Government Pressures Against Arabs in the United States

Abstract

The rise of the Palestinian fedayeen groups and the internationalization of Middle Eastern-oriented violence during the late 1960s prompted the beginning of a long series of organized campaigns directed against Arab and Arab-Americans living in the United States by a number of agencies of the federal government. Motivated by alleged security concerns, the government has engaged in a host of legal and illegal exercises designed to determine the amount of support, if any, given by domestic Arabs to Arab political organizations abroad and to take appropriate steps against those found to be politically undesirable. US government campaigns against persons of a specific ethnicity are not unknown in America's history. The internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War remains perhaps the most dramatic, if infamous, example. But aside from the obvious trauma to members of the specific community involved, the larger issues surrounding such operations present a sinister challenge to rights afforded by the US constitution to all who reside within the borders of the United States. The constitution carefully outlines the rights to which residents are entitled, among them the right to privacy, freedom from illegal search & seizure, freedom of speech and movement, freedom of political expression, and freedom from discrimination and persecution on the basis of religion, race, or national origin. Yet like the oppression from which many of them fled, persons of Arab descent in the United States have found these rights consistently denied by