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Oregon Public Broadcasting (Portland, OR)
September 8, 2005
9-11 OBSERVANCE STRIVES FOR
BETTER UNDERSTANDING
By Rob Manning
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ONLINE
PORTLAND, OR 2005-09-08 (Oregon Considered)
- This Sunday will mark four years since terrorist attacks
killed more than three thousand people in New York, Washington,
D.C., and Pennsylvania. Since the attacks on London this summer,
Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed for better understanding
among British Muslims and non-Muslims.
Rob Manning reports on an annual event in Portland this weekend
that has the same goal.
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It's become almost a truism that everything changed on September
11th. Many people say they're anxious about boarding airplanes,
or admit to being more suspicious of strangers. But Somali
refugee Kayse Jama, says a feeling of outright fear in immigrant
communities has ebbed only slightly in the last four years.
Kayse Jama: There was a huge backlash in
the immigrant and refugee community in this country, particularly,
on immigrants from Muslim countries.
Six Portlanders were arrested in 2002 - and later convicted
- for attempting to wage war against the U.S. in Afghanistan.
But Jama says a biased dragnet also wrongly nabbed Muslim
attorney, Brandon Mayfield, and local imam, Mohamed Kariye.
Jama says Kariye's arrest in 2002 brought the largely immigrant
Muslim community together with Portland's mostly white peace
groups.
Kayse Jama: That's when the connection happened,
that the two communities got together. And then we decided
to continue to have a dialogue between the immigrant and refugee
community and the host community, per se--the people who were
born here.
That connection led to the Global Portland festival, now
in its second year. A dozen-or-so organizers are meeting on
the roof of a Northeast Portland apartment building. They
seem to capture the spirit of the gathering as they make plans
for this weekend's event, between dances and dishes of ice
cream.
Mary Prottsman: It's all about creating
an inclusive environment where people don't fear each other
and questions get answered instead of having fear reign.
Mary Prottsman is the event's 24 year-old chairwoman and
a recent Muslim convert. The upbeat feeling seems at odds
with the weightiness of the 9-11 attacks, something many victims'
relatives are sensitive to.
Prottsman says the spirit among the planners on the rooftop
conflicts with an experience she had with friends on the street
below.
Mary Prottsman: It was a really diverse
group of people, you know, we had people of Asian background,
African background, white-bread American - me, born and bred
- and this group, this car drove up full of younger white
males and one of them hung out of the sunroof and just let
rip with these racial slurs. And they just kept driving.
Kayse Jama says these cases of intimidation are relatively
rare. Jama says he's more concerned about making a paradigm
switch, from getting immigrants to understand American society
to getting society to understand immigrants.
Kayse Jama: When you have people and try
to culturally assimilate them, they are not going to do that,
they will challenge that in different ways, and that brings
isolation. And that's the situation in London. If you visit
and research in Europe, it's a similar situation.
Some peace groups have told organizers they're worried that
holding the event on 9-11 could make it more of a target.
Muslim groups, however, appear undeterred. The Global Portland
Festival takes place this Sunday in Northeast Portland's Holladay
Park.
Copyright 2005 Oregon
Public Broadcasting
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