Americans under Attack: The Need for Federal Hate Crime Legislation in Light of Post-September 11 Attacks on Arab Americans and Muslims

Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel

While domestic and international terrorism have become the focal concern of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, little is known about Arab Americans’ attitudes toward counterterrorism policies that center on aggressive law enforcement practices. Using survey data collected from 810 Arab Americans, this study reported the general pattern of support for antiterrorism measures, including surveillance, stop and search, and detention, and examined the effects of race, ethnicity, and religion on measures targeting the U.S. citizens generally and Arab Americans specifically. The results revealed that the majority of Arab Americans showed weak to modest support for aggressive law enforcement practice, especially those targeting Arab Americans. Arab Americans’ attitudes toward antiterrorism measures were significantly related to their ethnic identities and religion with those who identified themselves as Arab Americans and Muslim showing less favorable attitudes toward counterterrorism measures. Arab Americans’ confidence in the federal government was also found to be positively associated with support for antiterrorism practices. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Using a mixed methods approach, the researcher gathered a set of narrative responses from focus groups that supported the claim of underreporting campus discrimination on a survey. Multiple studies have shown that underrepresented minority students are likely to bond with same-ethnic peers in a racially tense campus climate. This mixed method is a follow-up investigation into, why, in a post-9/11 environment, Arab and Muslim American community college students demonstrated less variation in the level of perceived discrimination in relationship to the percentage of same-ethnic and/or same-faith campus friendship groups. Post hoc comparisons revealed that Arab and Muslim students exhibited significantly higher mean scores on a perceived discrimination scale than other ethnic groups.

Understanding the dynamics of mental health stigma through existing frameworks, especially in minorities with higher stigma, is problematic. There is a need to reconceptualize stigma, particularly in highly traumatized groups. The current study examines the validity of a new development-based trauma framework that conceptualizes stigma as a type III chronic trauma that contributes to negative mental health effects. This framework proposes that public stigma is a unique chronic traumatic stress that mediates the effects of similar trauma types in mental health patients. To test this proposition, this study explores the relationships between internalized stigma of mental illness (ISMI), different trauma types, and posttrauma spectrum disorders. ISMI, posttraumatic stress disorder, other posttrauma spectrum disorders, and cumulative trauma measures were administered to a sample of 399 mental health patients that included Arab (82%), Muslim (84%), and refugee (31%), as well as American patients (18%). Age in the sample ranged from 18 to 76 years (M = 39.66, SD = 11.45), with 53.5% males. Hierarchical multiple regression, t tests, and path analyses were conducted. Results indicated that ISMI predicted posttraumatic stress disorder and other posttrauma spectrum disorders after controlling for cumulative trauma. ISMI was associated with other chronic collective identity traumas. While Arab Americans, Muslims, and refugees had higher ISMI scores than other Americans, the elevated chronic trauma levels of these groups were significant predictors of these differences. The results provide evidence to support ISMI traumatology model. Implications of the results for treating victims of ISMI, especially Arab Americans, Muslims and refugees are discussed.

<p><em>The epithets </em><em>“</em><em>Arab</em><em>”</em><em> and </em><em>“</em><em>Muslim</em><em>”</em><em> are often confused and, in the mind of many Americans, they expressly mean the same. In reality, they do not even overlap. Actually, although they have become more visible over the past few decades, Arab Americans remain an inadequately described community. The first challenge in studying them poses the problem of determining their size. The non-availability of official census data, added to contrasted estimates provided by nongovernmental institutions, makes it more difficult to draw an accurate statistical picture of such a tiny but extremely diverse group. </em></p><p><em>This paper seeks to explore the thorny issue of Arab American identity. It aims to track the paths of two communities, Arab American Christians and Muslims, that self-identify as “Arabs”, but differ in many respects as to the way they adjust to mainstream society and respond to the stumbling blocks encountered on their way for assimilation. It basically aims to demonstrate how, despite inherited sectarian frictions, both groups succeeded in recent history to cross faith lines and to constitute themselves as a cohesive ethnic entity in the United States. At the same time, it delegitimizes claims that the group named “Arab American” is a monolith, and demonstrates that, contrary to popular assumptions, the two labels, “Arab” and “American”, are not mutually exclusive.</em></p>

