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AAI in the News

Arab Americans see lingering prejudice, some progress since 9-11

By Sarah Karush
Associated Press
Posted on Sunday September 3, 2006

DEARBORN, Mich.—A 19-year-old Arab American woman hears a man mutter that she should go back to the Middle East, apparently unaware that she was born and raised in the Midwest.

A young chiropractor has renewed his commitment to Islam, in part because he is horrified by what some people are doing in the name of his religion.

A high school principal says his faith in American democracy has been shaken by U.S. actions abroad and what he sees as the erosion of civil liberties at home.

Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, Arab Americans are still sorting through the profound and varied consequences of the attacks and events that followed.

Some have faced threats and insults. Many have been detained and questioned, and believe it’s their names, physical features or religion that piqued the interest of authorities. One economist says prejudice has pushed down the earnings of Arab and Muslim men since 2001.

Others see signs of progress. They point to the outpouring of support from many non-Arabs in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and the efforts of law enforcement to protect them from hate crimes. They see Arab Americans showing more pride in their heritage and getting more politically involved.

“We have more problems than before 9-11, no question,” said James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute. “But we also have more opportunities to defend ourselves than ever before.”

The 2000 census counted 1.2 million people who claim Arab ancestry. Advocacy groups believe that is an undercount, and the Washington-based Arab American Institute puts the number at 3.5 million. A majority of Arab Americans are Christians, though recent immigrants from Arab countries are mostly Muslim. Those who are Muslim say post-9-11 suspicion of them often has more to do with their religion than their ethnicity.

The Detroit suburb of Dearborn is arguably the center of Arab America, anchoring a community of about 300,000 in southeastern Michigan. The Arab American National Museum, which opened last year in a 38,500-square-foot Middle Eastern-style building opposite City Hall is a symbol of the community’s increasing visibility. Across town, the minarets of the Islamic Center of America, believed to be the largest mosque in the U.S., are hard to miss.

Sura Hassan, a 19-year-old who is active at the mosque, is from an Iraqi family. Culturally, however, she says she is more American than Arab. She laughs as she describes how her family goes to bed early every night, while many of their Arab friends stay up late socializing, as is the custom in much of the Middle East.

But as a devout Muslim who wears a hijab covering her hair and neck, Hassan, who was born in Illinois and lives in Livonia, says some people consider her a foreigner and an enemy.

She recalled a recent incident at the public library: “We were about to check out, and this guy passes by—tall, American-looking if you want to say—and he just mumbles under his breath, ‘Get the ‘F’ out of here,’ or something like that.”

Hassan sounds more frustrated than angry as she recalls the moment. “You wish you could just be, like, ‘Could I have five minutes just to, like, tell you a couple things before you start assuming?’” she said.

Kallil Kazan also worships at the Islamic Center. Ever since Sept. 11, he has felt that Islam is under attack—and that has made him more dedicated to it. Though already a devout Muslim, the 31-year-old chiropractor from Dearborn Heights became more active at the Islamic Center following 9-11.

“That’s when the time came for me to define myself as a Muslim,” he said, adding that he wanted to provide a positive example of a Muslim, both for non-Muslims and for terrorists who “call themselves Muslims” but “have strayed away from the religion of peace.”

Like many Americans, Kazan and Hassan see Sept. 11 as a moment that sharply divided their lives into before and after.

At the same time, many Arab Americans say it was just the beginning of a series of events, including detentions at Guantanamo Bay and the war in Iraq, that have put Arabs and Muslims in the cross hairs. They are disturbed by what they see as simplistic, misleading portrayals of Arabs and Islam in the media and by President Bush’s recent use of the term “Islamic fascism”—a phrase they say unfairly links a whole religion to an extremist ideology.

Many see the fighting this summer between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of a post-Sept. 11 pattern of conflicts and say a pro-Israel bias kept the U.S. from acting quickly to stop the bloodshed.

“When your culture is fighting your nation or your nation is fighting your culture, it’s a very hard place to be in,” said Imad Fadlallah, principal of Dearborn’s Fordson High School, which he estimated is about 90 percent Arab American. “Nowadays, I have a very, very hard time defending American democracy because I’ve been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed to a point where I can’t defend anymore.”

A few weeks before the start of classes, Fadlallah was preparing to deal with the effects of the fighting in Lebanon on Fordson students, most of whom have family in southern Lebanon, the area that bore the brunt of Israeli air strikes. Almost every Lebanese student at Fordson was in some way affected—whether through the death of relatives or the loss of a family home, he said. Many Dearborn residents were in Lebanon for the summer when the fighting broke out.

Events closer to home also rocked Fordson this summer. Two recent graduates of the school were arrested in August in Marietta, Ohio, as they traveled around making bulk purchases of cheap, prepaid cell phones from discount stores. They were charged with supporting terrorism, but a prosecutor dropped those charges the following week, saying he couldn’t prove a link.

Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, both 20 and students at Detroit area colleges, have said they were buying cell phones to resell for a profit and were targeted because they are Arabs—an allegation officials in Ohio deny. They still face misdemeanor falsification charges because police say they lied when they were first questioned.

Within days of the Ohio arrests, three Palestinian-American men from Texas were charged in Michigan after making similar cell phone purchases. Again, a county prosecutor dropped the terror-related charges, though the three men now face federal counterfeiting charges.

Fadlallah said the case has prompted a flood of questions from students, who remember Houssaiky as captain of the football team and Abulhassan as a basketball star.

“The only crime they committed is one of them’s named Ali and the other one’s named Osama,” he said.

But Zogby, who also decried the arrests, said it’s a sign of civil rights progress in the U.S. that the terror charges were dropped. “Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have seen those kids again,” he said.

Imad Hamad, Midwest regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the cell phone cases are part of a pattern of official suspicion of Arabs. He says he is among many Arab Americans who have been repeatedly singled out for questioning at Detroit’s busy border crossing with Canada. And he bristles when federal officials claim a terrorist link in cases that involve more banal criminal matters like cigarette smuggling or tax evasion.

U.S. border officials say profiling is banned under their policies. Federal prosecutors say any terror-related allegations are backed by evidence.

Meanwhile, Robert Kaestner, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said government survey data show that the wages of men from predominantly Arab and Muslim countries fell 10 percent relative to other immigrants after Sept. 11.

But the effect of Sept. 11 on Arab Americans has not been entirely negative, said Tareef Nashashibi, of Aliso Viejo, Calif. A member of the Arab American Republican Club of Orange County, the 48-year-old Nashashibi said many Arab Americans are becoming more politically active, in what is a long tradition of minorities’ standing up for their rights.

“The way I see it, the baton of civil rights in this country has been handed to us,” he said. “I will not let history say that Arab Americans have dropped the ball.”