Hate Crimes on the Rise
War Drive puts Arabs, Muslims, & Arab-Americans in the Crossfire at Home

Article taken from Justice, the paper of the US-section of the CWI

As you all know, our nation is at war right now. We're going to defend America and defend the values that we all hold dear. And our nation is united in the defense of our country. We are not at war with Muslims. We don't have a beef with Muslims. We want to be friends with Muslims and Muslim children."
George W. Bush, October 25, 2001

Whatever President Bush says, there appears to be a domestic war building. Even as it denies its existence, the US government and ruling class relentlessly promotes a war against Arab Americans, Muslims and immigrants. Deniability and war have always gone hand in hand.

A Sikh gas station attendant is murdered for wearing a turban in the Mid-West. A Somalian is stabbed to death in Minneapolis. A Muslim man with an Arab name is found stabbed to death in Seattle. A man is murdered in Fresno, California for looking Middle Eastern. A Salvadoran man screams for help in Spanish as a gang of five white youngsters beats him for being "bin Laden's next of kin." A Nicaraguan woman is assaulted in Los Angeles for her Turkish features. A mob attacks two Afghan teenagers in Prince William County, near Washington, DC. An angry mob of 300 "patriots" marches through a Chicago neighborhood chanting anti-Arab slogans and threatening local mosques with fiery destruction. A mosque in Central Kentucky is reduced to ashes by a fire bomb. Businesses with Arab or Muslim owners are threatened in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, etc. Some are fire-bombed, others have windows broken or their storefronts decorated with the Neanderthal poetry of hate...

Tip of the Iceberg

These are some of the more grievous hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims or people resembling Middle Easterners reported to the authorities since September 11. Muslim civil rights organizations believe that the 1,000-plus reported attacks are only a fraction of the real total, and that most attacks are going unreported.

Akbar Ali doesn't need sophisticated scientific analysis to figure out why somebody set his 2,400-square-foot restaurant on fire last month. The blaze is among more than 10 possible hate incidents reported in Anaheim, California since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks-the most of any Orange County Community, according to preliminary reports filed with civil-rights advocates.

Khurshid Ahmad, an American Muslim professor at Wright State University, Ohio said his son was nearly run off the road. One of his ex-students was threatened with being shot while he dined in a restaurant. The incidents stemmed from anti-Muslim sentiment following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

And attacks against Middle Eastern-looking people "are now moving to airport profiling, FBI harassment and workplace discrimination" said Joshua Salaam, civil rights coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The council says it received 960 complaints since Sept. 11 in which people said they were targeted because of their ethnicity, or because they appeared to be Middle Eastern at those settings. Those complaints-again, the tip of the iceberg-can be viewed at http://www.cair-net.org/ People can also file hate crimes or complaints at that URL.

This situation begs the question: why is an increased racist wave against immigrants, particularly Arab and Muslims sweeping the country if, according to the President, "We have no beef with Muslims?" Are these events the work of isolated individuals, small, fringe hate groups or individual FBI agents or security guards at airports?

THINK AGAIN

"The First Step taken by the terrorists is to attend a service at the Mosque..." (CNN Documentary)

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush, members of his cabinet and spokepersons have campaigned to prepare the US for a war "between civilizations," called "a crusade." The original code name for this campaign was "Operation Infinite Justice." Every day since the attacks, Bush has spoken of his battle against evil, while TV screens repeatedly present images of Arabs and Muslims demonstrating against the US war on Afghanistan.

High military commanders refer repeatedly to the Afghans as "treacherous people who use treacherous tactics." The war propaganda machine does not talk about "them" without showing Muslim mosques, the central holy text of Islam (the Koran), or Afghans in prayer.

Dozens of US Representatives and Senators raise proposals ranging >from eliminating visas from countries considered exporters of terrorists to suggestions for ID cards. "Legal" profiling of Arabs is under discussion, already an accomplished fact in practice.

Louisiana Representative John Cooksey must be getting dizzy from his political 360s. After issuing an apology for his racist position that any airline passenger wearing a "diaper on his head" should be "pulled over" for questioning, Cooksey declared his opposition to harassment of Sikhs, Muslims and Arab Americans from the floor of the House of Representatives. Cooksey later reassumed his demented pose in a television commercial.

"Recently, my words were too tough, but my beliefs are still strong," Cooksey says in a spot that aired during the LSU-Florida game, now prominently displayed on the Web site for his 2002 Senate campaign. "We know the faces of terrorists and where they're from. Terrorist profiling is essential for our nation's security..." His campaign is reported to be planning to continue to air it over the next two weeks, at a total cost of nearly $200,000.

According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and a number of other media watchdogs, over 1,000 radio talk shows, more than 40 newspapers with a circulation of over 50,000 copies, hundreds of local TV stations and even mainstream 24-hours news broadcasters like CNN and MSNBC have participated in a systematic campaign of racial and religious profiling, stereotyping and racism. This takes the form of "open mike" programs on talk stations, op-ed pieces and commentaries by established columnists, and production of documentaries that present all Muslims, Arabs and Middle Easterners as being prone to criminal acts and terrorism.

Networks have willingly censored themselves, agreeing not to show any unedited report from the Muslim world. This includes the only credible, "independent and democratic source of information on the Middle East"-according to media experts, the network Al-Jazeera, founded by the Emirate of Qatar (a staunch ally of the US government) and the British BBC. The petition to censor the network came directly from top national security advisor Condoleeza Rice.

UNDER SIEGE

The FBI and the INS are rounding up immigrants that look like Middle Easterners, illegally raiding mosques as they go. According to the Justice Department, over 1,200 people have been arrested without charge. These people are being denied legal representation, contact with their families, according to lawyers and the ACLU. An estimated 3,000 para-military operations have been conducted throughout the country by newly formed law enforcement "task forces." Somalians, Ethiopians, North Africans, Arabs, American Muslims, African Americans and Latinos have been caught in this broad dragnet. Most (if not all) of them have no connections with terrorism, let alone the September 11 attacks.

At the same time, the FBI has agreed to investigate only a few dozen of the hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims and has assigned token attention to those cases. There is simply a political decision to do nothing about them. The media, while sporadically covering the issue, are mostly ignoring the terrorist attacks and murders of immigrants.

Bush has accompanied his fake denunciations of discrimination against Muslims with a humiliating parade of US Muslim leaders pledging their support for the President's policies against Muslim nations. Leaders of the Arab Anti-Discrimination League publicly stated that such demands were demanded from them by the Justice Department-together with the suggestion to abandon their support of Palestinians-in order to avoid branding as "anti-American."

The US House of Representatives and the US Senate, in a stomach-turning display of bipartisan support for war and racism, overwhelmingly passed the so-called Patriot Act. This anti-terrorist legislation reduces legal protections for immigrants to almost zero (see article, page 20), while attacking the civil liberties of all US citizens. There can be no doubt that the Patriot Act will be first used against people of Middle Eastern descent.

Socialists call on the antiwar movement, the peace movement, unions and political organizations to defend Arabs and Muslims, people of Middle Eastern descent and all immigrants from this open war against their civil and democratic rights. If we do not challenge these attacks, everyone suffers. The fight against this racist war on Arabs and Muslims in the US is part and parcel of the fight against Bush's war drive. Socialists also raise the iron necessity of defending these communities from physical attack, and demand justice for victims of harassment and murder.

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Hate Crimes on the RiseWar Drive puts Arabs, Muslims, & Arab-Americans in the Crossfire at Home

Article taken from Justice, the paper of the US-section of the CWI

Hate Crimes on the Rise
War Drive puts Arabs, Muslims, & Arab-Americans in the Crossfire at Home