US Press
Abbott threatened airport funding over footbaths, the New York Times reports
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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The New York Times published on Monday a long report on the political campaign now running against Muslim communities in Texas, a state with a large and growing Arab and Palestinian American population.
The paper's most concrete example is small and instructive. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport abandoned a plan to install additional foot-washing stations after Governor Greg Abbott threatened to pull federal funding, on the argument that the facilities amounted to religious discrimination.
Wudu stations are plumbing. A traveller washes before prayer, and airports across the world install them the way they install chapels and quiet rooms. In Texas this year the fixture became a political question a governor answered by threatening the airport's money.
The community the campaign is aimed at#
Immigration from Muslim-majority countries has added an estimated 80,000 people to the Dallas-Fort Worth area over the past decade, the Times reported. That growth is the background to the campaign, and to the project at its centre.
EPIC City is a master-planned development of roughly a thousand homes initiated by the East Plano Islamic Center, intended to serve the region's growing congregation. It has drawn investigations and denunciations from state officials, and it is the object most often named when Texas politicians raise the subject.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Texas chapter has joined Dallas-Fort Worth Muslim organisations in calling on state politicians to stop what they describe as hateful fearmongering.
Why this belongs in a Palestinian paper#
Palestinian Americans in Texas are inside this. They pray at these mosques, send children to these schools, and buy homes in these suburbs, and the campaign does not distinguish between a Palestinian family from Ramallah and a Pakistani family from Karachi.
The Times's report also documents how quickly a debate that ran for two years about Gaza — about protests, campus discipline and who may say what — has widened into one about whether Muslim communities may build in a state at all.
For readers here the practical significance is that the diaspora's political room in the United States is narrowing at the same moment its advocacy matters most. A community fighting to keep a housing development and an airport tap is a community spending its capital at home rather than on Washington.
