Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, Sept. 15 • The University of Tennessee may build a practice golf course over the site of a 16th century American Indian village next to Fort Loudoun Lake. This is gonna look great hundreds of years from now, when future archaeologists excavate the dual remains: Pottery and handmade tools of the ancient Red Man reveal a society that relished hard work and agriculture. Then the soiled visors and spent beer receptacles of the 21st-century White Man tell of a culture that favored funny pants and playing with its tiny balls. Thursday, Sept. 16 • The News Sentinel reports on a UT-sponsored debate between insufferable right-winger Fred Barnes of Fox News and churlish mega-liberal Paul Begala of CNN. The spectacle proves most interesting to members of the university’s physiology department, as it proves conclusively that, anatomy charts notwithstanding, the biggest assholes usually aren’t found in the middle. Friday, Sept. 17 • Hear the gasping and floundering? The pitiful cries for help? But never mind the county mayor’s office; how about the flooding from Hurricane Ivan? Saturday, Sept. 18 • Officials say it may take months to reopen a flooded section of Interstate 40 near the North Carolina border. Tennessee residents aren’t bothered by the wait, however; we’ll take a natural disaster over a TDOT project any day of the week. Sunday, Sept. 19 • Tennessee anti-abortion activist Brian Harris tells a News Sentinel reporter that “when it comes to life and death, there is no gray area.” Which indicates to us that besides never having been pregnant, Harris has never had in-laws, either. Monday, Sept. 20 • In a new poll, 53 percent of eligible Tennesseans say they would vote for George Bush if the presidential election were held today, while another 37 percent say they would vote for Democratic challenger John Kerry. Another 10 percent say that if either one of those yabos were on fire in a public restroom, they’d wait at least a half-hour to pee. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo: The James Park house addition was removed last week to renovate the antebellum building to its original size and appearance (read about it in “Ear to the Ground” on page 14). Congratulations to Lauren DePersio for recognizing the demolition in full swing on Walnut Avenue. We’re pleased to present you with a copy of the “As seen on Oprah” book, The Purpose of Your Life by Carol Adriennne. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend KNOX COUNTY COMMISSION Monday, Sept. 27 • 2 p.m. • City County Building • Large Assembly Room • 400 Main St. Regular meeting. THE JAMES WHITE PKWY-CHAPMAN HWY CORRIDOR STUDY TASK FORCE Monday, Sept. 27 • 5 p.m. • New Hopewell Elementary School • 757 Kimberlin Heights Road CITY COUNCIL Tuesday, Sept. 28 • 5 p.m. • City County Building • Large Assembly Room • 400 Main St. Regular meeting. THE JAMES WHITE PKWY-CHAPMAN HWY CORRIDOR STUDY TASK FORCE Tuesday, Sept. 28 • 5 p.m. • City County Building • Small Assembly Room • 400 Main St.

An Uncomfortable ‘Exchange’
A Muslim student reports religious intolerance

In this uneasy climate between some American Christians and Muslims of any nationality, a situation that suggests religious intolerance of or discrimination against Islamic people attracts attention. In a recent case in East Tennessee, an exchange student, whose real name Metro Pulse is withholding because of his age, lodged such complaints against a high school administrator who was serving as his host. In the following account, we’ll call him Abdul, and we’ll refer to his fellow exchange student as Rahim.
—The Editor.

Exchange student Abdul came to the United States under the pretext of learning of the freedoms inherent to living in a democracy. Instead, he was reportedly denied his most fundamental civil liberties before program administrators finally identified a suitable host family.

A native of Azerbaijan—one of a dozen or so Eurasian republics that became autonomous with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—16-year-old Abdul and his new friend Rahim, also an Azerbaijani, flew into McGhee Tyson Airport on Aug. 3. Both boys were paired with their new FLEX host “families”— Rahim with Knoxville couple Vanda and Paul Holik and their son Lawrence; and Abdul with Alan Reed, a childless divorcee and vice principal at Roane County’s Rockwood High School. Both boys are participating in FLEX under the auspices of California-based Pacific Intercultural Exchange (PIE), one of the several non-profit placement organizations nationwide that receive FLEX grants from the State Department.

Happy with his placement in the Holik household, Rahim says he called Abdul about a week later to see how he was adjusting to his new home. According to Rahim, Abdul was uneasy, and felt that Reed was not accepting of his religious beliefs. Abdul is Muslim; Reed attends a Baptist church.

