The attacks against Arab-Americans and Muslims now number in the hundreds.
They have been jumped, shouted at and spit on. Their children have been harassed at school. Their mosques and churches have been driven into, shot at, bombed and had excrement flung at them. Their men have been thrown off planes for looking Middle Eastern.
The venom has even been directed towards Sikhs, who are not Muslim but whose turbans make them targets. One was shot dead in suburban Phoenix. Two killings in California and Texas appear to be part of the backlash.
But to the relief of such vulnerable populations, the calls for protection are growing too.
President Bush, Mayor Richard Daley, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, and scores of legislators and religious leaders have spoken out on behalf of Arab-Americans. Extra police patrol their neighborhoods. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights set up a national hot line. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling for the protection of the “civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans, including Arab-Americans and American Muslims.”
The leaders’ messages consist largely of observations that, in a society fed around-the-clock news analysis, seem ridiculous: They lost people in the attacks too. They love the flag too. They believe in a religion that does not advocate violence too. They mourn too. They were born here too.
For any other ethnic or religious group, such platitudes would be insulting. But Arab-Americans aren’t any other ethnic group, and even the most Barney-esque of sentiments are welcomed–and some say they’re a sign of how far the community has come.
“We are more recognized, more respected and better protected than ever before,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, which champions the community’s interests in government and politics.
Kind gestures
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Zogby said, he received death threats, including one that called him a “towel head.” But those have dwindled, replaced by kind gestures: human chains around mosques, volunteers escorting children to school, interfaith religious services, even a pan of brownies dropped off at his office.
“When the rest of Americans saw the fear, they put their arms around us,” Zogby said of the supporters. “No one’s going to let the bigots win. No one’s going to let terrorists win. We’re going to beat them both.”
This community of 3 million, two-thirds of whom are Christian, has lived in the United States for more than a century. More than 80 percent are citizens and boast a rate of education and business ownership that is among the highest of any U.S. ethnic community.
Arab-Americans include disc jockey Casey Kasem, Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Jacques Nasser, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, former United Press International doyenne Helen Thomas and heart pump inventor Dr. Michael DeBakey–as well as thousands of professors, grocers, gas station owners and lawyers.
Associations
Yet their ethnic affiliation still has unsavory associations.
The 2001 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus lists “tramp,” “vagrant” and “huckster” as synonyms for “Arab”–a reference to the early days when many Syrian immigrants worked as peddlers.
In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis rejected the Arab-American endorsement, following Democratic nominee Walter Mondale’s move in 1984 of refusing donations from Arab-American groups for fear of alienating Jewish voters. And during her recent U.S. Senate race in New York, Hillary Clinton returned $51,000 in contributions to a number of Arab-American and American Muslim donors for fear that they were tainted.
In Hollywood, although many studios are wary of appearing politically incorrect, writers still rely on the stock images of the three B’s for the Arab character: billionaire, bomber and belly dancer, said media critic Jack Shaheen. Three years ago, the movie “The Siege” explored the fallout from a terrorist attack on New York by Islamic militants and the government’s response of herding American Muslims and Arab-Americans into detention camps.
Portrayals in entertainment
Such negative portrayals of Arabs or Muslims, also seen in “True Lies,” “Executive Decision” and “Not Without My Daughter,” provided distorted images that helped fuel the backlash, said Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Films and television shows “have force-fed a steady diet for 30 years of vitriol and defamation against Arabs and Muslims into the American popular culture and have made no effort whatsoever to present Arabs in a positive or neutral manner,” Ibish said. “We have been warning for years that this reckless racism would lead to a rash of hate crimes. We cannot be surprised.”
In a recent Washington Post poll, 43 percent of respondents said they would now be more suspicious of people of Arab descent.
The poll provides a glimpse of the pervasiveness of anti-Arab sentiment, compounded by the FBI’s dragnet of Arab and Muslim terrorism suspects and witnesses. The fact that the hijackers quietly studied in our universities, worked out in our gyms and trained at our flight schools–and looked like any other polite, well-dressed immigrants–only compounds the unease.
A renaissance
Despite the community’s baggage, Arab-Americans have been experiencing a renaissance of sorts–quietly in living rooms, mosques, churches, cafes or with great fanfare at press conferences. Slowly, they have emerged from one of the most maligned, politically powerless immigrant groups in American history into a viable political lobby.
During the fall presidential campaign, their 1.5 million votes were actively courted by both candidates, who visited the nation’s most concentrated Arab-American community of Dearborn, Mich. The community cheered when Bush during the debates mentioned concerns about racial profiling and the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s use of secret evidence.
“The community now is viewed as the mainstream, a constituent group as part of the body politic,” Zogby said. Six Arab-Americans currently hold seats in Congress.
Recently, the Arab-American and Muslim communities have challenged corporations, such as Nike, for designing a tennis shoe with embroidery resembling the Arabic script for Allah. They even persuaded Disney, in its videotape release of “Aladdin,” to edit out song lyrics that called Arabia “barbaric.” The move led to industrywide changes in which studio executives and producers seek Arab-American input to make sure they are not offending the community.
Islam also is being recognized. The number of mosques has increased by about 25 percent in six years to more than 1,200, according to a recent study, which also estimated the number of Muslims at 6 million to 7 million.
In December, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hosted the department’s first iftar, the evening meal eaten at sundown to break the day’s fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The interdenominational mourning service this month at the National Cathedral in Washington included a Muslim imam. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington to acknowledge the community’s contributions and demand that the backlash stop.
Arab-Americans and Muslims long have complained that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is shaped by the concerns of American Jews and have flexed their muscle by protesting American refusal to condemn Israeli military force toward Palestinians or the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions.
But in an about-face, Arab polities overseas are carefully watching the treatment of their U.S. brethren.
Consequently, there’s an increasing awareness that reports of hate crimes against American Muslims do not play well overseas, especially when the Bush administration is trying to reassure Arab allies that the U.S. is fighting terrorism, not Islam.
Increased activism
But stepped-up security in Arab-American and Muslim neighborhoods isn’t simply part of a geopolitical public-relations strategy; it’s also the result of decades of Arab-American activism.
In the wake of the attacks, community leaders asked for and were granted a meeting with Assistant Atty. Gen. Ralph Boyd of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to discuss ways to combat hate crimes.
“Within 48 hours of the attack, we were sitting around a table at the Justice Department with FBI and civil rights people asking what needed to be done,” Zogby said. “That’s a huge change.”
That didn’t happen after the Oklahoma City bombing. A rash of hate crimes also followed the arrest of an Arab-American, who was en route to Amman, Jordan, to visit his family, before police found Timothy McVeigh. While the backlash subsided as soon as authorities revealed that they had the wrong guy, the initial calls for calm were few.
Despite the current public support, Ibish said the damage is acute and deep. Hard-won advances are in danger of being compromised. For years, the communities have fought discrimination at airport security checks. Yet in today’s climate, woe to the bearded Muslim caught carrying manicure scissors.
Leaders fear that national security concerns will justify wiretapping and immigration abuses.
Under a bill proposed by the Bush administration, the INS would be allowed to detain suspected terrorists perhaps indefinitely.
“This is a moment of real identity. Our community is in a crisis. It’s not a time for self-congratulation,” Ibish said. “We need to have a precise appreciation for our status in society so we can go about repairing it.”
