by Lori Peek
rights coalitions with islamic organizations. in addition, new educational
and community outreach groups—such as Hate Free Zone, neighbors for
peace, and muslims Against Terrorism—were launched after the 9/11 attacks
to encourage dialogue across racial and religious divides and to oppose bias-
based harassment.45
some public officials and government agencies also took proactive steps
in attempts to thwart backlash violence. On september 12, 2001, the U.s.
Congress passed a resolution affirming the need to protect the civil liberties
Under Attack / 27
of all Americans and condemning bigotry against Arabs, muslims, and
south Asians. The resolution stated:
Be it resolved that Congress (1) declares that in the quest to identify,
bring to justice, and punish the perpetrators and sponsors of the ter-
rorist attacks on the United states of september 11, 2001, that the civil
rights and civil liberties of all Americans, including Arab Americans,
American muslims, and Americans from south Asia, should be
protected and (2) condemns any acts of violence or discrimina-
tion against any Americans, including Arab Americans, American
muslims, and Americans from south Asia.
On september 13, 2001, the U.s. Commission on Civil rights made a hate
crimes hotline available. At the height of the backlash, the hotline reportedly
received up to 70 calls per hour.46 The equal employment Opportunity
Commission (eeOC) introduced a new category designed to track instances
of employment discrimination against muslims, Arabs, middle easterners,
south Asians, and sikhs.47 The eeOC also posted a special “9/11 information”
section with resources on its Web site and issued fact sheets for employers
and employees about workplace rights for religious and ethnic minorities.
soon after 9/11, secretary of education rod paige sent a letter to every
school superintendent and college president in the country. paige called on
educators to take preventative measures against incidents of anti-Arab and
anti-muslim harassment, which he deemed “unconditionally wrong” and
intolerable in our nation’s schools.
The U.s. Department of Justice created the initiative to Combat post-
9/11 Discriminatory Backlash with the stated goals of reducing the incidence
of bias-related attacks and ensuring that perpetrators of hate crimes would
be brought to justice.48 The Justice Department’s Civil rights Division
announced in a september 13, 2001, press release that “any threats of violence
or discrimination against Arab or muslim Americans or Americans of south
Asian descent are not just wrong and un-American, but also are unlawful
and will be treated as such.”
six days after the terrorist attacks, president Bush visited the islamic
center on massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. in a highly publicized
address, president Bush proclaimed, “islam is peace.” He pointed out
that “America counts millions of muslims amongst our citizens” who are
“doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs,
shopkeepers, moms, and dads,” and “they need to be treated with respect.” He
continued, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take
out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of
humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”49
28 / Chapter 2
Despite efforts to combat intolerance in the weeks and months following
9/11, many individuals in the United states became the targets of hostility.
Arabs and muslims (as well as latinos, south Asians, and other individuals
who were mistakenly perceived to be Arab or muslim based on their skin
color, dress, or organizational affiliations) suffered an unprecedented
outbreak of backlash violence.
The FBi—which is the government entity tasked with compiling and
publishing data on hate crimes motivated by religious, racial, ethnicity/
national origin, sexual orientation, or disability bias—received 481 reports of
anti-islamic hate crimes in 2001. This represents a 1,600 percent increase over
the 28 incidents recorded in the year 2000.50 The sharp rise in hate crimes is
even more staggering when considering that almost all the incidents recorded
in 2001 occurred in the less-than-four-month period after the 9/11 attacks.51
no documentation is available from the FBi, or any other federal agency,
regarding the prevalence of anti-Arab hate crimes either prior to or in the
aftermath of 9/11. This is because FBi hate-crime statistics do not include
a separate category for anti-Arab incidents. most government definitions
actually classify Arab Americans racially as “white,” a fact that many
Americans are surprised to learn, since popular representations tend to
depict Arabs as racial and cultural outsiders. it is worth noting, though, that
the number of recorded “anti-other ethnicity/national origin” hate crime
incidents more than quadrupled from 354 in 2000 to 1,501 in 2001. The
dramatic increase presumably resulted from the post-9/11 backlash against
south Asians and middle easterners.52
Government prosecutors contend that most of the 481 anti-islamic hate
crimes recorded in 2001, which included assaults, bombing plots, acts of
vandalism, arson, violent threats and intimidation, and shootings, were in
direct retaliation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the pentagon.