The relationship between religion and transnationalism has only recently gained scholarly attention to document the influence religious organizations have on mediating transnational ties. While scholarship on second-generation transnationalism has gained interest, second-generation Arab Americans remain understudied. Yet, Arab Americans, especially Muslim Arab Americans, have been progressively encountering overt anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments for two decades, since 11 September. These experiences of discrimination are bound to affect their transnationalism. Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with children of Arab immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, this study finds that religious organizations are important transnational social fields for the second generation, especially those who experienced discrimination. This study finds that for Muslim Arab Americans, mosques are important transnational social fields in which they engage in transnational ways of being and belonging that connect them to their parental homeland and transnational identity. Consistent with reactive transnationalism, when experiencing discrimination Muslim Arab Americans increased their participation within their mosques in two ways. First, mosques are places Muslim Arab Americans draw on the support of other Arab Americans who have experienced discrimination. Second, the social networks of Muslim Arabs provide important historical and cultural knowledge about their parental homeland; knowledge that Muslim Arab Americans would later use to advocate and educate others when/if they reencountered discrimination.

Discrimination and psychological distress: Does Whiteness matter for Arab Americans?

The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

In 2018, Rashida Tlaib made history by becoming the first Palestinian American woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Although much is made about Tlaib being the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress, what is often understated in these accounts is she campaigned and won in a majority Black district against formidable Black candidates. Arab Americans and Muslims comprised a small minority of the district population. In 2019, she is one of two non-Blacks to represent such a majority Black district. This chapter examines her rise to power. How did she win in a majority Black district? To what extent were Arab Americans, Muslims, and women symbolically empowered by her 2018 campaign for Congress? This chapter also goes beyond symbolic empowerment and explores how she represents her diverse constituent interests in Congress.

Long-standing anti-Arab racism in the U.S. has worsened in recent decades, fueled by U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and by the September 11 attack on the U.S. Arab American and Muslim children have been the targets of misunderstanding and discrimination. Following a historical introduction, discrimination against Arab American and Muslim communities at the personal and institutional level is analyzed in light of Iris Marion Young's (1990) “Five Faces of Oppression.” The systematic transformation of the curriculum to be fully inclusive of Arab Americans would be a major improvement. (Banks' 1989, 2002) four phases of multicultural infusion is used as a guide for how this might be done. Specific types of problems and ways to address them are discussed. A list of recommended classroom materials is also provided.

Although anti-Islamic sentiments have grown in the United States since the advent of 9/11, very little educational research has been conducted to analyze how this negative climate has impacted students from Arab American descent, who are often perceived as Muslims as well as those who are Muslims. This chapter explores tensions faced by Arab American female students in a historically Caucasian school district with rapidly changing demographics. The study reveals how student feelings of being othered and their inability to meet society’s expectations of assimilation due to cultural and religious obligations ultimately resulted in a sense of duality and double consciousness among participants that fomented in a variety of ways. The intersectionality of being female and being Arab American presented specific challenges in this context. The evidence suggests that bridging the demographic divide and helping Arab American and Muslim American students navigate the precarity of the times requires intentional effort and collaboration between all stakeholder groups.

Christian and Jewish Arab-American Identities Beyond September 11 By Acksah Alhomady The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Arab American identities through the Christian Arab and Arab Jewish development within the United States. It examines the changes and shifts that resulted in their identities’ modification before and after 9/11. This analysis provides sufficient evidence of what the Arab American was and has now become due to changes consequently of the post 9/11 backlash. This research will distinguish the differences between Arabs and Arab- Americans , such as looking at factors of religion, place of birth, cultures, and education. It will present evidence on how the government reacted by passing discriminative acts and racially profiled, discriminated, and tortured Arabs. This paper will show that Arab Muslims were not the only victims but all Arabs, including Christians and Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, were. Additionally, Psychological disorders and health issues traumatized the Arab-American communities. Social and political legal rights were only provided for those in the aftermath. This aftermath assisted Arab organizations to expand and assist Arabs and Arab-Americans all over the United States, increasing unity and strengthening the revival of ethnic cultural identities within both groups. The scope of this research will examine these organizations and their contributions, and illustrate how Arabs, whether Christians or Jews, went from being inclusive and invisible from the political and media’s eyes to not assimilating into the American mainstream society melting pot, but remaining distanced enough to become bi-culture and hyphenated in identities, through generations, and still retain an American identity over the past ten year span after 9/11.

