Save our anger for terrorists, not Arab-Americans

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By ROBYN BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 16, 2001

On May 21, 1942, the San Francisco Chronicle announced: "S.F. Clear Of All But 6 Sick Japs." The story read: "The last group, 274 of them, were moved yesterday to the Tanforan assembly center. Only a scant half dozen are left, all seriously ill in San Francisco hospitals."

This was our nation's response to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. We rounded up all people of Japanese descent from our West Coast and hoarded them into internment camps, 120,000 in all, a large majority of whom were American citizens.

Only later, after the crisis had passed and the hysteria had died down, were we the least contrite. It took another 46 years for our government to formally apologize and pay reparations for the tragic wrong it had visited on people whose only crime was their heritage.

What is it about human beings that we are so willing to assign others' deeds to those who come from the same ethnic, racial or religious group? It is a worldwide phenomenon. Just ask the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Catholics in Northern Ireland or the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

America, though, was to be the antidote to this way of thinking. We are a nation of individuals, who are not to be judged on immutable characteristics but on our dexterity of mind and strength of back. Our immigrant ancestors came here to escape the yoke of caste, family background, and government-sponsored ethnic and religious discrimination.

Here, you are what you do. That is the soul of America.

It is incumbent that we keep this in mind as we go forward after the terrorism of last week. There are an estimated 4- to 7-million Muslims in our nation, and even if the vast majority of the terrorists who did this to us are of Middle Eastern descent, the vast majority of Arab-Americans and American Muslims are not terrorists.

Let me say that again: The vast majority of Arab-Americans and American Muslims are not terrorists.

They deserve to be treated as Americans, as individuals, which means their pain over this tragedy should be as honored and respected. They, too, have lost friends and family in the devastation. They, too, are victims of this terror. Their country, too, has been attacked.

Of course, the hot-headed, impulsive and ignorant among us have already taken their anger out on easy targets. The Islamic Center of Irving, a mosque in Dallas, had its windows shattered by gunshots, and in Alexandria, Va., bricks were thrown through a window of an Islamic bookstore with hate messages attached. It was inevitable that these things would happen.

But what doesn't have to happen is its official counterpart, a government response that would remind those of Arab descent, no matter how they have served our country, no matter how generous they have been to their neighbors and community, they are under suspicion.

To detain Arab-Americans at airports for extra searches, to infiltrate their social clubs and mosques, or monitor their e-mail simply on the basis of heritage is as wrong as randomly stopping and searching young black men on the street because they fit a demographic of those who commit crime. Racial and ethnic profiling is the antithesis of the American ideal. It is guilt by association, the same justification we used to intern those of Japanese descent during World War II.

If the result of terrorism on American soil is that we approve the concept of collective suspicion "for the sake of national security," then we have given our tormentors a much larger victory than the buildings they have leveled and the lives they have ended.

America was targeted because of our individualism. We are despised because we are willing to give each person the freedom to act as his or her own moral agent. We don't tell women what they can and cannot be, we don't dictate religious beliefs, and we don't decree what people may read or see. And rather than be "punished" by some metaphysical force for this unbridled confidence in the self, we have succeeded wildly. What could be more infuriating to those who believe that all people must be controlled and subjugated by religious order? (Their religious order.) The purpose of their terror is not so much to take us down -- they know they couldn't do that -- but to turn us into them. By injecting fear, they know we'll erect controls, and limits, and cede more power to the military. They know we'll start treating Arab-Americans and American Muslims as one of them and not one of us.

If these things are allowed to happen, then the transformation will already have begun.

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