At least twelve people, and perhaps as many as nineteen, were murdered as a
result of anti-Arab and anti-muslim hatred.53
The first confirmed backlash-related homicide occurred on september
15, 2001, just four days after the 9/11 attacks. Balbir singh sodhi, a native of
punjab, india, was shot five times while he was planting flowers in front of
his mesa, Arizona, gas station. sodhi was neither Arab nor muslim but was
apparently targeted because he had a beard and wore a turban as part of his
sikh faith. sodhi’s killer, Frank roque, left the scene and shot and wounded
a lebanese American clerk at another gas station and later opened fire on the
home of a family of Afghan descent. As roque was being apprehended for
sodhi’s murder, he shouted, “i stand for America all the way! i’m an American.
Go ahead. Arrest me and let those terrorists run wild!”54 law enforcement
records indicate that before the slaying, roque had bragged at a local bar that
he was going to “kill the ragheads responsible for september 11.”55 roque was
Under Attack / 29
obviously incapable of distinguishing his victim from the turbaned images
of bin laden that the media widely broadcast after the World Trade Center
collapse.
Waqar Hasan, a pakistani muslim, was also shot and killed on september
15, 2001, as he stood cooking hamburgers at his grocery store near Dallas,
Texas.56 mark stroman, who was convicted of killing Hasan, later admitted
to murdering vasudev patel, an indian man who owned a convenience store
in mesquite, Texas, and to shooting and blinding rais Uddin, a pakistani
immigrant and gas station attendant. stroman attributed the violent acts to
> his rage over the 9/11 attacks.57 After his arrest, stroman said, “i did what
every American wanted to do but didn’t. They didn’t have the nerve.”58
in the spring of 2003, larme price, a thirty-year-old man with a history
of drug abuse and mental health problems, went on a violent crime spree in
Brooklyn and Queens. Over a seven-week period, he shot five men in the
head at point-blank range, killing four of them and seriously wounding the
fifth. All the deceased were immigrants—from russia, Guyana, india, and
yemen. price eventually broke down and turned himself in to the police.
in his confession, price told officers that he had targeted people from the
middle east in his quest for revenge for the World Trade Center attacks. Only
one of the four slaying victims was actually from the middle east, although
price was apparently under the impression that they all were.59
large metropolitan areas with highly visible muslim populations were
especially prone to surges in hate-crime activity. in Chicago and los Angeles,
for example, law enforcement officials reported fifteen times the number of
anti-Arab and anti-muslim bias incidents in 2001 compared to the preceding
year. The city of phoenix recorded no anti-Arab or anti-muslim hate crimes
in the eight months prior to 9/11 but logged forty-six such hate crimes in
the last four months of 2001.60 On september 12, 2001, a mob of hundreds
of angry whites, some shouting, “Kill the Arabs,” some wielding weapons,
commenced a march to the largest predominantly Arab mosque in Chicago.
more than 125 suburban police officers were called in to keep the mob from
storming the mosque and the primarily muslim residential community
surrounding it. The following night, a similar march occurred, and the
police were called in again. For three nights, the police were forced to form a
human barricade around the neighborhood to protect the citizens.61 One of
the demonstrators told a newspaper reporter, “i’m proud to be American and
i hate Arabs and i always have.”62
Communities with fewer muslims were also vulnerable to xenophobic
attacks. in irving, Texas, someone fired nine shots through the windows
of the islamic center, shattering the glass and damaging the furnishings.
vandals painted “Jesus is the lord and Allah is the Devil” and other
vicious comments outside a mosque in Canejo valley, California. An angry
30 / Chapter 2
600
481
500
400
300
Hate Crimes
200
155
149
156
156
128
115
105
100
29
27
28
21
32
28
0
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Year
Figure 2.1. Anti-Islamic hate crimes, 1995–2008. (Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting
Program, “Hate Crime Statistics,” 2008, www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#hate, accessed January
23, 2010.)
Ohio man rammed his car through the front wall of the islamic center of
Cleveland. someone hurled bricks wrapped with hate messages through the
windows of an islamic bookstore in Alexandria, virginia. An islamic school
for children in Charlotte, north Carolina, was forced to close down after
teachers received a spate of threatening phone calls. in Huntington, new
york, a man attempted to run over a muslim woman and then threatened to
kill her for “destroying my country.”
FBi data indicate that the most severe wave of hate crimes occurred in
the nine weeks immediately after the World Trade Center and the pentagon
were hit. Although the numbers of recorded hate crimes have decreased in
the years since,63 they remain well above the pre-9/11 levels (see Figure 2.1).
Obviously violent crimes perpetrated against muslims increased
considerably following 9/11, but the numbers do not tell the entire story.
