Abdiamar Bare, 21, walks up to the nondescript mosque in Greeley for noon prayers and pauses a moment to talk about his faith.
He is asked by a visitor if he’s seen the DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” No, he says. He’s asked if the principles of Islam allow other religions to coexist with it.
“Every religion is the same. No religion is better than another religion,” Bare says. “I believe in Islam. I like my religion, and I don’t want it to interfere with other religions.”
Bare is one of about 120 Muslim workers recently fired by JBS Swift & Co. for walking off the job after a disagreement on prayer breaks. He enters the mosque, off 8th Avenue near the University of Northern Colorado campus, to join dozens more for prayer.
It’s a low-profile, unmarked building in which Greeley Muslims come to practice their faith, which again finds itself in the crosshairs of scrutiny locally and nationally.
In Greeley, the dispute continues on prayer breaks for Muslim workers at the meatpacking plant. Sentiment has spread among some in the community that the newcomers are pushing too much, exhibiting a desire not to assimilate but rather impose their religion on others.
Nationally, the DVD arrived on 28 million doorsteps as rhetoric on homeland security heats up in the presidential race.
The confluence of recent events -- the Muslim workers’ dispute and, on its heels, the “Obsession” DVD -- is the talk of the town. Many Greeley residents have noticed the 400 mostly Somali refugees who’ve arrived in the past 18 months to take jobs at JBS Swift. The workers say they are here to escape the oppression of their war-torn homeland, build a new life and peacefully practice their religion.
What to make of these newcomers and their religion, which is indelibly linked to 9/11 and other violent acts across the globe, has sparked a variety of views. The DVD alone prompts widely different opinions.
A Greeley woman calls the disc “neo-con propaganda,” while a history professor at Colorado State University says the film is factually accurate and shows it in his classes.
Meanwhile, in the day-to-day operation of the Greeley meatpacking plant, the African refugees’ religion is at odds, especially during Ramadan, with the assembly line production.
Brianna Castillo, a JBS Swift employee for four years, said the Somali workers are asking for special treatment and making non-Muslim plant employees pick up the slack.
“Somalis are running our plant,” Castillo said at a recent protest by non-Muslims against the Muslims’ request for a changed break time. “They are telling us what to do.”
‘They need to be flexible’
Bill Jerke, a Weld County commissioner, said he worries that if a large percentage of workers walk off an assembly line at once, it can lead to an over-stressed and potentially dangerous situation for the remaining workers.
He said the Muslim workers who walked off the job because of the prayer issue should be more flexible.
“Every other group that’s come to the United States, that maybe has a little different angle on culture and religion, has learned to assimilate with the majority, and that’s what I think they need to be flexible enough to do,” he said.
Jerke has watched “Obsession” -- he bought the DVD a couple of years ago at a Republican function -- and read a book called “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.” Those sources, which he deems well-researched, as well as worldwide bombings by radical Muslims over the past 15 years, make him circumspect of Muslims in America.
“With the Muslim religion, their practices will dominate over what your American practices would wind up being,” he said. “And part of that is they believe that Islamic law should dictate over laws of man.”
He said the issue in Greeley, Weld County and across the country boils down to “whom will accommodate whom and whom will assimilate to whom.” He said “America Alone” argues that Europe is “reverse assimilating” in that fewer Europeans are being born compared to Muslims, and the continent is being overwhelmed by Muslims.
DVD and presidential race
Greeley resident Marise Downing said she doesn’t know enough about the JBS Swift labor dispute to decide which side is right -- the workers or the company. She said she has no problem with Muslim workers attempting to follow their beliefs.
Downing is more pointed about the “Obsession” DVD, which in an e-mail to The Tribune she called a “disgusting piece of neo-con propaganda.” The film was a paid advertising insert in the Sept. 14 Tribune and 70 other newspapers nationally, including the Denver Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Downing said she hasn’t watched the hour-long film, produced by the New York-based Clarion Fund, but said she’s researched it enough to satisfy her belief that it’s fear-mongering propaganda.
“I understand it’s a matter of money I presume (for the newspaper),” she said. “To me, it gives it a kind of authenticity that it wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Seeme Hasan, a Colorado Muslim who co-founded Muslims for America and the Hasan Family Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes understanding between developing countries and the United States, said the DVD spreads hatred. The cost of the DVD’s distribution would have been better spent on “actually educating people to what Muslims are,” she said.
