Press Room

AAI in the News

Arab Americans Find Their Voice

By Jonathan Maslow
Herald News
Posted on Tuesday October 26, 2004

Basima Mustafa checked out of her American skin after Sept. 11, 2001.

When the Paterson teacher led a discussion of the terrorist acts with her School 9 social studies classes, she felt herself reeling from the shock, hurt and confusion. She would never forget one Hispanic blind girl, who asked the question on the minds of most Americans, “Why do they hate us, Ms. Mustafa?”

Us. In the following months, Mustafa, 43, who was born in Jordan, raised in Paterson and graduated from William Paterson University, retreated from the fine line she had always walked between her identity as a modern American professional woman and the traditional culture of her Palestinian parents. She shrank from the flag waving and patriotic fervor. Instead of following her lifelong habit of reading The New York Times every day, she found herself gazing numbly at shows like “The Bachelor” on television.

“And that’s so not me,” Mustafa said.

Then came the winter of 2003 and the debate over whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat to the United States. Suddenly, Mustafa got angry at the idea that a war she was skeptical about could be started in her name as an American – and she lifted her post-9/11 veil.

She began by attending an anti-war rally in Washington. In time, she would join the Arab-American Democratic Caucus and the Network of Arab-American Professionals. Last year, she was appointed to the New Jersey Arab and Muslim Advisory Committee to the Attorney General. She registered parents of students, teacher colleagues and neighbors to vote. In September, she started teaching night classes in English to immigrants, most of them Arabic speaking. Now it’s hard to keep up with her whorl of engagement.

“Anger is a great feeling. Because you start to get angry, and you start to care about something.” Mustafa said.

Like Mustafa, a number of Arab-Americans in North Jersey have overcome the challenges of the past three years by doing what Americans do best: speaking out to defend their constitutional rights and organizing to fight injustice as they see it.

They have journeyed from the usual identification of American immigrants with the old country to a robust new commitment to local and domestic issues that affect them directly. Civil liberties concerns about new government powers granted under the USA Patriot Act, verbal attacks on the Muslim faith and the war in Iraq have impelled others to answer the age-old question: What does it mean to be a patriot in a nation founded, not on geography and ethnicity, but on universal freedoms and human rights?

The three years since 9/11 have been trying times for the Arab-American community in North Jersey – starting with broadcasts on some cable television news outlets on Sept. 11 purporting to show Arabs dancing in glee in the streets of South Paterson after the terrorist attacks.

“It was horrible,” said Paterson Police Chief Lawrence Spagnola. “I mean, we don’t have palm trees in Paterson. We don’t have dirt roads. We do have burned-out buildings – but not entire blocks. Horrible.” Spagnola joined then-Passaic County Sheriff Ronald Fava, then-Paterson Mayor Marty Barnes and Arab-American community leaders at a Sept. 14 news conference at City Hall, countering the misinformation and asserting publicly that the local Muslim community condemned the attacks, like all Americans.

In rapid succession, however, came the sweeping detention of about 2,000 Arab-American men nationwide, a tripling of hate crimes against American Muslims in the year after 9/11, as documented by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the federal special registration program for men from Muslim countries – reflected locally in a flirtation in West Paterson with an ordinance requiring registration of mostly immigrant renters. Although hate crime reports have gone down since the first year after 9/11, the war in Iraq and anti-Muslim rhetoric from Attorney General John Ashcroft and some of President Bush’s allies in the fundamentalist Christian community – including the Revs. Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell — have contributed to jitters and feelings of embattlement among the nation’s estimated 2 million Arab-Americans.

But the events since 9/11 have led at least some Arab-Americans to step forward and fight for civil liberties and against ethnic profiling, said Abed Awad. He’s a Clifton lawyer of Palestinian descent and chairman of the Arab American Democratic Caucus, who was recently appointed to the Electoral College as a New Jersey Kerry elector. Awad pointed out that new immigrants often identify with the old country and view issues through the prism of the old country’s political culture – a culture of colonial occupation or authoritarian regimes, in many cases. “I believe that 9/11 transformed Arab-American political culture by making issues like civil liberties, education and defending the Constitution more paramount than foreign issues,” he said.

The Zogby International polling firm, which specializes in studies of Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans, showed that Arab-Americans register and vote in greater numbers than other Americans. In 2000, for example, 88.5 percent of Arab-Americans were registered to vote and 62 percent turned out, compared with 70 percent of Americans overall who were registered and 58 percent who actually voted in 2000. In the four battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Zogby projected about a half-million Arab-Americans will vote on Nov. 2, a Zogby poll released last week indicated that more than 200,000 Arab-Americans have switched from the Republican to the Democratic column.

