Marwan Kreidie

Marwan Kreidie

Overview

* Founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Arab-American Community Development Corporation
* Member of the National Leadership Conference of the Washington, DC-based Arab-American Institute
* Professor of Political Science at Immaculata College and Villanova University
* Opposes U.S. government’s counter-terrorism measures


Marwan Kreidie is the founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Arab-American Community Development Corporation (PAACDC), which exists to help the city’s Arab-American residents access social services and assistance with immigration problems and discrimination complaints. Kreidie is also a member of the National Leadership Conference of the Washington, DC-based Arab-American Institute, and he consults with many organizations about “Arab and Muslim Cultural sensitivities.”

Kreidie was born in New York City and raised in Beirut, Lebanon until 1976. He graduated from Drew University in 1983 and earned a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Temple University five years after that.

From 1997-2005, Kreidie was a Civil Service Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia. In May 2005, Pennsylvania Governor William Rendell appointed him as a State Civil Service Commissioner.

In addition to his aforementioned duties, Kreidie teaches Political Science at Immaculata College and Villanova University. He has previously taught at Lincoln University, Temple University, and Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.

Kreidie has repeatedly damned the U.S. government’s counter-terrorist measures and, according to scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes, has never approved of a single one. For example, he:

  • Condemned the American government’s plan to interview some 5,000 male non-citizens who had come to the U.S. on temporary visas from countries hosting active terrorist cells; Kreidie characterized the initiative as “sloppy police work” and “ridiculous.”
  • Was “appalled” by measures requiring some arriving foreigners to provide fingerprints, photographs, and details about their travel plans. “For me as an American citizen, it’s frightening,” said Kreidie.
  • Furiously compared the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), a national system by which concerned workers can report suspicious activity, to the notorious Stasi secret police in East Germany.
  • Opposed the USA Patriot Act, saying that it had created an “open [hunting] season” on Arabs and Muslims.
  • Indignantly condemned the government’s offer to reward “reliable and useful” information about terrorists with a fast track to U.S. citizenship: “It’s bribery and it’s disgusting.”
  • Decried the focus on deporting illegal aliens hailing from Arab and Muslim countries – the source of nearly all the terrorism in America – as “biased.”
  • Denounced FBI interviews of Iraqi immigrants as having a “zero” chance of turning up useful information.

More broadly, Kreidie rejects law-enforcement counter-terrorist efforts as “massive intrusions on civil liberties” that have “enraged” Arab and Muslim Americans. He has even characterized anti-terrorism efforts as “unconstitutional.”

Kreidie condemned what he called the “assaults on human rights mounted by President Bush and his [then-] Attorney General, John Ashcroft.” He accused Bush of “a litany of anti-Arab and [anti-] Muslim actions,” and on one occasion referred to the Attorney General as “that lunatic Ashcroft.”

Kreidie denies that American Muslims have anything to do with terrorism. “Nobody in my community supports Osama [bin Laden],” he has announced, thereby preemptively exonerating all Muslims of connections to Al-Qaeda. After the U.S. President personally signed the papers to close down the Holy Land Foundation, a fraudulent Islamic “charity” that the Treasury Secretary described as an organization that “exists to raise money in the United States to promote terror,” Kreidie insisted that the foundation was a legitimate charitable organization. When Pennsylvania State Treasurer Barbara Hafer suspected that $210,000 stolen by individuals with Arabic names could be connected to terrorism, Kreidie jumped on her statement as baseless and inflammatory.

Summing up his whole outlook, Kreidie has said that for American Arabs and Muslims, working with the FBI to combat terrorism is “a waste of time.”

This profile is adapted from the article “Federal Bureau of Islamists,” written by Daniel Pipes and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on July 6, 2004.

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