Muslims Walk Out of White House Meeting in Protest

(RNS) -- About 25 representatives of American Muslim organizations walked out of a White House meeting Thursday (June 28) after the Secret Service asked a member of the delegation to leave.

The meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with the Rev. Mark Scott -- associate director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives -- was interrupted when Abdullah Al-Arian, a college intern in the office of Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., was asked to leave.

"About 15 or 20 minutes into the meeting a uniformed Secret Service officer came in and was trying to find Abdullah," Faisal Gill, of the American Muslim Council, told Religion News Service. "Abdullah and a couple of other representatives went out and talked and came back in and one of the representatives said they were asking Abdullah to leave. So at that point everybody said we were all going to leave if Abdullah had to leave, so we did."

No official reason was given for the request, Gill said, but some suspect the incident was linked to the political activism of Al-Arian's father. Sami Al-Arian is president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedoms, which has battled the U.S. government's use of "secret evidence" -- evidence never disclosed to a defense team -- in deportation proceedings to detain people suspected of terrorist activity.

The college student is also the nephew of Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian professor whom the government recently freed after holding him in custody for about three years on the basis of secret evidence. The government had claimed to possess evidence that connected the man to a terrorist group.

"Sami has spearheaded the challenge to the secret evidence laws and his brother-in-law (Al-Najjar) was one of the secret evidence victims," said Margaret Zaknoen, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which organized the meeting. "They are very high profile figures on the issue of secret evidence. Neither one has ever been convicted of a crime, but their names raise alarms at the White House."

Zaknoen said that White House security gave security clearance for Abdullah Al-Arian before the meeting began, and likewise last week raised no objections when the elder Al-Arian visited the White House with several other Muslim leaders for a briefing planned with Vice President Dick Cheney at which the vice president did not show up.

Continued on page 2: »