"I will go to the airport in my underwear!"

Not long ago after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, a Palestinian-American attorney friend told me a story about her honeymoon. She's a wonderfully vivid story teller, and she recounted this tale with humor and lightness in her voice, even though it is really a reflection of these troubled times. It goes like this: When she left on an exotic honeymoon with her white, Italian-French-American husband, her own strikingly Arab name triggered a "hit" at the airport check-in. As a result, the couple's boarding passes were immediately marked with three bold letters, "SSS." And when she and her new hubby arrived at the security checkpoint, they were subjected to a special search which involved being placed on a platform with their arms outstretched and "wanded" with a metal detector. During the procedure, her lawyer husband decried the treatment by exclaiming, "you're profiling my wife, you've singled her out. This isn't right!" My easy-going friend amusingly thought to herself, "my poor white boy, he just doesn't get it!" Given his insulation from the backlash that struck Arabs and Muslims after 9/11, he was outraged by a situation that his wife had come to accept as routine. Of course, Palestinians have always been, in one way or another, deemed a people who require heightened vigilance by the West. But in a very recent conversation with another Arab friend about the new security precautions established after the "Christmas" bombing attempt by a Nigerian national, which involve full body searches of citizens of certain nations, including the one from which his family comes, he simply said with a sarcastic smile, "I will just go to the airport in my underwear!" Given recent news reports which indicate that Osama bin Laden's mug shot was updated using the google image of a Spanish politician, Spaniards may even find themselves under unusual scrutiny. After all, with black hair and darker skin tones, they have an uncanny resemblance to "terrorists."

I have several friends who themselves, or whose ancestors, are from countries that the U.S. Government (and other Western nations as well) has condemned as "terrorist havens." As a group, these men and women are highly educated, kind and compassionate, and care a great deal about the world and the communities in which they live. All of them have dedicated either their career, education or free time to the public interest, which is how I met each of them. They are both Muslim and Christian, some devout and others not so much so. The single absolute they share is that all are Arab, in a day and age when "flying while Arab" is frustrating, and sometimes downright intimidating. Yet all remain firmly proud of their heritage as they should be, but also appear resigned, without apparent bitterness, to the new status quo. I have also noted in my work, with exasperation and concern, the disturbing, yet clearly documented trend, that migrants from Muslim countries, who are arrested and detained by the Department of Homeland Security in this region of the country, are not afforded a bond. The required assessment of whether one is a flight risk or a danger to the community is ignored, and instead, a generalization is made that leads the officers to conclude that no bond will be set.

On the evening news not too long ago, I was intrigued by the anchor's statement at the beginning of the newscast, "Yemen, a country Americans know little about…," and then going on to explain how the country was a launching ground for terrorists, including the so-called Christmas bomber. Actually, I know a few things about Yemen which are quite fascinating. A friend, whose family is Yemeni, once sent me an array of beautiful photographs of Yemen, encouraging me to visit. It is a striking land. The old walled city of Shibam and the old medieval city of Sana'a, the capital, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Apparently, the latter was deemed so at the insistence of the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who feared that Sana'a would succumb to the same modernization that his native land had suffered, eliminating its tranquility and unique character. I also have been quite struck by images of Al-Hajjara with its11th century mud structures rising from the cliffs. When I visited the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, I learned that one of Cesar Chavez's loyal supporters was Negri Daifulla, a UFW member and an immigrant from Yemen. He was killed on the UFW picket line in 1973. I also recently read in The Washington Post that women from what was once known as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen have lost significant ground since the unification with Northern Yemen (supported by the U.S.) in 1990. In the past, these women dressed casually and were professionals in several male-dominated fields such as law. Today, they feel repressed by orthodox Muslim codes and practices, as well as tribal traditions, which dominate the country. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012201354.html.

There is a well-established Yemeni community in Buffalo's neighboring city of Lackawanna. Many came to work in the prosperous steel industry of the 1950's and settled here, mixing the old ways with the new. Unfortunately, today the community is almost exclusively known for the prosecution of six young men accused of attending terrorist training camps in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. (For an objective look at the case, I would recommend Dina Temple-Raston's book, The Jihad Next Door (2007).)

Syria as well appears on a number of watchlists and was condemned in 2002 by the Bush Administration as a member of the expanded "Axis of Evil." However, Syria, from where two of my friends hail, generously hosts over 1.2 million Iraqi war refugees, and still maintains a population of Palestinians which makes up at least 3% of the country. A friend tells me that when he was growing up there, schools tolerantly accommodated all of the religious holidays of the students whether they were Muslim, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Alawite. Syria also boasts five World Heritage Sites, including the Ancient City of Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, the Ancient City of Aleppo and the site at Palmyra. I've read a number of articles about Americans traveling and studying in Syria, and all unanimously confirm that the country's people are gentle and generous toward American tourists. Sadly, but understandably, Syria plans to retaliate and will now subject Americans visiting their country to stricter security measures as well.

Today citizens of Syria and Yemen are both subjected to new security measures, but nationals of Jordan, Nigeria and the U.K. are not. Obviously, these purportedly improved measures do not appear to recognize that the doctor who killed eight Americans in Afghanistan not so long ago, including CIA agents, was a Jordanian; that the accused "Christmas bomber" was a Nigerian; and Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," was a British subject. This is not to suggest by any means that one should condone the collective punishment of any nation for the isolated acts of one, or a few, of its citizens. Indeed, as the Nigerian Information Minister pointed out, in an interview with NPR earlier this month, Nigerians now feel like lepers who were singled out for the actions of one person in a country of 150 million inhabitants. It remains obvious to me that racial or ethnic profiling in general is a wholly ineffective tool for combating crime, let alone terrorist threats. Moreover, such profiling is contrary to the fundamental norms of civil and human rights, and was rightfully denounced, several years ago, during the debate over “driving while black.” However, I cannot help but wonder whether such continued reliance on such law enforcement measures is one of the reasons why terrorists are potentially still able to do us harm-- we really do not know who they are. We only assume that we know. It is clear that the simple label of "terrorist havens" and the stereotypes imposed on Arabs completely ignore the many attributes of Middle Eastern and North African countries, and serve to dismiss, or disinform us about, an entire people and their rich cultural heritage.