Federal hate-crime statistics only document (1) acts defined as criminal
under hate-crimes legislation, which varies from state to state; (2) acts that
victims have actually reported to authorities, which is problematic because
hate-crime survivors often do not report bias incidents for many reasons,
including fear of retaliation by the perpetrators, post-traumatic stress,
feelings of self-blame or powerlessness, mistrust of the police, or fear of
retribution within the criminal justice system; (3) acts that local and state law
enforcement officials have recorded as hate crimes and have submitted to the
federal authorities; and (4) in most cases, the most heinous of crimes.
Underreporting of hate crime is clearly an issue. But how significant is
the problem? The FBi has tallied somewhere between about six thousand
Under Attack / 31
and ten thousand hate-crime incidents annually since it began publishing
the numbers in 1992. yet, a 2005 special report by the U.s. Department
of Justice, based on an analysis of detailed national Crime victimization
surveys, found that the actual annual level of hate crime in the United
states averaged some 191,000 incidents—in other words, approximately
twenty to thirty times higher than the numbers that the FBi reported each
year.64 Official hate-crime statistics simply do not reflect the true number
of incidents committed against any given minority population, nor do these
numbers capture the full psychological and social impact of these crimes on
the targeted community.
Other federal agencies noted significant increases in complaints involving
acts of discrimination and racial profiling after 9/11. The eeOC investigated
654 cases alleging 9/11-related workplace discrimination based on ethnicity,
race, or national origin and 706 charges of religious bias against muslims in
the year following the attacks. more than 75 percent of these eeOC cases
involved persons, most of whom were Arab, south Asian, and/or muslim,
who were wrongfully terminated from their jobs.65 During the first eight
months after the attacks, the U.s. Department of Transportation (DOT)
investigated 111 complaints from airline passengers who were singled out
at security screenings for interrogations or full-body searches because of
their ethnic or religious appearance. The DOT reported that it was also
investigating an additional thirty-one complaints by persons who were
barred altogether from boarding airplanes.66 Arab American Congressional
representative Darrell issa and a muslim American secret service agent on
president Bush’s security detail were among those not allowed to fly.
Traditional popular and legal discourse on racial profiling has focused
on “Driving While Black” and, more recently, “Driving While Brown.” These
expressions are used to draw attention to the frequency with which police
use traffic stops as a pretext to pull over and search African Americans
and latinos. After 9/11, Arab and muslim American advocates coined the
phrases “Flying While Arab” and “Flying While muslim” to highlight the
; ways that members of their communities were being profiled and subjected
to humiliating security procedures based solely on their skin colors, religious
attire, countries of origin, or ethnic-sounding names.
A number of advocacy and human-rights groups issued their own
reports on the prevalence of hate crimes and discrimination perpetrated
against religious and ethnic minorities in the aftermath of 9/11. These
documents illustrate the difficulty associated with separating anti-Arab
and anti-muslim incidents; the hostility encountered is often directed
indiscriminately at either or both Arabs and muslims—or anyone mistaken
for them. even so, the available reports suggest a clearly identifiable pattern
of post-9/11 retaliatory attacks.
32 / Chapter 2
The group south Asian American leaders of Tomorrow (sAAlT)
reviewed newspapers and other media serving major cities throughout the
United states and found that in the first week after the terrorist attacks,
645 separate bias incidents were directed toward Americans perceived to
be of middle eastern descent.67 ADC documented more than 700 violent
incidents targeting Arab Americans and other minorities in the first nine
weeks following the attacks. ADC also verified more than 80 instances of
discriminatory removal of passengers from airplanes and more than 800
cases of employment discrimination against Arab Americans.68 The sikh
American legal Defense and educational Fund estimated that 250 post-9/11
hate crimes were perpetrated against sikhs, who are often misidentified
as muslim or of middle eastern descent due to their appearance.69 The
national Asian pacific American legal Consortium confirmed nearly 250
bias-motivated attacks and 2 murders targeting Asian pacific Americans in
the three months following 9/11.70 Human rights Watch cited more than
2,000 backlash-related crimes against Arabs, muslims, and other minority
citizens and immigrants.71
CAir issued a special report in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The
report documented 1,717 cases of anti-muslim harassment in the first six
months following 9/11.72 CAir also publishes annual civil-rights reports
that track incidents of anti-muslim bias in the United states. As illustrated
in Figure 2.2, reported acts of discrimination committed against muslim
Americans have steadily and consistently risen since 1995, the year when