The Leadership Conference Urges Lawmakers to Prioritize Addressing White Supremacist Violence
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Charmaine Riley, [email protected], 202.548.7166
WASHINGTON — Iman Boukadoum Esq., senior manager of the Fighting Hate and Bias program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, will testify before the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy today. She will highlight the ways that national security statutes regarding financing domestic and international terrorism, are overused against Black, Brown, Muslim and Arab communities, while ignoring white supremacist violence.
“[A] sober analysis of our nation’s history shows that even well-intentioned national security laws are invariably weaponized against Black, Brown, and Muslim communities. For these reasons, we oppose any legislation that would create an added charge for domestic terrorism or any enhanced or additional criminal penalties including to trace funding relating to domestic terrorism,” says Boukadoum in her testimony. “The federal government, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within the Treasury Department, has many tools at its disposal to investigate and support Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice prosecutions including some 50 terrorism-related statutes and over a dozen other criminal statutes and authorities, to prioritize and address white nationalist violence and financing, now, irrespective of an international link.”
Boukadoum also noted that while the federal government turned a blind eye to the rising threat of white supremacist violence, they wrongfully targeted and policed Black, Brown, and Muslim communities, violating their rights to due process and religious practice: “Charitable giving particularly in Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S. has been severely chilled by this oversurveillance and aggressive application of these powerful, existing terrorism statutes. Countless innocent people, particularly in the Muslim community, have effectively lost their right to First Amendment-protected free exercise rights to perform religious duties while violent white nationalists become emboldened to commit more acts of hate violence with impunity.”
Boukadoum called on federal agencies to use existing tools to focus on preventing, investigating and prosecuting hate crimes perpetrated by white supremacists, given the historical context, rate of hate crimes and incidences, and the traumatic impact of such incidences on targeted communities.
Her full testimony can be found here.
A live streaming of the testimony at 10am ET is available here.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 220 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States. The Leadership Conference works toward an America as good as its ideals. For more information on The Leadership Conference and its member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.