Mohamed El Filali, of Clifton, who was born in Morocco and is the outreach coordinator for the Islamic Center of Passaic County, has spent much of the past three years speaking at churches, schools and colleges on the peaceful nature of Islam. Countless times, he said, he has stood before schoolchildren in his shirt and tie and white skullcap, watching hands go up after he asked who thought he was a terrorist, just because he was Muslim.

“After 9/11, it was our job to go out and educate people about Muslims,” said El Filali. It’s been like a crucible – the vessel at the bottom of a furnace used for testing molten metals.

Said El Filali, “If you want to refine gold, you put it under heat and fire.”

When Ghassan Shabaneh poked a tree limb with his rented U-Haul while moving into West Paterson’s Westmount Apartments in May 2002, he never dreamed it would lead him to start a voter registration drive against what he considered the ethnic profiling of him and his neighbors. And perhaps to tip the local mayoral election.

Even before moving to West Paterson, Shabaneh, a Palestinian political scientist who teaches at Marymount Manhattan College, viewed the lack of due process in some of the government’s post-9/11 measures as a threat to the civil liberties of law-abiding Arab-Americans. But he saw it in historical context as similar to the hardships and discrimination that other ethnic newcomers faced in their day, struggling to find their place in America. “Every immigrant group that came to this country suffered,” said Shabaneh. “The Italians suffered. The Poles suffered. The Jews suffered. The blacks suffered. Now it’s our turn.”

That afternoon, Shabaneh recalled, a West Paterson policeman arrived at The Apartments, as the Westmount complex is called in town. A sprawling development of nearly 900 rental units on the heights of Garret Mountain, the bland yellow-brick apartments are home to many immigrants and naturalized citizens like Shabaneh and his wife, and to minorities and young people. The Apartments had come to public attention in November 2002, when a Jordanian named Eyad Alrababah, who had lived there from 1999 to 2000, was charged in Virginia with helping the 9/11 hijackers obtain false identifications.

The officer checked Shabaneh’s identification, wrote him a ticket for knocking down the tree branch, and drove away. Shabaneh paid the ticket in Municipal Court and thought the matter was over.

About a month later, however, Shabaneh read in the Herald News that then-Mayor Garry Collettiwas considering an ordinance requiring renters like him to register with the police, so that they could cross-check the list with terrorist watch lists.

“That stunned me,” said Shabaneh. Although he could not be certain that Colletti’s proposal resulted from his moving day mishap, he felt very certain that any such local law would represent a type of ethnic profiling more consistent with a police state than with American values. “We don’t punish a whole group for the crime of one person,” he said. “In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, if you did something to him, he might kill you, your family, your whole town. If there is one thing that makes this a great country, it’s our respect for human rights. It’s our respect for civil liberties. It’s our respect for the individual.”

Shabaneh asked for a meeting with Colletti to try to persuade him to drop the idea. He brought with him Yasmin Hamidi, who at that time was the New Jersey field coordinator for the Arab American Institute, a national, nonpartisan organization that encourages civic and political participation among Arab-Americans. She recalled that Colletti was polite and listened as they explained why they considered the proposed registry discriminatory and dangerous, because it was not based on any suspected criminal behavior of renters. “We said that, basically, he was putting security concerns over the Constitution in our view,” she said.

The mayor stood his ground. Colletti, a Republican running for re-election at that time against Democrat Pat Lepore, recalled things differently. He said the registration list was never meant to target any group and that it had legitimate purposes, like helping find the parents of lost children and ferreting out schoolchildren who don’t live in town. He said the newspaper and the Democrats took it out of context and blew it out of proportion. At the meeting with the Arab-Americans, Colletti said, “I tried to explain it had nothing to do with them.”

At The Apartments, window shades were drawn. In the dog days of summer 2003, tenants wouldn’t open their doors to a reporter. Missing was the familiar American soundtrack of an open society – of kids playing outside and neighbors chatting and laughing freely.

“The recent immigrant is the one who fears,” said Abed Awad, who, as chairman of the Arab American Democratic Caucus, set up a meeting between himself, Shabaneh and Lepore.

Lepore recalled that he told the Arab-Americans he found Colletti’s plan for keeping a police list of renters “chilling” and “extremist.’’

“I thought it was outrageous that anybody would want to register anybody in this country,” said Lepore. He said if Congress passed a bill requiring everyone to register, he might not like it, but it’s the law. “Once you start targeting people unfairly, it leads to nothing but bad and evil.”

What happened next had about it the elegant simplicity of grassroots democracy: Shabaneh, Hamidi and Awad organized a team of 10 Arab-Americans to go door to door in The Apartments and surrounding streets to register voters. Over two September weekends, Shabaneh and the team knocked on doors and urged those who were citizens to take a few minutes to fill out voter registration forms and make their voices heard on Election Day.

