This Thanksgiving, Reject Hate

Hateful opportunists want us all to turn on each other. We can't let them win.

Hey all, Parker here.

When researching Monday’s newsletter, I went back through a bunch of the news coverage that was published in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Specifically, I was interested in how Arab-Americans were framed, hoping to glean insight into the reshaping of society that was about to take place.

A week after 9/11/01, the New York Times ran a story about Afghan-Americans with the headline, “Group Struggling to Shed Association With Terrorism.” (Here’s a gift link to read the full article.)

In a just world, people wouldn’t feel the need to proactively declare that they don’t support terrorism. Unfortunately, we seem to live in a world where that is very much necessary—if you happen to be of a specific ethnicity or religion.¹ Even then, people may not believe you.

The man featured in that 2001 New York Times article, restaurant owner Aziz Omar, was described as having fled Afghanistan with his family in 1979. He’d been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years at that point. Still, in response to the 9/11 attack, he knew that he had the unfortunate responsibility to denounce bin Laden lest people think he was happy about the terrorist attack just a week earlier.

In its reporting, the New York Times made a point of noting that “the reality is more complex” and that it can’t simply be assumed that any individual Afghan-American doesn’t support terrorism. From the article (bolded emphasis mine):

Mr. Omar, who runs the De Afghanan Fine Kabob and Tandoori House, and his brother, Wais, a manager at a Silicon Valley electronics company, plan to distribute posters that show an X across the face of Osama bin Laden, who is the prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks. The posters also carry a strongly worded message: ''The Afghan Community wants Mr. bin Laden out of their country and will not take the blame for Terrorism.''

The brothers want the world to know that Afghans here resent the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic group that controls 90 percent of Afghanistan, as much as they resented the communists before them.

The reality is more complex. Afghans in Fremont say that the vast majority of their community despises Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban, and resent that their depressed, rundown country has become synonymous with both. There is wide agreement that Mr. bin Laden, who was born in Saudi Arabia, is a foreign invader foisted upon Afghanistan.

But there are other Afghans, especially outside Fremont, who come from poorer, rural regions of Afghanistan and settle here in the poorer communities of Pittsburg, Concord and Hayward. They support the Taliban despite its harboring of Mr. bin Laden, said David Yaar, a professor of economics at California State University-Hayward.

I’m genuinely curious what the point of this kind of “to be sure” hedge is supposed to serve in these types of articles. When paired with a headline about “struggling to shed association with terrorism,” you might wonder, as I did, whether the actual function of this story was to increase suspicion of Afghan-Americans and make the inherent racism and Islamophobia that was quickly coming to the surface following the attacks justified. It’s all very sure, here are these people who despise Osama bin Laden, but you can’t trust all of them to be like this! in its execution.

The rest of the article includes stories of Muslim women suddenly afraid to wear headscarves in the U.S., business owners stocking up on American flags to signal loyalty to the country, and people peeling bumper stickers that identified them as Muslims from their cars to avoid having them vandalized or worse. It was a horrific time, through no fault of their own, and it would only worsen.

A 2002 Human Rights Watch report illustrated just how much was about to change and how quickly it would happen (bolded emphasis mine):

The September 11 hate crime backlash confirmed the fears of Arabs and Muslims in the United States: a major terrorist attack gave rise to a nationwide wave of hate crimes against persons and institutions perceived to be Arab or Muslim. Unlike previous hate crime waves, however, the September 11 backlash distinguished itself by its ferocity and extent. The violence included murder, physical assaults, arson, vandalism of places of worship and other property damage, death threats, and public harassment. Most incidents occurred in the first months after September 11, with the violence tapering off by December.

Both official and community-based organization tabulations derived from self-reported incidents and newspaper accounts clearly demonstrate the severity of the September 11 backlash. The FBI reported that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes rose from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, a seventeen-fold increase. The ADC reported over six hundred September 11-related hate crimes committed against Arabs, Muslims, and those perceived to be Arab or Muslim, such as Sikhs and South Asians. Tabulating backlash incidents ranging from verbal taunts to employment discrimination to airport profiling to hate crimes, CAIR reported one thousand seven hundred and seventeen incidents of backlash discrimination against Muslims from September 11 through February 2002.

State and local agency data provide additional perspective on the extent of the violence. In Chicago, the police department reported only four anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hate crimes during the year 2000; in the three months of September through November 2001, the number was fifty-one. In Los Angeles County, California, there were twelve hate crimes against persons of Middle Eastern descent in the year 2000, compared to 188 such hate crimes in 2001. In Florida, the attorney general directly attributed the 24.5 percent increase in the total number of hate crimes registered for the year 2001 to September 11-related bias.

