Civic Engagement, MAF National Network Khudai Tanveer Civic Engagement, MAF National Network Khudai Tanveer

COMMUNITY GUIDE FOR GRASSROOTS GROUPS

This guide offers critical Know Your Rights (KYR) information and a guiding framework for grassroots groups, fiscally sponsored projects, and fiscal sponsors working on mutual aid, bail funds, and Palestine solidarity initiatives. This guide offers key recommendations on managing targeting, risk, and government scrutiny. It offers a framework groups can use to address infrastructure development, map potential oppositional threat targets, develop plans, crisis response, and financial record-keeping.

The guide is divided into three sections:

  • An overview of organizational infrastructure, with guiding questions and checklists.

  • Threat mapping and resilience planning for movement infrastructure.

  • KYR resources specific to mutual aid and donation management.

This guide draws on the expertise of organizers and lawyers with direct experience in executing large-scale mutual aid and bail fund projects within Muslim communities. Please note this document is not legal advice or exhaustive and does not replace consulting with an attorney.

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Defending our Future | A Guide for Communities to Resist Project 2025

Given the formidable threat posed by Project 2025, Muslims for Just Futures developed this brief with contributions from the Detention Watch Network and the Armenian-American Action Network. It provides an overview of Project 2025, emphasizing the proposed policies within the expansion of militarism, immigration enforcement, prisons, and jails. It analyzes the potential impact on BAMEMSA and SWANA communities and offers recommendations for community groups on effectively countering Project 2025 and building long-term power. The recommendations and analysis covered in this brief apply to BAMEMSA and SWANA community groups and broader movements building toward a radical democracy.

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Civic Engagement, MAF National Network Darakshan Raja Civic Engagement, MAF National Network Darakshan Raja

Resources | Know Your Rights

Building Community Power Requires Strong Defense

Our rights are only as powerful as our knowledge of them. That's why Muslims for Just Futures is launching a series of "Know Your Rights" (KYR) resources tailored for community members and organizers. Our first resource focuses on general rights awareness in Chicago, especially in light of the upcoming DNC. We strongly encourage groups to download and share the full KYR guide. This resource covers: 1) Agencies that can bring criminal charges against you in Chicago; 2) What to do if you're arrested. 3) Pretrial detention procedures. 4) How to protect your privacy during searches.

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Federal Advocacy Demands

This community memorandum offers input from organizations working with impacted BAMEMSA and SWANA communities on key initial recommendations, as a starting point, for federal government agencies in implementing a comprehensive White House Islamophobia strategy. This memorandum also offers concerns with the existing process for developing the White House Islamophobia strategy, provides a community-rooted framework of structural and gendered Islamophobia and contains key agency recommendations. While these recommendations are wide-ranging, we note that they are not exhaustive. This community memorandum was developed by Muslims for Just Futures with consultation from our working-class community members and Palestine Legal, Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, HEART, DREAM of Detroit, Muslim Women For, American Muslim Bar Association (AMBA), Center for Constitutional Rights, and Savage Daughters. Overall, 95 community-based organizations, national networks, and coalitions working across communities have endorsed the recommendations and joined this memorandum

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100 Organizations to Congress | Stop Scapegoating Pro-Palestine Protests to Expand Mass Surveillance

According to disturbing reporting from Wired, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner pointed to ceasefire protesters outside Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's house as a basis for keeping open the backdoor search loophole within Section 702 of FISA; (slides from his presentation). Instead of reining in intelligence agencies for rampant, warrantless spying on people nationwide, Chairman Turner is falsely scapegoating protestors to push through 702 reauthorization, undermine reform, and further entrench mass surveillance.

We strongly reject the use of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism by congressional members to justify keeping the backdoor-search loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). We reject the continued use of mass surveillance, which utilizes racist and Islamophobic logics against all of our collective communities.

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Report Launch: 100 Days of Building Power and Solidarity

100 Days of Building Power and Solidarity: Observations and Recommendations about Immediate and Long-Term Infrastructure Needs for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab Groups in the U.S. This report highlights the emerging needs of organizations working closely with Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian, and Black communities in the United States as the genocide in Gaza passes the 100 day mark in January 2024. The observations and recommendations in this report synthesize conversations around needs and recommendations for infrastructure and solidarity to address the current crisis and plan for the long-term.

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A Call to Social Justice Movements

Over 100 grassroots, advocacy, and movement organizations calling upon broader movements, civil rights organizations, and anti-hate groups to firmly reject the government’s attempts to manipulate hate violence, antisemitism, and Islamophobia to further expand state criminalization. We reject the state’s attempts to use this increased violence to expand hate crime laws. These initiatives do not address community safety. Instead, they simply expand state power and criminalization while ignoring the fact that the state itself has laid the groundwork for this violence.

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MAF National Network Firas Nasr MAF National Network Firas Nasr

Read our policy agenda calling for the divestment from criminalization and investment into communities of care

Read our collaborative grassroots policy agenda calling for the abolition of the War on Terror and building communities of care at the national, state, and local-level. We hope this agenda is used as a tool to further engage our communities, grassroots organizations, movement groups, and policymakers in order to build power, heal, and enact change.

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