The Enemy Isn't Us
EDITORIAL The Enemy Isn't Us If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times already—from the same people who always tell us obvious things a thousand times when once would do: In...
...Federal investigators believe that a handful of Osama bin Laden terrorist cells remain at large in the United States, and the FBI has specific members of the cells under surveillance...
...There the two men engaged in what AlArian calls "intellectual-type activity...
...There are thousands of freshly grieving widows and orphans in New York and Washington just now...
...Fashioning themselves "Organizations in Defense of Freedom" or the "Coalition for Constitutional Liberties," here we find . . . practically every interest group in American politics: the American Association of University Women, George Soros's drug-legalization front groups, Common Cause, Citizens for Choice in Health Care/Minnesota, Citizens Against Repressive Zoning, and so on, ad infinitum...
...Or any serious reason to fear one...
...As recently as August 29, testifying in federal court at a deportation hearing for his brother-in-law, suspected by the FBI of involvement in Palestinian terrorism, Al-Arian invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination—99 times—rather than answer such questions as whether he had engaged in fund-raising on behalf of organizations on the State Department watch list...
...Not so many years ago, for instance, he founded a "think tank" at USF called the World Islamic Studies Institute and installed a man named Ramadan Abdullah Shal-lah as its director...
...That is for us to decide—while we sit around waiting to see him get what's coming...
...As a matter of fact, there is nothing in the proposed Mobilization Against Terrorism Act that will in the slightest bit affect or inconvenience even so repellent a character as Abdullah Al-Arian's father...
...Following Pearl Harbor, for example, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans—Greenhouse makes the analogy explicit in her very next sentence—were driven from their West Coast homes and subjected to federal internment in spare and frozen Rocky Mountain Quonset huts...
...By their criticism of the anti-terror bill under review on the Hill, many of these groups are simply pursuing narrow ideological fetishes—or the business interests of their corporate donors—that preexisted the September 11 airline hijackings...
...And our government is obviously, vocally, painfully embarrassed even by the appearance of certain steps it has already taken: the detention and questioning of various Arab-origined gentlemen lately resident within our shores...
...We suspect, instead, that there remain a few items higher up on his priorities list—like not hearing an overflight of B-52s...
...Death to Israel...
...And they are demanding that the rest of us behave that way, too...
...But though 6,000 people are now dead by these suspects' likely connivance, not a one of them has yet been arrested...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Even at a moment of national crisis, the United States must remain the United States...
...White House apologies were immediate and profuse...
...Nor does it say anything about Arab and Muslim Americans as a whole that the country is now considering whether it can afford such expansive hospitality in the future...
...Hamdi is personally acquainted with Osama bin Laden and is known to have provided him a battery for the cell phone used to organize the U.S...
...Let's not all raise our hands at once, but let's not permit this question to go unanswered, either...
...Off campus, however . . . no, check that, on campus sometimes, too, Professor Al-Arian is something else altogether...
...And it is precisely at those margins that Congress, on the one hand, and the White House and Justice Department, on the other, are now colle-gially negotiating...
...Carping at them from the outside, however, apparently uninterested in collegial negotiation towards a common, national goal, are a truly astonishing array of lobbying groups, the loudest of which were prepared—even before they'd read the bill—to declare it an offense against God and James Madison both...
...And what if pigs should fly...
...A second Al-Arian-created outfit in Florida, the Islamic Committee for Palestine, once employed a fellow named Tank Hamdi...
...Revolution until victory...
...What "if the idea takes root that civil liberties should not be permitted to stand in the way of a war on terrorism" and "security measures start to corrode the very society they are designed to protect...
...Nothing whatsoever...
...And it is a question that turns out to be considerably more complicated than the ostentatious soul-searching of our interest groups and op-ed pages would imply...
...But memories of the slight—and the prejudice it might seem to have reflected—lingered...
...There've been some 90 apparent incidents of bias against Arab and Muslim Americans, a couple of them violent...
...We are called instead, as a unified people, to pull together against a genuine common enemy...
...Which seems to us precisely what America shouldn't do just now, bromides about "what the terrorists want" notwithstanding...
...Just the same, we rather doubt that Osama bin Laden now wakes up each morning hoping most of all for another vandalized mosque in Detroit and passage of the Mobilization Against Terrorism Act in Washington...
...We have met that enemy...
...Al-Arian, who days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities returned to Newsweek as a guest columnist...
...It's not at all clear, actually, that "staying true to ourselves" is really the thing that'll get al Qaeda where it hurts...
...He is not our federal government...
...But at the same time, well, no...