Not surprisingly, the persons most vulnerable to September 11-related hate crimes were those easily identified as Arabs or Muslims, including Muslim women who wear hijabs. Sikhs who wear turbans also appear to have been disproportionately targeted, presumably because of the erroneous assumption by many Americans that men wearing turbans are Arab or Muslim. Similarly, bias-motivated property attacks were often directed at property that could easily be identified with Muslims or Arabs, such as mosques.

Wow. There were 28 anti-Muslim hate crimes investigated by the FBI in 2000, jumping to 481 the following year. That is astonishing. And in my hometown of Chicago, the number of anti-Muslim/anti-Arab hate crimes committed in 2000 was four, only to jump to 51 in the three months that followed 9/11.

None of this was fair. None of this was right. The people who were victims of those hate crimes, of the culture of fear, of the discrimination had nothing at all to do with the 9/11 attacks. Overnight, they went from being treated as our neighbors to being treated as suspects, all because they happened to share the same religion or ethnic background as a group of terrorists they had nothing to do with.

American society has never really addressed the hate that was unduly directed at our Muslim neighbors.

In March 2019, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) delivered a speech at an event hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). She spoke for about 20 minutes, but the general gist of what she said was that the civil liberties of American Muslims had been unfairly attacked following the 9/11 attack, and that no amount of trying to be a model citizen could protect them from pervasive, society-wide discrimination.

“The truth is you can go to school and be a good student. You can listen to your dad and mom and become a doctor. You can have that beautiful wedding that makes mom and dad happy. You can buy that beautiful house,” she said. “But none of that stuff matters if you one day show up to the hospital and your wife, or maybe yourself, is having a baby, and you can’t have the access that you need because someone doesn’t recognize you as fully human.”

It doesn’t matter how good you were if you can’t have your prayer mat and take your 15-minute break to go pray in a country that was founded on religious liberty. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you one day find yourself in a school where other religions are talked about, but when Islam is mentioned, we are only talking about terrorists. And if you say something, you are sent to the principal’s office. So to me, I say, raise hell; make people uncomfortable.

She was absolutely right. It is hypocritical that the U.S. was founded on the idea of religious liberty, but that “liberty” only seemed to extend to certain major religions. And yes, it is wrong that Islam gets talked about as somehow synonymous with terrorism. Just imagine if Christianity was exclusively discussed in the context of the crusades and activists who bomb abortion clinics. I’m pretty sure a bunch of people would take issue with that!

Because here’s the truth -- here’s the truth: Far too long, we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can’t just say that today someone is looking at me strange, that I am going to try to make myself look pleasant. You have to say, “This person is looking at me strange. I am not comfortable with it. I am going to go talk to them and ask them why.” Because that is a right you have.

She made a factual mistake in this paragraph. It’s not super important to her point, but CAIR wasn’t founded after 9/11. It was founded in 1994 and received a fair bit of attention for pushing back against the reflexive blame for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that was placed on Arab-Americans as a whole.² It was after 9/11 in response to the anti-Muslim backlash that CAIR saw its biggest expansion. I assume this was just a misstatement, but I think it’s worth putting out there.

But if you recognize that last paragraph I quoted, it’s probably because you see the words “some people did something,” which became a right-wing media obsession after a conservative account called Imamofpeace straightforwardly lied about what Omar said, claiming that she “does not consider [9/11] a terrorist attack on the USA by terrorists.” That’s not at all what she said. She had just mentioned the word “terrorists” seconds earlier. She was specifically talking about how it was unfair to link all American Muslims to a group they had nothing to do with. This was obvious to anyone willing to see past their existing biases.

In no way did she “downplay” 9/11, even though that would become the accepted narrative through sheer repetition. The New York Post went so far as to plaster those four words on its front page.

The cover of the April 11, 2019, edition of the New York Post.

Again, her point was that CAIR’s post-9/11 resurgence came “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” In other words, Muslims were all being punished collectively for the actions of a tiny minority. That’s not how justice is supposed to work in the U.S., but it too often does.

I remember in the days that followed the right’s campaign of twisting Omar’s words, there was a lot of How DARE you suggest that YOU were in any way a VICTIM here! The REAL victims were the people who DIED because of people like YOU! sentiment. But the truth is that, yes, Muslim-Americans were unfairly demonized after 9/11, were treated as second-class citizens, and were expected to sit idly by as they all shared collective blame for the actions of 19 terrorists they’d never met.