Almost 140 new voters signed up, said Shabaneh, who had to overcome the reticence of not growing up in a country where kids cut their teeth going door to door selling cookies and raffle tickets, or hawking magazine subscriptions for class trips. “I did become a kind of salesman – a very proud salesman of democracy,” he said.

On Election Day, Lepore won by 18 votes, in part, he said, “because a lot of people who felt threatened by what Colletti was proposing got involved in the democratic process.” Lepore is currently a Democratic candidate for county freeholder.

Ghassan Shabaneh still lives in The Apartments, but is house shopping in North Jersey. His experience of the last three years taught him something about becoming an American. “Priority number one is to survive by becoming part of the system,” he said. “Colletti wanted to register me. Lepore wanted to appoint me to the zoning board. This is the American way.”

Little more than a month before the United States attacked Iraq last year, the Borough Council of Prospect Park, a half-square mile of 5,800 residents, raised its voice in protest. It adopted a resolution urging the Bush administration not to put American troops in harm’s way “unless there is a clear and present danger,” but rather to “exhaust all diplomatic avenues” toward “a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi conflict.”

The feisty resolution was the brainchild of first-term Councilman Mohamed T. Khairullah, 29, a Syrian-born Paterson schoolteacher and volunteer firefighter, who is running for re-election on Nov. 2 on the Democratic line with Councilman Herb Perez.

One opponent in the race for two Prospect Park council seats is Thomas F.X. Magura, the local Republican leader. In the winter of 2003, after the council adopted the resolution, he called it “treasonous” and jeered that “these guys think they’re on the student council.” In a recent telephone interview, Magura said he stood by his earlier statements that the resolution was “an act that gives aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.” He said that in his current campaign he was telling people that “the Democrats in town are not supporting the troops.”

Why would a young, ambitious Arab-American politician, who, supporters say, could one day become the first Arab-American mayor in New Jersey, stick his neck out – especially at a time when many Arab-Americans are as cautious as incumbent politicians to talk openly about war and patriotism?

To understand that, perhaps, you have to make your way across one of the clanking old iron bridges that span the Passaic River from Paterson to hilly Prospect Park.

The densely built streets of modest ranchers and what used to be called double deckers are home to a highly transient, abundantly diverse community, many of whose members migrated from Paterson seeking the slightly better quality of life that is always associated in America with moving to higher elevations.

You don’t have to go very far on North Eighth Street, where Magura lives, for example, to meet Afghans, Dominicans, Italians, Albanians, Kosovars, Egyptians, Jamaicans, Macedonians, Peruvians, Bengalis, Circassians, whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Poles and a Palestinian boy peddling to the corner store on his bicycle. It’s a blue collar United Nations of Passaic County, where residents are interested in the same things their neighbors in richer and poorer towns are interested in: schools, taxes, police protection, snow removal.

But this is also a town where foreign-born residents know exactly why they came to America. “A lot of immigrants like me came to this country because of free speech,” said Khairullah.

Prospect Park is also the kind of town that is unstinting in offering up its best and brightest to defend the nation when necessary. How often does this happen: Two members of the Borough Council who voted for Khairullah’s resolution, Perez and Councilman Thomas Jefferson, are National Guardsmen recently called up to active duty.

Khairullah’s biography follows along lines similar to many of the residents he represents. Born in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo under the authoritarian Baathist regime of the late President Hafez Assad, Khairullah and his family moved to Saudi Arabia for economic opportunities. There, however, they faced ethnic discrimination by the Saudis against Arabs from countries, like Syria, which had not supported the allied coalition in the Gulf War.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1991, when Khairullah was 16, and soon settled in Prospect Park, where Arabic immigrants have been living since the 1970s and now make up 12 to 15 percent of the population, according to Khairullah.

As soon as Khairullah’s feet hit American soil, he understood he would have to grab the brass ring of freedom hard, and hold on by his own efforts. At Manchester Regional High School, he made the soccer and wrestling teams. “I got involved in sports, because right from the beginning I realized that if I wanted to be a part of American society, I had to get involved in what society does. I decided sports was the way for me.”

When he went on to William Paterson University to study business, Khairullah joined the borough’s volunteer fire company at age 19. His brother, Zein Khairullah, is on the Haledon volunteer ambulance squad. His uncle, Dr. Fehmi Khairullah, was elected to the Prospect Park Board of Education. Khairullah said that other residents of Arabic origins or Muslim faith are also represented on the police force, fire and ambulance squads, and take part in recreational sports and other civic groups. Integration into the civic life of Prospect Park not only helped Khairullah and Prospect Park Muslims to Americanize, but also inoculated the community as a whole against post-9/11 anti-Muslim defamation and paranoia. “We understand that we have to get involved and give back to the community, and I think people have seen that in us and understand that we are not these monsters they see on TV or get portrayed in the media sometimes,” he said.

