For the past two weeks, a running verbal battle has been waging on the Internet. This columnist wrote an article for the Arab News entitled, “How to Identify a Terrorist” which questioned the wisdom of a new program of the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA). This TSA program uses “behavior detection” as a method for detecting potential terrorists. This writer argued that the TSA program could lead to “racial profiling” and discrimination against certain ethnic/national groups and what some TSA officials referred to as “dark-skinned” individuals.
Although most of the e-mail replies to the column on this issue were supportive of this writer’s point of view, one reader dissented strongly. That reader feels that Arabs/Muslims must be watched much more closely than other potential terrorist threats. “I believe Arabs/Muslims must be scrutinized more, simply for the fact that they pose the greatest threat. If Scandinavians, for example, had perpetrated 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, then I would be saying the same thing about them,” wrote the reader in one of his many comments to this writer.
Let’s focus for a moment on what role the mass media and the US government might play in helping to encourage this attitude of this reader and others like him.
The US government has embarked on a major international effort in educating the Arab and Islamic world about democracy and the American vision. The 9/11 Commission recommended in its final report that we must “Communicate and defend American ideals in the Islamic world, through much stronger public diplomacy to reach more people, including students and leaders outside of government. Our efforts here should be as strong as they were in combating closed societies during the Cold war.”
When the 9/11 Commission report was published, this writer noted that, although there were strong recommendations to educate Muslims about America and American culture, there were no recommendations to educate Americans about Islam, Muslims or Arabs. We questioned why the commission didn’t feel the necessity for all of us to understand each other better.
Although the US government has good intent with its international education programs for the Muslim world, American mainstream mass media does little to convey that message to the Islamic and Arab world. Very little mass media attention goes toward explaining Muslim and Arab positive traits to the American public. In fact the opposite is very likely to happen and that worsens the problem.
How many Americans know that last week in Chicago, a man was sentenced to 160 years in prison for plotting to blow up the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago? He had pursued a plot to detonate a truck filled with fertilizer outside the Chicago courthouse. The man was following a plan to create more destruction than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh caused in 1995 when McVeigh blew up a federal building with a load of fertilizer killing 168 people. The convicted man, who will be in prison the rest of his life, was 67-year-old Gale Nettles. Had his name been Omar or Khalid or had he been a Muslim or an Arab, this story would have been front-page headlines and the US government would have likely called a major press conference to announce his crime and sentence.
There is an interesting sidebar to the Nettle’s story. A US government undercover official had posed as a “member of a Middle Eastern terrorist organization” and was part of a transaction involving hundreds of pounds of fertilizer (which was, in fact, not the same type of fertilizer that would actually have worked as an explosive) with Nettles. Nettles was a disgruntled ex-convict who had been heard to say that he wanted to extract revenge against the government for his previous time in prison.
Readers might recall another story about US officials posing as Middle Easterners that led to criminal convictions of prominent Americans. In 1978, the FBI set up “Abdul Enterprises Ltd.” where undercover agents posed as Middle Eastern businessmen and offered money to members of Congress in return for political favors to a nonexistent sheikh. Much of that operation was directed by Melvin Weinberg, a convicted con artist, who was hired by the FBI for that purpose.
Sometime later, when this sting operation surfaced, the media dubbed the operation Abscam or Arab scam. Shortly after that, this writer was part of a group of individuals who inaugurated a new organization, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee or the ADC, founded by Sen. James Abourezk, which responded to this defamatory act of using false Arabs and Muslims to simulate illegal activities. The ADC is an organization with thousands of members, headed by former member of Congress, Mary Rose Oaker, fighting the ongoing battle against discrimination and defamation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States.
Nettles was not the first potential terrorist active in the US in the post 9/11 environment arrested for his activities. In Texas in April of 2003, 62-year-old William Joseph Krar was identified to have in his possession a homemade hydrogen cyanide device, a chemical weapon, which was determined to be a potential terrorist device. In Chicago, a month earlier, Joseph Konopka was sentenced in criminal court to possession of a chemical weapon. By the time Krar pleaded guilty to possession of a chemical weapon in November 2003, two US citizens — Krar and Konopka — were accountable for far more chemical weapons than had been found in postwar Iraq according the US based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
No press conferences were called by the US government nor was there any major media attention paid to either the Krar or Konopka cases although, according to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Krar presented the most demonstrably capable terrorist threat uncovered in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.” Neither Krar nor Konopka are Arab or Muslim and there has never been any suggestion that they have connections to either group.
Defamation or discrimination against any ethnic, racial or national group because of their birth background is defamation and discrimination against all of us. Our reader friend and others, who agree with him about discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, truly need a stronger case to advocate for their cause.
