University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: April 10, 2003

By JOHN J. WOOD
Reporter Contributor

Since Sept. 11, Arab-Americans have been singled out for special scrutiny and have been the focus of aggressive new laws and policies that increasingly compromise their civil liberties and reduce them to second-class citizenship. All Americans should take notice, for what is happening to Arab-Americans may affect others in the future.

This was the warning issued by Jean AbiNader, managing director and chief operating officer of the Arab American Institute, during a wide-ranging talk on April 3 in the Center for the Arts titled "Arab Americans: At the Edge of the National Security Debate."

AbiNader, whose lecture was part of a series organized by the Council on International Studies and Programs and co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Education, also spoke to two undergraduate classes during his visit to UB.

"Since 9/11, Arab-Americans have watched their dream of being fully a part of American society subject to the stresses of federal initiatives—new laws, policies and procedures—that produce fear and intimidation in their community," AbiNader began.

"No citizen, immigrant or visitor to this country is immune from these new laws," he added. "The Arab-American experience is a warning to everyone about the need to balance civil liberties and our legitimate homeland security concerns.

"Being an Arab-American at this time poses a challenge to the reason most of our parents and grandparents came to this country. I grew up just over the border in western Pennsylvania. My mother and father came here from Lebanon. They did not emigrate to America to be part of a sleeper cell, when the country they were leaving was itself ungovernable," he pointed out.

"And that is true of 99.9 percent of Arab-Americans and Muslims who have immigrated to this country," he said. "They did not come here to subvert the country that promised them opportunities they couldn't find in their own countries.

"What we cannot deny is that the people who carried out the attacks of 9/11 were Arabs and Muslims, so there is some logic to the campaign of waging a global war on terrorism beginning with Arabs and Muslims.

"However, I would like to challenge some of the assumptions behind how we have formulated our policy since 9/11," AbiNader added.

Calling 9/11 a "cataclysmic event for American society," he said it profoundly affected the way the country saw itself and its relations with the rest of the world. Following the end of the Cold War, in particular, the U.S. tended to view itself as "both ascendant and appreciated" among the nations of the world.

Sept. 11 dispelled America's superficial optimism that all is well with the world and that the U.S. is universally admired. "It brought home the reality that there are some basic problems with American foreign policy and challenges to our domestic policy as well," AbiNader said.

"As someone who travels frequently outside the United States and who has long relationships with friends in the Arab world and other places, I have sensed a profound shift—at least in the governing world view of Americans—of moving from optimism to pessimism. There is the sense that we don't trust the world anymore.

"What does that mean for Arab-Americans?" he asked. "We got caught up in this pessimism because we started to look around the country to see who were our friends and who were our enemies."

Immediately after Sept. 11, many national figures, including President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Gov. Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked Americans not to blame Arab-Americans and American Muslims for the terrorist attacks, AbiNader said.

"These public statements were very important because within a month of Sept. 11, more than 2,000 hate crimes were committed against Arab-Americans and Muslims in this country, and who knows how many more went unreported," AbiNader noted. "The very significant drop-off in hate crimes that followed was directly attributable to leaders speaking out against hate crimes against Arab-Americans and other people who looked like them."

Despite these interventions on behalf of Arab-Americans, there was a growing disregard for their civil liberties, AbiNader said, citing media accounts of profiling, including one of the Arab-American Secret Service agent who wasn't allowed on a plane for fear he was a terrorist.

"So the civil liberties of Arab-Americans and American Muslims came under attack, and we have been treated increasingly as second-class citizens in this country," he said. "Not only do we see it at airports in terms of profiling, but also in a whole series of federal initiatives that in any other circumstance would not have been acceptable but are now acceptable because this country is at war."

The erosion of Arab-American citizenship and rights has accompanied two other trends, AbiNader said. The first is the "systematic degrading of Islam by conservative Christians, neoconservatives and the right wing."

The irony, he said, is that more than 60 percent of Arab-Americans are Christian, and 80 percent of Arab-Americans are U.S. citizens. "So what you have is Christian citizens defending Muslim immigrants. That should tell you something about the coherence and pride of Arab-American culture," he said.

"When referring to the Arab-American community, we mean all Arab-Americans, whether they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish. We are all in it together. So the attack on Islam is an attack on all of us. Islam is the dominant religion in the Arab world and a formative part of our culture. The attack on Islam is not something Christian Arabs are going to join in with because we know Islam has as many faces as Christianity has. The war against terrorism cannot be a war against Islam."

The conservative Christian attacks on Islam as a "religion of liars and terrorists needs to be challenged, and unfortunately this has not been done by the administration itself, which draws so much support from this constituency."

The second trend, AbiNader pointed out, is the degrading of relationships between the United States and Arab countries. In addition to the domestic laws assaulting the civil liberties of Arab-Americans, there is an attack on Islam, as well as on U.S. bilateral relations with Arab countries.

"There has been a constant symphony of negative stories about how the United States does not need the Arab world," he said. "Perhaps not, but why not cooperative if you have mutual interests?"

