Hides those Grade School Doodles

When I was younger I liked to doodle planes and space ships, think I am going to be investigated? I wonder if Jon Stewart is worried about his doodles?

In a letter sent today to the Elk Grove school board, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) and the Sacramento Valley Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SV) criticized school officials for allowing FBI agents to interrogate 16-year-old Munir Rashed without first notifying his parents. The FBI interview concerned a doodle of the word “PLO” (referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization) that Munir had scribbled on a binder two years earlier.

Administrators at Calvine High School violated an Elk Grove school board policy that requires that a student’s parents be informed when a law enforcement officer requests an interview on school premises. Moreover, the boy’s family suspects that a teacher who had initially confronted Munir about the drawing reported him to the FBI, chilling his right to freedom of speech at school.

On September 27, 2005, Munir was pulled out of class and taken to a room where two men in suits were waiting to speak with him. After identifying themselves as FBI agents, the men asked Munir to recount an incident that had occurred two years earlier in a math class. Munir told the FBI agents that his teacher had chastised him for having scrawled the letters “PLO” on his binder. The teacher called the PLO a terrorist organization and said that anyone who supported them was a terrorist, and Munir defended the PLO as a legitimate political group that supported Palestinian rights.

The FBI then followed up with further questions, asking how Munir knew about the PLO, whether he was familiar with the investigation of several Muslims in Lodi, whether he had ever traveled to Palestine, even whether he had pictures of terrorists on his cell phone. (In fact, Munir has only a picture of a mosque as his phone’s background display.) The entire experience left Munir badly shaken, and he has since been hesitant about expressing his political views in any context.

“It’s outrageous that the FBI dragged this student out of class to interrogate him about a two-year-old doodle on a notebook,” said Shirin Sinnar, an attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “The FBI should not be interviewing kids about their political views, and schools should not be short-circuiting the involvement of parents in such a frightening situation.”

"The practice of interrogating minors, without their parents present, is totally unacceptable and stresses the importance of better training for agents," said CAIR-SV Executive Director Basim Elkarra. “Unfortunately, this disturbing incident will only serve to undermine efforts to build better relations between law enforcement agencies and the Muslim community."

Elkarra asked that those responsible for the incident be disciplined.

Now, remember it is important that we do not collectively hold our breath.