Through pioneering research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab American cemeteries, this chapter overlays shifting approaches to burial onto three broad phases of Christian and Muslim Arab immigration to America. Like other immigrants these newcomers buried along denominational lines, whether Catholic, Orthodox Christianity, or Sunni and Shi’a Islam. They also did so in separate sections of extant grounds or later in independent cemeteries as Arab Americans gained communal numbers and means. Looking to the nation’s largest Arab population centers, this chapter traces a rich array of Arab American cemeteries and offers a unique lens to explore communal dynamics among Muslim and Christian Arabs as they intersected with immigration policy, family, socio-economic standing, and a larger sense of rootedness to American society over time.

ABSTRACTAs the minority group frequently at the centre of public fear in the post-9/11 era, Arab Americans’ own sentiment toward, and concerns with, crime, has eluded scholarly attention. This study investigated their fear of crime net of five empirically validated fear of crime theoretical models. Face-to-face interviews with a random sample of Arab and non-Arab households in Metro-Detroit, Michigan indicated that net of all controls, Arab Americans experienced significantly higher levels of fear concerning both general and bias crimes than non-Arab Americans. The greater fear among Arab Americans calls for policy and practice change, and moving from perceiving Arab Americans as a major “source” of fear, to “carriers” of fear who are in need of more attention, care, and assistance.

Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational Strategies for a “Postrace” Era Evelyn Alsultany (bio) After 9/11 a strange thing happened: there was an increase in sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims on US television. If a TV drama or Hollywood film represented an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the story line usually included a “positive” representation of an Arab or Muslim to offset the negative depiction. Dozens of TV dramas portrayed Arab and Muslim Americans as the unjust target of hate crimes or as patriotic US citizens. President George W. Bush was sure to distinguish between Arab and Muslim “friends” and “enemies,” stating “the enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.”1 News reporters interviewed Arab and Muslim Americans, seemingly eager to include their perspectives on the terrorist attacks, careful to point out their experiences with hate crimes. Yet at the same time that sympathetic portrayals of Arab and Muslim Americans proliferated on US commercial television in the weeks, months, and years after 9/11, hate crimes, workplace discrimination, bias incidents, and airline discrimination targeting Arab and Muslim Americans increased exponentially. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims multiplied by 1,600 percent from 2000 to 2001.2 In just the first weeks and months after 9/11, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and other organizations documented hundreds of violent incidents experienced by Arab and Muslim Americans and people mistaken for Arabs or Muslims, including several murders. Dozens of airline passengers perceived to be Arab or Muslim were removed from flights. Hundreds of Arab and Muslim Americans reported discrimination at work, receiving hate mail, and physical assaults, and their property, mosques, and community centers vandalized or set on fire.3 In the decade after 9/11, such discriminatory acts have persisted. [End Page 161] In addition to individual citizens taking the law into their own hands, the US government passed legislation that targeted Arabs and Muslims (both inside and outside the United States) and legalized the suspension of constitutional rights.4 The government’s overt propaganda of war was palatable to many citizens on edge and regarded with suspicion by others as the government passed the USA PATRIOT Act, initiated war in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, and explained the terrorist attacks to the public by stating “they hate us for our freedom.” Given that Arabs and Muslims have been stereotyped for over a century, given that 9/11 was such an opportune moment for further stereotyping, given that the US government passed domestic and foreign policies that compromised the civil and human rights of Arabs and Muslims, and given that demonizing the enemy during times of war has been commonplace, why would sympathetic portrayals appear during such a fraught moment? As overt war propaganda has become increasingly transparent and ineffective over the decades since World War II and the Cold War, the production and circulation of “positive” representations of the “enemy” have become essential to projecting the United States as benevolent, especially in its declaration of war and passage of racist policies. Positive representations of Arabs and Muslims have helped form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices.5 It is no longer the case that the other is explicitly demonized to justify war or injustice. Now the other is portrayed sympathetically in order to project the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postrace era. The representational mode that has become standard since 9/11 seeks to balance a negative representation with a positive one, what I refer to as “simplified complex representations.” These are strategies used by television producers, writers, and directors to give the impression that the representations they are producing are complex, yet they do so in a simplified way. These predictable strategies can be relied on if the plot involves an Arab or Muslim terrorist, but are a new standard...