When terrorists struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Khairullah was already on the ballot as a Democratic candidate for Borough Council. It was his first try at elected office and only one year after getting his American citizenship. That morning, he recalled, he left his school building during a prep period, went out to his car, and listened to the radio in stunned solitude. He was sure, he said, of two things: that “the monsters who did this might call themselves Muslims, but no true Muslim would do such a thing” and that the people of Prospect Park would not use his candidacy as a scapegoat because of his Arabic and Muslim background.

Less than two months after 9/11, Khairullah and his running mate Perez were both elected handily to Prospect Park’s all-Democratic Borough Council.

During the prelude to the Iraq war, the Arab American Institute came to the freshman councilman with examples of resolutions opposing a pre-emptive strike against Iraq that had been adopted by more than 70 local governing bodies across the country, including Philadelphia and Chicago, Newark and, later, Paterson. Khairullah told the institute representatives he would like to go forward with a Prospect Park resolution. But he warned that he had to work with five other council members. Then he e-mailed the Philadelphia resolution to the other council members.

When Councilmen Perez and Jefferson read the draft, they got together with Khairullah for a rewrite. They sought to make crystal clear that their opposition to a pre-emptive war did not mean lack of support for American troops. “We wanted to make sure we were 100 percent behind our troops,” Perez said.

The resolution that went before the council billboarded that distinction in the very first clause: “Whereas, the residents of Prospect Park have a long and proud history in defending our nation during times of war and crisis and we support our men and women in the Armed Forces, we believe they should be used to protect our great nation from terrorism and those who would harm us and not be put in harm’s way unless there is a clear and present danger.”

The Prospect Park council adopted the resolution by a 5-0 vote on Feb. 10, 2003.

Perez said, “Can you be patriotic and still oppose the government policies? The First Amendment guarantees just that.”

But Magura said, “You can’t have it both ways. That’s political jibberish.”

Khairullah defends the resolution on practical grounds. The war links the small town with the world, he said. What goes around in Iraq comes around to affect what happens at home. The soldiers who serve, die or are wounded come from towns big and small like Prospect Park. In addition, as he wrote in the resolution, “such an enormous drain on the federal budget would necessarily result in dramatic spending reductions in other parts of the federal budget,” including essential public services like education and law enforcement.

“We are all going to be touched by it and we had to speak,” Khairullah said.

On a recent autumn weekend, campaigning on a street where lime-green campaign signs for himself and Perez were almost as common as potted chrysanthemums, Khairullah dismissed the attacks on his patriotism. “This is a wonderful community, and people will see through that,” he said.

In Prospect Park, too small to have its own newspaper, radio or TV, politics are retail and face to face. If all politics were this local, said Khairullah, the world would be better off. But since it isn’t, people must make their ideas known up the political food chain to their councilman, to governors, Congress and to the president.

As if to underscore that point, a constituent stuck his head out the window of his second-floor flat and called down his views on the war in Iraq to the councilman on the sidewalk below. Maybe half of Prospect Park could hear him.

“The mistake has been done,” said Amet Vinca.”The war shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Now we should support the troops. That’s our boys over there.”

According to Webster’s Dictionary, patriotism is “the love and loyal or zealous support of one’s country.”

But does America’s unique creation as the world’s first, now oldest, constitutional democracy lift patriotism beyond nationalism to mean standing up for the Constitution or defending liberty itself, the rule of law, the inalienable rights of every citizen?

“Patriotism is not a bright line rule: You love your country, period,” said Abed Awad, the Clifton attorney. “What Arab-Americans have found out since 9/11 is that American patriotism is the ability to love your country and question its policies.”

Mohamed El Filali, the outreach coordinator at the Paterson mosque, said he still feels the call to speak about Islam as often as he can, though the number of speaking invitations is down from the first year after 9/11.

“A lot of people clearly have a lot of questions: What is Jihad? Who has the right to call Jihad? Terrorism. Osama bin Laden,” he said, adding that if he were in non-Muslims’ shoes, “I would have the same questions.”

El Filali tries to put himself in the place of those who ask, and tries to answer with patience. But he also finds himself speaking out more, these days, about other issues that matter to Muslims: the danger of extending the Patriot Act to give government the right to strip individuals of American citizenship; the war in Iraq, which he considers unnecessary; and health care and jobs – his brother, an industrial engineer, has been unemployed since last May.

“Someone said, ‘I love my country so much I have to criticize it,’” said El Filali.

It was James Baldwin: “I love America more than any other country in this world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”