(Cross-posted to Michigan Liberal)
Meet Ismael Ahmed, Michigan's Department of Human Services chief. His official bio is here. Ismael Ahmed now has a blog on Wordpress. Ismael Ahmed also has a blog at a blogspot address. And, you can read more about Ismael Ahmed in a short feature written a few years back by Jack Lessenberry called, "Meet a real American." Here are the two lead paragraphs to that:
Ismael Ahmed is about as American a guy of his generation as you can find. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, he came to Detroit when he was 6 and stayed here with his mom after his parents split up.
After high school, he did a hitch in Vietnam and Korea. He came back, worked on the line, was active in the United Auto Workers union, put himself through the University of Michigan-Dearborn, then got interested in helping out his neighborhood and his community.
You might wonder why Lessenberry would feel compelled to write such a thing. Well, I'm assuming he did it for the same reasons why I'm writing this MichLib diary. Shortly after Sept. 11, the American rightwing went absolutely insane. They saw terrorists everywhere; in airplanes, in city parks, behind bushes ... they even saw encoded messages between terrorists in bowls of Alpha-Bits soup. As a result being a Muslim and an Arab in the United States was made to be a difficult affair, which is something for which I'm likely to be ashamed of for the rest of my life.
That was seven years ago, and while most normal human beings long ago concluded that you could be a loyal citizen of this country while at the same time also be a Muslim and an Arab (all at the same time!), the stench from the feces the rightwing flung at the time remains. Some of that has stuck to Ahmed, via a Google search for his name.
As you can see, Ahmed's name has been smeared via an association to terrorists. The agent of the association is Debbie Schlussel, who has a long history of denigrating Muslims in metro Detroit. She refers to Pakistani people as Pakis, and calls Dearborn by the name Dearbornistan.
The strength of her character assassination, which was enough to apparently sink Ahmed's candidacy to be a U of M trustee, was based on the fact that his non-profit once had an association with two of the four men charged as part of the Detroit al-Qaida sleeper cell.
Seven years later, the charges were dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct (based apparently on the fact that much of the evidence had to be made up). Yet, Schlussel's now inaccurate smear piece remains festering on the Internet, hovering at the second highest ranked spot for those inclined to do a Google search for Ismael Ahmed.
If you've gotten this far, I commend you and ask that you go back to the top and open up the other windows in your browser. A few years ago, to disarm Google bombs, the company adjusted the algorithms used in page ranking, but every little bit helps and in this case helps clear someone from a negative,smelly, false association.