...The bias crimes are an insult to our country's honor...
...embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania...
...Abdullah Al-Arian marvels that anyone could even remotely associate him with terrorism...
...He had been victimized once by the Secret Service in June, Al-Arian wrote, "evidently condemned [merely] by my name and physical features...
...Victory to Islam...
...He is currently head of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization...
...EDITORIAL The Enemy Isn't Us If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times already—from the same people who always tell us obvious things a thousand times when once would do: In response to a mass murder of our fellow citizens carried out by foreign hands, Americans must be careful not to alter the fundamental arrangements of our domestic life, else the bad guys will have won...
...Newsweek called it a "gaffe," especially given that Al-Arian's father, identified only as "one of the country's leading advocates for repeal of secret-evidence laws," had campaigned for George W. Bush against Al Gore...
...Honestly, now...
...And just last week, the website for the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom—Sami Al-Arian, chairman— advised Arab Americans to "know your rights" and "don't talk to the FBI" about the events of September 11...
...Indeed, George W. Bush has been at pains to acquit Arab and Muslim Americans of association with political violence since before the World Trade Center was destroyed...
...This past June, the White House hosted a meeting of various representatives from those communities...
...How such a man as bin Laden wishes America to conduct its internal affairs should be irrelevant in any case...
...Before it could begin, however, the event was marred by an "incident...
...This word comes down from the very top: from the Oval Office, from the podium of a joint session of Congress, from every platform the president now employs...
...Ramadan Abdullah Shallah has since moved on to another-type activity...
...Well, yes...
...By day, Al-Arian is a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida and a man who now tells the Associated Press that he is a patriotic American like everybody else and "if I knew anyone who is going to be a threat, there is not even a thought in my mind, I would report it...
...It says nothing about Arab and Muslim Americans as a whole that Sami Al-Arian's very dangerous friends have so far lived and worked among us unmolested...
...Film exists of Al-Arian at one of these rallies shouting "Jihad is our path...
...Will we now do something similar to the Muslims among our neighbors, she wonders...
...Somebody should introduce him—and the editors of Newsweek, and the Secret Service—to his dad...
...And now he feared being victimized again by "an inevitable backlash...
...The specific people who helped make them grieve, and who might soon add others to their ranks—we need to get those specific people the hell off our streets, and quick...
...To begin with: Is there, in fact, a pogrom now underway against American citizens of the Islamic persuasion...
...And there's a proposal by the Bush administration to give federal agencies expanded power to deter and prosecute terror plots—a proposal which various "civil liberties" groups, left and right, rush to decry as "draconian...
...Quite the contrary: The only ethnic and religious slur now in general circulation is the hysterical suggestion—a commonplace among critics of heightened domestic vigilance against ter-rorism—that it will be Arab and Muslim Americans as a whole who will suffer if the nation takes even the most modest steps to adjust its laws in response to new and horrifying realities...
...Including a great big chunk of what passes for conservatism nowadays...
...Paul Weyrich's increasingly fringy Free Congress Foundation, for example, warns that "our most basic and fundamental freedoms are under attack unlike any time since the Revolutionary War"—referring to the Bush administration's still-theoretical response to an unprecedented slaughter of American civilians...
...One of the invitees, a Duke University undergraduate named Abdullah Al-Arian, was abruptly escorted off the property by Secret Service agents operating, Newsweek would report, on an "erroneous tip that the student had terrorist connections...
...And the anti-terrorism legislation is open to reasonable debate on its particulars...
...Our Newsweek essayist's father—the Bush supporter, remember—is one Sami Al-Arian...
...Professor Al-Arian has hosted public pep rallies for Islamic Jihad founder Abdel Aziz-Odeh and Sheikh Abdul Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing...
...How could it be," he asked, "that I, or anyone in my position, could possibly be associated" with terrorism...
...Again, there is room for responsible disagreement over this draft legislation—at the margins...
...Times of deep insecurity, grief, and anger," correspondent Linda Greenhouse lets loose in the New York Times, "have often evoked the worst of our national instincts...
...Revolution...
...Rolling into Jerusalem...
...Nothing would please the terrorists more," you see, than for us to turn on one another, brother against brother, and set the Bill of Rights on fire in a McCarthyite witch hunt for the enemy within...
...No general connection should be assumed, we are repeatedly told by our public officials, between any ethnic or religious group and the support or sponsorship of terrorism...
...What exactly has that requirement to do with the Lebanese man who may be your cardiologist or cab driver...
...They are behaving as if nothing has happened...
...At least they lingered with young Mr...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 4
