What’s wilder than Minhaj’s tales?

The FBI surveillance my Muslim neighborhood truly endured

by Assia Boundaoui

Final month, an article within the New Yorker detailed discrepancies in comic Hasan Minhaj’s standup specials. In a single story, Minhaj recounts rising up in a Muslim neighborhood in Northern California, and his experiences with an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh. The story was a fabrication. However Monteilh was actual. Within the mid-2000s, he was employed by the FBI to pose as a convert to Islam and work as an informant in Orange County mosques.

I’m no comic. I’ve no opinion on what the suitable share of reality and fiction a comic book’s jokes should be, or whether or not Minhaj should be canceled. However as a journalist and filmmaker who has spent a decade documenting the surveillance of American Muslim communities, and as an American Muslim who has skilled it, I’ve felt deeply uneasy as these falsehoods got here to gentle. I concern individuals will now imagine that we’re exaggerating or making up tales about surveillance. After the exposé, social media was flooded with disturbing posts — accusations that that is simply one other instance of individuals of coloration falsely claiming victimhood.

However the reality is that each one of us — Arab Muslims, Black Muslims, wealthy and poor Muslims, third-generation Muslims, newly immigrated Muslims, educated Muslims, working-class Muslims — have had our run-ins with the surveillance state. And the reality is wilder than any fiction a comic may make up.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Chicago’s southwest suburbs of largely Muslim Arab immigrants. My neighbors and household pals all have tales about being surveilled. About unusual white males putting in cameras on streetlights; about unmarked automobiles parked in entrance of the mosque; about white males following individuals within the neighborhood round on their day by day errands; about unusual clicks on the cellphone. After we had been simply children, within the ‘90s, my mother used to inform us that every time she went to the native public library, a person would comply with her in and watch her, write down what books she was studying after which comply with her out.

I turned a journalist and began making a documentary movie about these anecdotes. I used to be intent to search out out the reality. I finally filed a freedom of knowledge lawsuit in opposition to the FBI and demanded all information about my neighborhood, together with all of the video, audio and paperwork associated to surveillance. What I came upon was staggering: In 1993, the Chicago discipline workplace of the FBI had launched one of many largest home terrorism investigations up to now. It was code-named Operation Vulgar Betrayal, and it focused my neighborhood.

A federal choose pressured the FBI to launch greater than 33,000 pages of paperwork, and whereas the FBI redacted greater than 75% of the file, the data across the redactions tells sufficient of a narrative to validate the a long time of paranoia which have shrouded my neighborhood.

The file incorporates dozens of “bodily surveillance logs” with handwritten initials of brokers, signing out and in. Our mosque itself is listed by title as a topic of investigation, together with our native Muslim elementary and highschool and dozens of space companies and charities. Greater than 500 particular person sub-files had been opened on individuals in the neighborhood. I got here throughout my father’s title greater than as soon as. (Even I make a cameo look in one of many paperwork.)

Surveillance was ubiquitous. Brokers adopted individuals round (“On Monday [redaction] at roughly [redaction] 35mm black and white pictures had been taken by Particular Agent [redaction] of an Arabic Male [redaction] complexion …”); famous the place they drove (“Arab male driving [redaction] arrived at [redaction] he parked within the driveway …”); and in a single occasion, even adopted individuals into emergency rooms (“Unknown Male #1 and Unknown Male #2 had been noticed within the Emergency Room ready space, accompanied by a male little one [redaction] noticed filling out hospital paperwork.”)

They monitored our native gatherings, nationwide Muslim conventions and our donations, they usually recorded probably the most quotidian particulars about our lives. Our suspicions of what was happening paled as compared with the fact of how intrusive and pervasive the FBI’s surveillance was. Nobody in our neighborhood was ever convicted of something associated to terrorism, and but we had been topic to this day by day harassment for many years.

Minhaj was one of many first Muslim comedians who unapologetically talked about being the goal of surveillance on a nationwide platform. It was refreshing. There’s one thing very highly effective that occurs once you discuss out loud about one thing that we often solely whisper about. And but the harm performed by his lies will likely be borne not by Minhaj alone, however by the three.5 million Muslims on this nation. It makes it more durable for individuals to be believed, and for these of us attempting to inform true tales about what our communities have endured.

For the previous few years, I’ve gone past simply documenting authorities surveillance and have ventured into co-creating an artwork initiative with my neighborhood and curating a group of residence movies and household pictures from the neighborhood. The intent of the “Inverse Surveillance Venture,” is to counter the federal government’s violent archive of being watched, with a neighborhood archive of being seen.

We created an artwork set up with a large-scale labyrinth utilizing the hundreds of pages of FBI paperwork, and used augmented actuality to superimpose movies from the neighborhood archive onto the redacted areas of the federal government’s surveillance file. On this manner, the historical past of our neighborhood isn’t simply one thing that the FBI will get to secretly file however is one thing we get to communally create. By telling our personal tales, we get to have management over our narrative and the way our neighborhood will likely be remembered.

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian American filmmaker, a recipient of a 2022 United States Artists award and a fellow on the MIT Open Documentary Lab.