Rahim checked with Abdul again around Labor Day, and found that his relationship with his host had only deteriorated. Concerned, Vanda Holik called Reed and invited Abdul to her home for the weekend.

But Holik says Reed wasn’t amenable to her request. “He had all kinds of strange excuses why the boy could not come for the weekend,” she says. His attitude quickly became “antagonistic and aggressive,” and he hung up on Holik’s husband when he picked up phone and joined the conversation, she says.

Holik called back and left a message on Reed’s answering machine, threatening that she would report him to relevant authorities for violating Abdul’s civil liberties. Within hours of that call, Reed reportedly called PIE and asked that Abdul be removed from his home.

Abdul was allowed to spend the weekend with the Holiks. According to Vanda, his arrival at their residence triggered an emotional catharsis. “I could see that things were very wrong; he was so emotional, crying,” Holik says. “He couldn’t stop talking. He was animated like someone who had been suppressed, then suddenly freed.”

Rahim, whose English is good but limited, affirms that Abdul was “quite upset.”

Holik asked Abdul to relate the details of his time in Reed’s custody. With Rahim’s help, she recorded his words in an informal statement, checking with Abdul (whose English is very limited) to ensure that each sentence she typed accurately reflected his experience.

Says Abdul in the statement, “My host guardian [Reed] began to complain about my praying and reading [the] Koran, even if I was doing this privately in my own room. He said: ‘You cannot pray in my Baptist home.’”

Among other things, Abdul says in his statement that Reed insisted that he attend church every week, despite his objection to doing so; threatened to burn his Koran; harassed him in various ways; and demanded that he print out and translate all of his personal email communications. When Abdul refused to do so, he says Reed kept him from accessing the Internet both at home and in his classes at Rockwood High.

He further states that when he spoke of the problem to local PIE representative Cynthia Michelhaugh of Anderson County, she sided with Reed, and told Abdul he had no right to refuse to attend church, or to deny Reed access to his private email communications.

“As a result of this antagonistic situation,” Abdul concludes, “I couldn’t no [sic] longer sleep, I felt depressed and trapped in a negative situation totally isolated with no support.”

For his part, Alan Reed claims that he did not prevent Abdul from praying, but that he did insist that he attend Baptist church services. Reed notes that on a student profile completed prior to his coming to the United States, Abdul had indicated he was willing to attend the host family church.

“I wasn’t aware of Muslim practices, that they pray five times a day, and wash five times a day,” Reed says. “But the boy said on the PIE form he would attend the church. So I told him that since he signed a contract he needed to do that. I felt he needed to experience that [the church services] since I was allowing him to pray five times a day.”

Reed also admits that he did try to control Abdul’s email communications, on the muddled grounds that, “there were some websites [Abdul visited] that had the word ‘terrorist’ in them, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I don’t know what was involved with those websites, but for purposes of his safety, I wanted to make sure no one would get the wrong idea [about his Internet activities.]”

Although Reed was no longer his host, Abdul’s problems didn’t end.

Vanda Holik asked PIE representatives in Nashville and California for permission to act as Abdul’s temporary guardian until a long-term host family could be located. She says PIE agreed, but then rescinded a day later, insisting that she yield custody of the boy to Michelhaugh.

As of Sept. 18, Abdul had been out of school and living at Michelhaugh’s house for close to two weeks. Michelhaugh was uncooperative when asked how the search for a new host was progressing. PIE representatives in California failed to return several calls requesting that information.

On Tuesday, however, Vanda Holik confirmed that Abdul emailed Rahim—in their native tongue—that he had been successfully placed in the home of a Muslim family in Knoxville. “Thankfully,” Holik said, “this incident came to a positive conclusion.”

But the happy ending doesn’t erase concerns about PIE’s administration of the exchange program in Tennessee. Reached for comment at her home in Anderson County, Michelhaugh was asked about the possible violations of Abdul’s religious freedoms. Her response was telling.

“The student signed a paper that said he was willing to participate in a religion other than his own,” she said. “It may not have legal standing, but I think if you say you’re going to do something, your word is your bond.”

Here it should be noted that the State Department’s instructional handbook for FLEX families states that, “It is essential for host families to respect their student’s wishes and comfort zone and to make an effort to adhere to any religious practices and dietary restrictions the student may have.”