I wrote about all of this at Media Matters back when it happened, but the past month and a half has me revisiting it.

For years, terrorist attacks carried out by Muslim extremists were used to demonize Muslims as a whole. It was the basis of Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” proposal. This is how out-groups have their rights stripped: unfair generalizations. For instance, after a former student shot up their former school in Nashville earlier this year, Republicans used the fact that this shooter may have been transgender as an excuse to attack trans people’s civil liberties. Trump went so far as to announce at the NRA convention that if he’s elected, he plans to address this “spiritual problem” by instructing the FDA to “investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme, depression, aggression and even violence.” It’s absolutely absurd, no matter which group faces this sort of collective blame.

Notably, none of this scrutiny is ever applied to in-groups. When a white, Christian shooter murders dozens of people, politicians don’t float the idea that maybe something needs to be done about white Christians as a whole. When the perpetrator is part of the in-group it suddenly becomes really easy for elected officials and journalists to separate the individual from the broader group.

Stop demonizing Muslims. Stop demonizing Jews. Now.

Last month, I wrote a piece about my worries that the worst parts of the 9/11 aftermath would repeat themselves. I worried then, as I do now, that antisemitism and Islamophobia would worsen, with life getting harder for Jews and Muslims, alike.

After 9/11, Fear Won. Let's Not Repeat That Mistake.

Yesterday, I saw a video on social media of a man harassing a food vendor in New York City. The beginning of the interaction is cut off, so it’s hard to determine what specifically set this off. Still, I don’t see what kind of context there could be that would excuse the way he acted.

“[I’m sending this] to my friends in immigration and to the Egyptian Mukhabarat,” the man says while typing something into his phone at the beginning of the video. “Does your father like his fingernails? They’ll take them out one by one.”

Throughout the interaction, the vendor shows commendable restraint, trying to deter the man by asking him to go and saying he doesn’t speak English.

“Why should I go? Why should I go? Tell me why I should go. I’m standing here. I’m an American. It’s a free country. It’s not like Egypt,” the man says, smiling and snapping a photo of the vendor. “Did you r*pe your daughter like Muhammad did?”

Later in the day, a second video and third video of the man (seemingly taken on different days) harassing the street vendor surfaced. In that video, the man accuses the vendor of being a “terrorist” who “supports terrorism” and “killing little children.” The vendor finally responds, saying, “You kill children, not me.” To this, the man says, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

Somehow, the story gets even worse. This wasn’t just some random guy. According to Vice News, the man in the videos is Stuart Seldowitz, an advisor to President Obama and longtime State Department diplomat who was deputy director and senior political advisor to the agency’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs from 1999 to 2003.

Last month, a Cornell University student was arrested after he made violent and antisemitic threats on a school message board.

Another man allegedly punched a woman in the face on the 7 train at Grand Central Terminal in New York. She asked why he hit her, and he said, “You are Jewish.”

And yet another man, dressed only in his underwear, was arrested last month in Los Angeles after trying to break into a Jewish family’s home while allegedly saying “Free Palestine” and “Kill Jews.”

The list of these incidents goes on and on.

Hateful opportunists are going to use this time to let the mask slip and express the antisemitism and Islamophobia that’s always existed beneath the surface. They will see the rise in hate and see it as social permission to act how they’ve always wanted to. It’s a permission-based system. Just like Trump’s election signaled to the worst people in the country that they could be the worst versions of themselves without fear of reprisal, the conflict in the Middle East is providing bigots with an excuse to target Muslims and Jews. Even worse, these opportunists will try to pit the groups against each other.

We need to reject that. The Muslim guy with a food cart in New York is not responsible for the October 7th atrocity in Israel. The Jewish family in Los Angeles is not responsible for deaths in Gaza. There is no reason to turn on each other, and if there’s any hope of surviving the tidal wave of hate and bigotry crashing upon our shores, it means standing up for one another. Don’t let your anger about what’s happening right now in Israel and Gaza, however justified it may be, stop you from seeing your neighbors as human beings.

Reject the kind of misguided hate we saw after 9/11. Reject antisemitism. Reject Islamophobia. Reject bigotry wherever it may be.

That’s it for me today. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Parker

1. The big exception to this, which is what makes this so hypocritical and unfair, is that white, Christian Americans aren’t ever asked to proactively condemn terrorists and mass shooters who share their background. When

2. Naturally, the news organizations that ran wild with claims that the bomber was Muslim didn’t pivot to placing suspicion on all white, Christian Americans once it turned out that Timothy McVeigh was the perpetrator.