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Friday evening, Sept. 14: An interdenominational group rallied at the Chicago Islamic Center on the city's southwest side. In reaction to an anti-Arab rally earlier in the week, the participants -- Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths -- wanted to make a public show of support for local Muslims during the hour of evening prayer.
However, the mood of peaceful ecumenism was quickly shattered the following morning when, sometime after sunrise prayers, vandals attacked the mosque and smashed its glass front doors. "Our people are scared," says Hakim Husien, a Palestinian American and community activist who lives directly behind the mosque.
This incident is one of numerous examples of anti-Arab backlash around the U.S. in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. It's part of a struggle very different from the one President George W. Bush has vowed to wage against the perpetrators of the terror -- a struggle between the tolerance that usually prevails among Americans and the angry reaction spurred by deaths at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Whatever happens in the war on terrorism, Americans need to redouble their efforts to ensure that justice prevails on this second front, too.
PROTECTING THOSE AT RISK. So far, government officials have gone out of their way to discourage retribution against Arab Americans. Everyone from President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft to New York City's Mayor Rudy Giuliani has warned early and often against scapegoating. Nonetheless, Arab Americans -- and Hispanics, Indians, and just about anyone else who might be mistaken for an Arab American -- are frightened.
"The government response has been very good -- much bigger than ever before," says Ali Abunimah, a vice-president of the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based advocacy and community-service organization. "But the backlash also has been bigger. Oklahoma City is the worst we've seen until now, and this has been much worse."
Already, a number of violent incidents have been directed against people supposed to be Arab Americans. The worst may have been the fatal shooting in Mesa, Ariz., of a Sikh owner of a Chevron station, allegedly by a 42-year-old man who was quoted by a local paper as saying, "I stand for America all the way." The same man is also believed to have shot at and missed a clerk in a Mobil station who is of Lebanese descent, and to have fired several times at the home of a family of Afghan descent. The FBI is investigating whether to declare the shootings hate crimes.
Other gas stations and shops have been attacked, and in Chicago, a Moroccan was assaulted by a man wielding a machete who bragged later in a bar that he was trying to get an Arab.
BRUTES AND FOOLS. All told, Arab groups say more than 200 incidents have happened so far since the tragedy struck. Parents report that Arab-American children -- especially girls who wear the hijah, the Muslim head scarf -- are frequently harassed. Arab-American store owners are threatened with vandalism if they don't display American flags. Via e-mail listservs, advocacy groups warn anyone who is, or might be mistaken for, an Arab American to wear red, white, and blue clothing, and not to smile or appear too cheerful in public. Hate mail and death threats have even forced the Arab American Action Network to remove the names of staff and board members from its Web site.
Most of these incidents are no doubt the handiwork of a tiny minority of thugs and ignoramuses. But America's elite also bear some responsibility. Even while warning against prejudice, President Bush seemed to relish Wild West allusions and injected disturbing religious overtones into his campaign on terrorism by referring to it as a "crusade."
Even the usually circumspect New York Times editorial page got into the act on Sept. 16 when columnist Maureen Dowd quoted lines from Rudyard Kipling referring to Afghanis as "utter brutes." Is such demonizing of others less reprehensible when it's filtered through a literary citation?
SKETCHY RECORD. We've all got to start working harder to avoid fanning the flames of prejudice against Arab Americans. We've gotten very smug in recent days about our country's reputation as a beacon of freedom. Americans -- and Canadians, for that matter -- would do well to remember that we don't have a particularly noble record of maintaining civil liberties in the wake of attacks on our people.
Indeed, it's little wonder that Asian-American organizations have been among the first to condemn any backlash against Arab Americans, notes Warren Maruyama, a Washington trade lawyer whose forebears were interned during World War II. Says Maruyama: "The Japanese-American community is very conscious of scapegoating in situations like this because of what happened during World War II."
During the early stages of World War II, people of Japanese, Italian, and German descent were rounded up, their property confiscated, and their mobility restricted. In 1941, immediately after the U.S. entry into the war, some 5,000 Japanese Americans were classified as "enemy aliens" and summarily discharged from the U.S. armed forces as threats to security.
PRISONER EXCHANGE. Eventually, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 31,000 German Americans, and several thousand Italian Americans were interned. About 2,000 people of Japanese descent were even rounded up in Latin America. The U.S. government eventually exchanged 900 of these people, most of whom had never been to Japan and many of whom spoke only Spanish, for U.S. prisoners of war held by the Japanese.
If you're thinking things were any better in Canada, think again. More than 20,000 Japanese Canadians also were interned and stripped of their property. During World War II, about 4,000 of them were deported to Japan. An additional 6,000 were deported well after the war was over. Many of those had never been to Japan and didn't speak Japanese.
Yes, we've come a long way from those days. No responsible person is talking about interning Arab Americans. Anything remotely similar seems unthinkable. And, thankfully, both Canada and the U.S. have tried to make amends for at least some of the mistreatment they meted out to their own citizens. In 1988, both U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologized to citizens of Japanese descent and paid reparations ($20,000 U.S. and $21,000 Canadian per person).
There's no room for complacency, however, given the explosiveness of the current tensions. "On the one hand, we've seen all sorts of sympathy and tolerance expressed," says Rashid Khalidi, a professor of History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. "On the other hand, there's this incredible xenophobia." The challenge now is to be certain that sympathy and tolerance vastly outweigh the xenophobia.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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