AbiNader said that it needs to be explained what is at stake in terms of the future of the Arab world. For example, the Saudi royal family frequently is attacked in the media as decadent and corrupt, and involved in the funding of terrorism.

"The question is, who is going to replace the current Saudi leadership?" AbiNader asked. The problem is that if free elections were held tomorrow in any Arab country, the people elected would not be friendly to the United States.

"The question is not how we want to remake the Arab and Muslim world; the question for our foreign policy is how can we work with the elements of those societies who are progressive and thoughtful to help their civil societies consolidate so that their governments become more progressive and their economies offer more opportunities to their people," he said.

AbiNader likened recent U.S. policy, both foreign and domestic, to the two-faced Roman god Janus: "One face is that of American imperialism overseas, where security is the dominant theme and the touchstone for U.S. foreign policy going forward, summed up by the slogan, 'Either you are with us or you are against us.'

"And if other countries want to cooperate, they must approximate American political values and embrace democracy as the preferred form of government. This is backed up by the new doctrine of pre-emption, which allows unlimited scope for U.S. military intervention. That's the face of America as seen overseas."

But there is a domestic face as well, which is concerned above all about safety, he said.

"Domestically, there are three assumptions that trouble us as Arab-Americans. One is that respect and support for the core U.S. values that we all share is somehow subject to new rules about dissent.

"What we hear from the administration is that we need a different sense of discipline about how we speak about this country, and a different sense of civic responsibility." This is reflected in initiatives like TIPS (Terrorist Information and Prevention System), which encourages citizens to inform on fellow citizens suspected of being involved in terrorism.

"For the Bush administration, the question of dissent is tied into the issue of patriotism. The Democrats in Congress have rolled over on this, first on the USA Patriot Act, then on the declaration of war against terrorism, then on the declaration of war against Iraq, and now on issues relating to domestic security.

"The price of supporting core U.S. values on the administration's terms is a weakening of our ability to have free speech, encouraging people to be informants on the community, and diminution of the ability to dissent."

The second assumption in the domestic policy is restrictions on those who are perceived as not fitting into this country. There is a clear distinction between those who fit in and those who don't, AbiNader said. "And we are seeing this in such diverse ways as the attack on affirmative action. They are going to bring back the 'English as the national language' movement. It is going to come up as soon as the war in Iraq is over.

"The new visa policy clearly reflects the leadership's attitude toward those who fit versus those who don't fit. The new registration system, which is supposed to apply to all visitors to the U.S. by Jan. 1, 2005, seems like a good idea; after all, why shouldn't we know about those who are coming into the country and where they are when they are here?"

However, the registration system has focused only on visitors from certain primarily Arab and Muslim countries, AbiNader said. "This is not supposed to be racial or religious profiling, but given the countries required to register so far, what is it?

"It turns out that the registration system cannot be fully implemented because it lacks the technical capabilities to support itself," he said. "What the system did do is turn up about 400 people who overstayed their visas or who had committed relatively minor crimes, like not paying their parking tickets. After three months of incredible intimidation for the citizens of these countries visiting the United States, there has not been one conviction for terrorism as a result of this system.

"We in the Arab-American community have been fighting these developments, along with many other groups—the civil liberties and ethnic organizations with whom we have a common cause," he said.

During his visits to the Middle East, AbiNader hears old friends say with tears in their eyes that they don't want to send their kids to the U.S. to study. "These are the people who have been the bedrock of our relationship with the Arab world, and they don't want to come here because of what has been going on since 9/11," he said. "They feel we don't respect their religion, their culture, and they can't get a visa anyhow."

AbiNader reported that 32 Fulbright scholars were not able to get visas to come to the U.S. in the past year. There has been a 30 percent decline in the enrollment of Arab students in U.S. higher education—the number of Saudi students has fallen from 1,500 two years ago to 50 last year.

"The U.S. is going to lose the next generation of students from the Arab world who will go to Canada, the UK or Australia instead," he said. "The leadership in the U.S. doesn't seem to care if this happens. For them, our security is built on being able to define the rules.

"There is a real disconnect between what the government says and what it does," he pointed out. "The combination of racial profiling, the assumption of guilt by association, the restrictions on dissent are a recipe for failure. I'm not saying everything is bad. But it feels that way."

Arab-Americans are confronted with a basic challenge to their identity as Americans, AbiNader said. "Being an Arab has become a liability in this country. We are being told, essentially, that we are not good enough. This is clearly not the case if one takes the time to see who Arab-Americans are.

"We have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of what we have contributed to this country. By belittling Arabs, by belittling our relations with the Arab world, by belittling Islam, you challenge our ability to participate fully in this country, and that's why I say we are at the edge of the national security debate," he said.

"Being at the cutting edge means I have to speak out, I have to encourage others to speak out, and to say to this government that the United States can't go it alone. The U.S. has to establish its leadership in the world by example, not by force. It has to build relationships," he said.

"We have talented knowledgeable people in this country who can help us develop an informed policy and relationship with the Arab world and who can help build bridges to make these countries more progressive."