The packaging says the DVD’s intent is to educate people about the threat of radical Islam. It adds that neither the presidential candidates nor the media are discussing the issue openly.
A story in Editor & Publisher said about 28 million copies of the DVD have been distributed so far, mostly in swing states in the presidential race. “An article at the group’s site, www.radicalislam.org, all but endorsed John McCain this past week (Sept. 14) then was pulled down,” Editor & Publisher reported.
A call to the nonprofit Clarion Fund for comment was not returned.
Hasan said she believes the DVD’s main intent is to spread fear and sway the election.
“I don’t know -- is this anti-Obama, is this for McCain?” she said. “Either way, this is a very bad way of doing things.”
Mainstream vs. radical
James Lindsay, an associate professor of Middle Eastern history at CSU, takes an opposite view on “Obsession.” He believes it’s a straightforward look at radical Islam.
He said the producers are explicit that film is about the radical ideology within Islam, which is advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida and other groups. The film’s introduction states that most Muslims are peaceful and don’t support terror.
The militant Islamic branch -- which the film says makes up about 10 percent to 15 percent of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.2 billion, the world’s second-largest religion behind Christianity -- has a conquest ideology, Lindsay said.
“It’s one of subjugating the world to their ideology. There is not room for another ideology, according to the radical Muslim ideology, and it’s frightening,” he said. “But it’s part and parcel of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Qaida types that they want to impose their will on everyone.”
The film acknowledges that part of that mindset stems from a fear that the West is out to destroy Islam, and that the religion’s followers must strike first.
Hasan agrees that there is a radical strand that claims adherence to Islam. But she dismisses them as brainwashed and “sick, sick individuals” who don’t practice Islam but rather a singular and misguided hatred of America.
Hasan, who is married to a physician and has homes in Denver and Beaver Creek, returned from Washington, D.C., Thursday after being invited to the White House’s annual dinner observance of Ramadan. Hasan, an ardent supporter of the Bush administration, said she spoke last week with a Brazilian ambassador about the problems at the Brazilian-owned JBS Swift plant in Greeley.
She believes the Somalis in Greeley will assimilate within about eight years. Resettling people to the United States from a country of poverty and poor education is a complex process, she said.
The U.S. or United Nations should assign social workers to the refugees to smooth their transitions, Hasan said, “then the communities where these people are sent to, it would be a much happier atmosphere.”
Hasan, whose Muslims for America organization works to get Muslims more involved in the American political process, believes Islam can coexist peacefully in the United States.
“American Muslims are very happy, very satisfied because they are allowed to enter mainstream America,” she said. “We are not held back. We are not judged against.”
Conflict inevitable
Lindsay, the CSU professor, said the Muslims who flew the airplanes into the Twin Towers felt they were doing God’s work.
Muslims who say “jihad” means the struggle for personal betterment aren’t giving the full picture of what’s written in the classical text, he said. Rather, the text says the Islamic practitioner is preparing himself to be a better warrior.
“The idea of the jihad as laid out by extremists is one of the doctrines within the Quran itself,” Lindsay said. “It’s a fundamental tenet of Islamic religion and it has been in Islamic history -- engaging in warfare against the enemies of Islam.”
Conflicts between the West and Islam are inevitable, Lindsay said, because the demands of Islamic law are in conflict with the West’s approach to law and religion. The Quran speaks of creating a society that’s obedient to God’s law, not obedient to men’s model, he said.
Lindsay believes the way to deal with Muslim immigrants -- as in the case of the JBS Swift workers -- is to explain how employment rules and policies operate in the United States. “I have no desire to make any accommodations to Islamic law, and that’s my opinion.”
Amin Kazak, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at the University of Colorado-Denver, said he believes a middle ground can be reached between JBS Swift and the Muslim workers.
“The workers have to be flexible as much as the owners of the (company) have to be flexible,” he said. “Not jeopardize the ritual and spirit of Muslims, and not jeopardize also the other (non-Muslim) workers’ rights and so on.”
On the wider issue of religion, Kazak said a conquest mentality is not representative of overall Islam. “Other than Saudi Arabia, it’s not a subjugating environment. ... I think if one person or a certain group behaves incorrectly, it does not necessarily mean this is Islam.”
