“At Home, a Struggle for Acceptance” — The Daily Iowan/special project
This appeared May TK, 2007, in “Faith without Frontiers: Islam in Iowa,” an online project and Daily Iowan special section as part of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications master’s program.
Bill Aossey was the first Muslim to serve in the Peace Corps. He was a Boy Scout and so were his three sons. He has fond memories of shared camping trips and scouting expeditions.
So it was only natural that he would volunteer to start a nonprofit organization to bring children from around the world into the Iowa woods.
“You’ve heard of the YMCA. We said, ‘why can’t you have an MYCA — Muslim Youth Camps of America?’ It would be an open camp for all denominations, all nationalities, all religions, all racial backgrounds,” said Aossey, owner of Midamar, a halal food export company that has operated in Cedar Rapids since 1972.
For its first project, MYCA, which had no experience running a camp and just $5,000 in assets when it was founded, proposed a facility called Camp Heritage. It would be located on 114 acres of land controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and would be the first permanent Muslim-affiliated youth camp in the United States.
To the dismay of the MYCA board, the camp’s religious affiliation became a roadblock. And in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became increasingly difficult to separate justified concerns from irrational fears.
And the fears were palpable.
“Many Muslims hate us and I don’t trust them to have a camp with easy access to our water supply,” one opponent of the project wrote to the Corps.
In this case, “them” was mostly the Aossey family, Bill and Joe Aossey, sons of Lebanese immigrants, and Bill’s own sons, Yayah and Jalel. All are members of the MYCA board of directors. All were born in Cedar Rapids. All have been involved since the beginning, eight years ago.
The camp site, 10 miles north of Iowa City along the Iowa River, sits unused. The gravel road has been resurfaced but it only leads to the remains of a Girl Scout camp that occupied the land until 1990 when its lodge burned down. Decaying outhouses, a hole where the lodge once stood, and rotting picnic tables lie in undergrowth that has yet to be cleared.
The camp’s development has been hampered by the strength of the opposition. Newspapers printed editorials in opposition. Opponents sent letters to the Corps. Two local governments formally fought the camp. Conservative radio host Mike Gallagher broadcast nationally from downtown Iowa City. He fanned the flames with comments like, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all the terrorists are Muslims.”
Some opponents had the sort of environmental concerns that arise whenever land is slotted for development: noise, traffic, access.
Others had a problem with the group’s religion.
Some of these reacted to leasing the land to any “exclusionary” group, be it Muslim, Christian or the Boy Scouts. But others — a small but unignorable minority — made the leap of linking the Muslim youth camp to a training ground for terrorists.
“We’re running into that kind of social perception in the United States that unfortunately has an impact on how 5- and 6-year-old kids and programs for them are viewed,” said Joe Rinas, a Lutheran, former Linn County Supervisor and MYCA’s first and currently only employee.
Rinas has worked for the last three months alongside the MYCA board of directors: the four Aosseys; Manzoor Ali, who emigrated from Pakistan; Riad Jammal, from Lebanon; and Bob Ballantyne, a Unitarian Universalist who served with the Peace Corps in Iran. All have been in Iowa for at least 30 years.
The lack of women on the board, Jalel and Joe Aossey said, is due to the camp’s plodding pace of progress — there hasn’t been much to do and so the organization hasn’t expanded beyond original participants. As the camp gets closer to completion, both said they hoped women would be interested in working with the group.
The group’s goal, board members say, is two-fold. First, because of what it believes is the public’s misunderstanding of Islam, organizers want to give non-Muslims the chance to learn from and interact with Muslim children to build understanding. They also wanted to give Muslim youth from around the world the opportunity to experience an Iowa summer camp.
While the details of the camp’s day-to-day programming remain undeveloped, organizers say the camp will have the same look and feel as other summer camps. The camp’s five cabins, five tent platforms, and a 2,400-square-foot lodge, all encircled by woods and hiking trails, will host about 60 campers each week throughout the summer. The site will be available to other non-profits during the off-season. The group is working towards American Camping Association accreditation. The cost of building the camp is estimated at $1 million for the facilities alone.
Funding has come from conventional sources. More than half of the $200,000 the group has spent on engineering and construction so far has been donated by non-Muslims, organizers estimated. Rinas, hired to raise funds and promote the camp, said he plans to raise money from Muslim business owners and apply for grants from foundations and private corporations.
If the board has its way, MYCA will be as American as the YMCA. The “Y” is Christian and yet is open to people of other faiths. The YMCA’s mission remains “to put Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind, and body for all.”
Modeling itself after the YMCA has not helped the MYCA.
When the Corps awarded MYCA the exclusive right to negotiate a lease, the group met with the neighbors to explain its intentions. Some members of the community weren’t happy with what they heard.
“We were shocked,” said Lynne Kinney, whose home overlooks the leased land.
The former tenants had used the camp a few weeks each summer, mostly for day camping, said John Braun, the property manager for the local Girl Scouts council at the time. The scouts hadn’t even bothered to store canoes on the site and have not returned since their lodge burned down.
What neighbors saw in the initial MYCA proposal was a camp that could be used year-round by 120 people each week, replace pit toilets with a wastewater system and have an unknown effect on neighboring wells and streets.
To allay these concerns, Zambrana Engineering, a firm based in St. Louis, was hired to conduct a detailed environmental impact assessment. Every tree on the land was cataloged.
The firm concluded that building MYCA’s dream camp would cause no significant environmental problems. Still, the Corps decided to reduce the size of the camp MYCA could build by 50 percent.
Then, what had been a local story turned into national news. What seemed to grab hold of the public and media imagination were rumors of the inclusion of a 75-foot-tall prayer tower in the camp’s plans. Where this detail came from, no one is certain. The plans have never called for such a structure.
Besides people’s willingness to believe unsubstantiated rumors, Bill Aossey saw it as just another misinterpretation of Islam.
“There is no such thing as a prayer tower. Nobody’s going to pray to a post or a column,” he said.
But the story took on a life of its own. It was picked up by Fox News and other national media. Web sites such as the Militant Islam Monitor called it a “jihad camp” and made connections between Bill Aossey, Midamar, some Islamic groups it has supplied, and international terrorists.
Front Page, an online magazine featuring columns by conservative commentator Ann Coulter, dubbed the project “Camp Terror.”
Still, the response wasn’t a surprise, camp organizers said. Neither was it reason to give up. When a local resident told Bill Aossey that the camp would never happen, Aossey remembers replying, “Never is a long time. I don’t care if we get a piece of land big enough for a pavilion, a tent and a picnic table; we’re going to have a camp.”
The MYCA and the Corps signed a contract in March 2006 — nearly seven years to the day when a small group of men first started down this road. Construction started last summer and the lease requires its completion by 2011.
“We’re 20 years behind schedule in my head,” Joe Aossey said, laughing. “Up to this point in time, this has just been a vision. It’s like any other dream; you always question whether it’s a dream or a hallucination.”
Still, when Joe Aossey and Ballyntine asked the Johnson County Board of Supervisors for support in seeking an Iowa Community Attraction and Tourism grant, they were turned down. The county cited environmental concerns despite the impact study’s findings. In contrast, the YMCA has received some $1.7 million through the same state tourism grants.
Following the failed request, Ballyntine received letters and a telephone call that regaled him with expletives and called him an “idiot” and a “traitor.”
At no point did MYCA, which hopes to host its first campers in tents this summer, consider giving in to public pressure.
“Why should we give up on youth? That’s like saying give up on society,” Bill Aossey said. “Why would you give up on the future of youth?”