Michelhaugh also implied that Abdul is not sufficiently devout in his Muslim faith to warrant any claims of religious discrimination; that he contrived the statement he dictated to Vanda Holik as a means of excusing his inability to get along with his original host; that he did not sign the statement; and that Abdul himself was largely to blame for the problems with Reed.

“I took this not as a problem with religion, but as a control issue,” Michelhaugh said. “The student was not responding in the family to any direction.”

Michelhaugh and her husband agreed to put Abdul on the phone to talk to a reporter last week, although they remained on the line while he spoke. The boy would only say that he “[didn’t] want to be in the newspaper.”

Holik says this experience has discouraged her from ever acting as a FLEX host again, or from allowing her own son to participate in an exchange program. “This has been a horror for me,” she says. “Now I would never trust my child with an organization like this.

“But I worry most for Abdul. He came here to experience American culture. But after this, what kind of opinion will he have about this country?”

—Mike Gibson

Broadcastus Interruptus
Was KFAR raid a political move?

The group operating KFAR wasn’t terribly surprised when the FCC agents raided its pirate radio station last week after almost three years on the air.

However, what did catch their attention were some of the names listed in the affidavit as complainants—FBI agents and a TVA agent. Radio regulations aren’t traditionally the purview of those agencies. Their involvement made the KFAR operators wonder whether the station’s shutdown was politically motivated.

“[The affidavit] said nothing about the quality of our equipment or bleeding over or anything like that,” says Ratchet, one of the KFAR DJs, who uses an alias for public purposes. “We have no proof, but we think it’s content [that spurred the raid], because we’ve been very outspoken about the Bush administration.”

No criminal charges have been filed yet, although the FBI says it is considering filing some. About $4,000 worth of KFAR’s equipment was seized in the raid last Wednesday at the South Knoxville trailer where it broadcast at the 90.1 FM frequency at 100-watts. Its antenna was not taken and the group has a backup 50-watt transmitter.

KFAR’s operators say they plan to go back on the air, although they’re being cautious. “Everybody really wants to go back on the air, but right now we’re uncertain,” Ratchet says. “The plan is to eventually go back on the air. The location of the station, that might change.... We could be up in as little as a day if we found an ideal place to put the transmitter and antenna.”

Although it broadcast illegally, KFAR members believe they had a right to broadcast because the airwaves belong to the public. They believe the FCC has mismanaged those airwaves to benefit large corporations at the expense of the public interest. KFAR is soliciting the support of local legislators in hopes of getting the FCC to back off.

The station played a wide variety of music, as well as political programming with a leftist or progressive bent. The programs are what some members think got them in trouble. A lot of the shows—Democracy Now!, CounterSpin, Making Contact, Between the Lines—were produced by national groups and were critical of the Bush Administration and the corporate media, among others. Locally, programming on the station has been critical of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s environmental record and nuclear power policies.

One TVA police agent and a former FBI agent, David Icove, was named as a complainant on the affidavit, as was R. Joe Clark, who is head of Knoxville’s FBI office.

Clark says the FBI and TVA became involved because, “my understanding is [the FCC] asked us to assist them.” In the wake of anti-terror efforts, federal agencies are cooperating more on other matters, he says.

“It’s not a political issue for me. It boils down to is there evidence you broke the law, and I don’t care what your politics are. If there is [evidence], we investigate it,” Clark says.

“When you steal somebody else’s air time or present the potential of interfering with emergency communications that should be every citizens’ complaint,” he adds.

Clark says the FCC and the FBI were contemplating filing criminal charges. That might prove difficult, as the station has no hierarchy and there are about 50 people involved in running it.

“The bottom line is it’s still an ongoing investigation. We are conducting it in concert with the FCC administration. We are in the process of making a presentation to the U.S. Attorney’s office on several areas,” Clark says.

KFAR operators wonder whether it’s worth it for the federal agencies to expend the energy chasing a small station operating on unoccupied airwaves.

“There’s so much emphasis on fighting terrorism ,and they’re spending all this money to go after us, when one of the biggest terrorist threats is out in Oak Ridge,” Ratchet says. “It just seems like a waste of money. It makes me wonder if it wouldn’t have gone down like this if it wasn’t an election year.”

—Joe Tarr

September 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 39 © 2004 Metro Pulse