He believes the Muslims coming here respect the United States for its many freedoms.
“This is a diversity of cultures and faiths, and (Muslims) are going to get along with other cultures and understand it, rather than leave it to circumstances of what’s happening today to color it,” Kazak said.
Alison Shah, a University of Colorado-Denver history professor who specializes in Eastern Islamic and South Asian history, said she is surprised the Greeley workers aren’t being accommodated for their religious practice.
“I don’t know a lot about how the industry works, but I do know that breaking fast during Ramadan is always at sunset, and this is not about jihad or anything other than devotion and correct practice,” Shah said. “I suppose it would be like asking a Jewish person to eat during one of the fall fasting holidays, or to ask a Catholic to wipe the ash off his forehead on Ash Wednesday.”
Rep. Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, was invited by the fired workers to meet with them at a recent meeting. He said work accommodations have been made in the United States for Christian and Jewish workers because there are significantly greater numbers of them.
“What we’re dealing with here now (with the Muslims in Greeley) is a much smaller group of people with a faith that’s not nearly as common or well-understood,” he said.
Century of peace?
Back at the Greeley mosque, Kaise Egal, a Muslim working to help the fired workers, said the meaning of the word Islam is peace.
“Any radical group, no matter their religion -- Muslim or non-Muslim, Christian or Jewish -- if their formal message is of violence, that’s wrong,” Egal said.
He said he believes the radical strands in Islam are isolated, adding that radical groups exist within other religions as well.
Egal said the 21st century, after the wars of the 20th century, should be an era of peace.
“It shouldn’t be a century of ideological and religious fighting. It should be a century of knowledge and technology and global village,” he said.
Egal and Bare represent moderate Muslims, who espouse practicing their faith in a compatible manner with other religions.
Hasan argues that they reflect the majority of Muslims worldwide. She believes moderate Muslims can help bring change.
“Everybody now in the world who really cares about this issue of spreading hatred is trying to bring the religions together and doing peace dialogue,” she said. “That’s mostly what needs to be done -- come closer together, sort out whatever differences that we have.”
Lindsay has a more jaundiced view. He considers the gulf so wide, and the militant element within Islam so vehemently anti-West, that finding a path to peace is unlikely. He points out that the extremists believe they are doing the work of God and “that is a tremendous motivator. They don’t mind dying.”
Lindsay doesn’t expect to see an end to the conflict between radical Islam and the West in his lifetime.
“If we value who we say we are, we have to be vigilant against this ideology, which is hell-bent on our destruction,” he said.
BREAKOUT// PUBLIC OPINION ON MUSLIM RELIGION
a Washington Post poll in 2006 found that 58 percent of Americans say there are more violent extremists within Islam than in other religions and 46 percent have a negative view of Islam.
When asked, “Do you think mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims, or is it a peaceful religion?” 33 percent said it encourages violence and 54 percent said it’s peaceful (13 percent said no opinion).
In 2007, a CNN poll found that 53 percent of Americans believe conflict between Islam and Christianity is “inevitable,” up from 45 percent in 2003.
BREAKOUT//Greeley’s latest chapter in Islamic relations
It’s an unlikely pairing.
The dispute between Muslim workers and JBS Swift & Co. is the latest intertwining of Islam and the conservative, agricultural-oriented city of Greeley.
The first came about 60 years ago.
The six-month stay in Greeley by an Egyptian student in 1949 made him so angry that he wrote books to express his anti-American diatribe. Sayyid Qutb (SIGH-yid KUH tahb), studied at the University of Northern Colorado and wrote disdainfully of the city’s teen dances, loose morals and “behavior that could not be further from religion.”
Qutb became one of the founders of Islamic terrorism and is referred to as the godfather of al-Qaida.
In 1965, he published his most famous book, “Mallem Fittareek” (Milestones), in which he condemned Western morals, partially because of what he witnessed in Greeley. It led to his arrest on the orders of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was executed in 1966 in Egypt.
Greeley, largely thanks to Qutb, is more than a simple footnote in modern Islamic history. The recent friction between the Muslim workers and the meatpacking plant is adding to that history.
“I think we’ve been in religious and cultural conflict with Islam since the Middle Ages,” said Bill Jerke, a Weld County commissioner, “and this is simply one of Greeley’s small chapters in that worldwide discussion of culture and religion.”
-- Chris Casey
