Oklahoma bombing and the brunt of racial abuse
Oklahoma bombing and the brunt of racial abuse
The Oklahoma City blast had nothing to do with the Mideast, but American Moslems still bore the brunt of racial abuse. Farhan Haq of Inter Press Service reports.
NEW YORK: When Dr. Mohammed T. Mehdi entered his office the day after a federal building was bombed in Oklahoma City last month, he found familiar hate calls.
Some 40 angry callers had left messages on the answering machine of his office, the National Council on Islamic Affairs.
That was the day after the blast when the news media and most U.S. officials still believed Moslem and Middle Eastern groups were connected to the April 19 car bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building.
One day later, police named alleged members of the Michigan Militia, a heavily-armed rightwing group, as the culprits in the attack which killed more than 120 people.
"I hope the news media and the politicians recognize they have to eat their words," Mehdi says now. "Their original, prejudicial opinion of identifying any act of violence as the responsibility of Islam is wrong."
Other Moslem leaders share Mehdi's mixture of relief at no longer being accused, and anger at having been automatically singled out in the first place.
"We're happy that some people have been caught and that they weren't Moslems," says Ibrahim Hooper, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "And we feel frustrated that we had to defend ourselves when it wasn't even true."
"In dealing with the pain of Oklahoma, we have to deal with other pain -- the harassment, hundreds of phone calls and other threats against Moslems and Arabs," says Hamzi Meghrabi, chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
Claudette Schwiry of the Arab-American Institute puts it simply: "This stereotyping and scapegoating really needs to stop. We're grieving, the same as anyone else."
Hooper notes that Moslems throughout the United States were harassed in the aftermath of the bombing which one retired Oklahoma congressman, Dave McCurdy, immediately suggested might be the work of the small Moslem student community in Oklahoma City.
Moslem organizations from New York to Los Angeles reported threatening phone calls, broken windows and anger directed at anyone who looked Middle Eastern.
One Pakistani cab driver, Assad Siddiqui, was arrested by Oklahoma police officers after he asked a policeman for direction near the site of the blast. Immediately, three New York papers trumpeted Siddiqui's connection to the "Islamic terrorist' attack -- even though police released him hours later, saying he had played no role in the bombing.
The irony of the hunt for Moslem or Mideast suspects is that one of the heroes after the blast was in fact an Arab. Gary Massad, a doctor who saved the life of a young woman trapped in the rubble for a day by amputating her leg, is an Arab American.
CAIR, for its part, sent a relief delegation comprising members of three major Moslem groups to Oklahoma immediately after Friday prayers at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in northern Virginia. But those stories of helpful Moslems were initially obscured by the specter of Islamic militants stalking the heartland of America -- even though President Bill Clinton himself warned: "Let us not jump to conclusions ... this is not a question of anybody's religion."
The media focus on Islam has been so strong, says researcher Sam Husseini of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), that the search for a Middle East connection has continued even after the white supremacist link was found. "The way they've acted, they're not saying, `This is the evidence.' They still really want to pin this to the Middle East," Husseini says.
Top U.S. newscasters took to the airwaves after the arrest of Timothy McVeigh to decry the beating the Moslem image took in the media. But, notes Husseini: "Who's been giving them that beating in the first place?"
Mehdi agrees: "Their new code word is `Mideast-looking'." Siddiqui was described in that manner prior to his brief detention by the police.
Last December, New York police searched for a `Middle East- looking' man, as well, after a firebomb exploded on a New York subway, injuring dozens of people. But the suspect arrested by police afterward was in fact an unemployed worker of Irish descent, Edward O' Leary.
Mehdi contends that Moslems will still be assumed to be behind attacks since the United States "is a racist, anti-Islamic society". He adds: "Americans need a foreign villain. They have found Islam as the new candidate."
For politicians like Representative Henry Hyde, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and commentators like filmmaker Jeff Kamen, the image of Moslem terrorism was serious enough to prompt calls for a crackdown on illegal immigration.
But as Husseini notes: "Who's (found to be) behind this? The people who are most hawkish against immigrants." He adds that the media has lingered so long over the prospect of Moslem terrorism that they have ignored the dangers of the right-wing paramilitary groups, believed to number as many as 10,000 across 40 states.
But those right-wing groups not only have been ignored by the mainstream media, FAIR says, they have been featured approvingly in right-wing radio talk shows where they can joke about shooting the president or mimic rifle noises.
Husseini says, the U.S. media should learn from this crisis to examine such groups more closely and, at the same time, focus on the five million Moslems in the United States in contexts outside of terrorism.
Mehdi adds that Moslems themselves must lead the process to educate people against the myths about Islam. Says Mehdi: "By now, my skin has become so thick that nothing hurts me. But if hurting me educates Americans, it is worth it."
-- IPS