TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/02049911.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 157 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 42

THE HOME FRONT

Walking a Tightrope


For Americans of Arab descent, the war brings despair, anger,
threats and fear for loved ones in the line of fire

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Kathleen Adams/New York, S.C.
Gwynne/Detroit and Michael Riley/Washington


    For the Bakal brothers, Eddie and Jake, the road to the
American dream runs dead center through one of the most lethal
neighborhoods in Detroit. The brothers, who moved there from
Iraq in the mid-1970s, own a convenience store at the
intersection of Seven Mile and Van Dyke roads, an easy rifle
shot from streets lined with abandoned houses and open-air drug
markets. To look at their tidy store, swaddled in bulletproof
glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras and equipped with a
small arsenal in back, one would think they too were in the
middle of a war.

    These are crushing days for the Bakals. Two other brothers,
still living in Baghdad, have been drafted into the Iraqi army,
and two of their American cousins are serving in the U.S. armed
forces. "The hardest thing is when my 10-year-old daughter asks
me whose side am I on," says Jake, 35. "I tell her instead that
it's not what I'm for, it's what I'm against. I'm against the
war." Jake recalls a man who entered the store wearing
camouflage and presented his brother and him with a calendar
bearing a photo of the tomb of the unknown soldier. All the
dates but Jan. 15 had been crossed out.

    Such unnerving incidents have become common for the 250,000
Iraqi Americans living in the U.S., along with 2.2 million
other Americans of Arab descent. For this diverse, and often
divided, community, the outbreak of war has brought despair,
anger, threats of attack, charges of disloyalty and fears for
family still living in the line of fire. "These two
civilizations that have defined us are now clashing," says
James Zogby, executive director of the Arab American Institute.

ft. away, and we just want it to stop."

    The Arab-American community, not surprisingly, mirrors the
Middle East, with opinions about the war breaking along the
battle lines: those with roots in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
largely support the effort, while those with ties to Iraq,
Jordan and Syria are most adamantly opposed to the war. There
are few apologists for Saddam Hussein. "This guy has been
giving me nightmares for 12 years," says an Iraqi now living
in New York City whose father was imprisoned and fatally
poisoned by Saddam's security forces. "There is not a single
Iraqi who likes Saddam." But at the same time, many Arab
Americans echo the charge that the U.S. employs a double
standard, enforcing these U.N. sanctions against Iraq, while
failing to press Israel to address the Palestinian problem.
They are also bitter at the bigotry they have encountered since
the crisis erupted. "I agree that Saddam is a ruthless
dictator," says Mike Maatouk, 19, a sophomore at the University
of Michigan, Dearborn, "but the end result of all this killing
is that my Arab race, my people, are being pulled back 100
years. And all of a sudden every Arab person is your enemy."

    In the months since Iraqi tanks rumbled into Kuwait, stores
and restaurants owned by Arab Americans in Los Angeles and
Detroit have been set afire. Many Arab-American leaders are
receiving regular death threats. At the home of a Lebanese
family in Dearborn, vandals burned an Iraqi flag on the front
lawn. On Jan. 19 in Blissfield, Mich., 60 townspeople helped
scrub clean the walls of a Dairy Queen, owned by a Palestinian
American, on which vandals had sprayed U.S.A. NO 1. Last week
the Dairy Queen was burned to the ground.

    The attacks are one measure of widespread ignorance about
the Arab-American community. Few are aware, for example, of the
degree to which Arab-Americans have flourished in this country,
rising to the ranks of White House chief of staff and Senate
majority leader: both John Sununu and George Mitchell are of
Arab descent, as are Paula Abdul, Ralph Nader and Danny Thomas.
Arab Americans are better educated than the U.S population as
a whole, more likely to hold management or professional
positions, and wealthier: the average household income of
$22,973 is above the  U.S. average of $20,973.

    The success of Arab immigrants and their offspring has not
protected them in the past, either from hate crimes or from
subtler forms of discrimination. In recent days, press accounts
have implied a lack of loyalty and patriotic zeal in the wake
of war. Arab Americans respond that opinions may be divided --
as they are throughout the American public -- but loyalties are
not. "Where else is my loyalty going to be?" asks Kay
al-Askari, the northern New Jersey representative of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We've been here
35 years." Brenda Murad, a second-generation Lebanese
American, agrees. "I am not dealing with the conflict as an
Arab American," she says. "I just see it as very wrong. When
we went into Panama, I felt the same way."

    But the right to speak out against the fighting seems a
luxury to many these days. Ismail Ahmed, director of the Arab
Community Center for Economic and Social Services, reports that
a major Arab group in Detroit "told me they're going to support
the President, that that's the only way they can be safe. I
said, `But you don't believe what you're saying.' They said,
`That's the only way we can be safe.'"  In Wellesley, Mass., a
woman of Iraqi descent who works at Harvard as a computer
designer used to speak out at neighborhood meetings on Middle
East events. Now, friends say, she stays out of sight and tries
to conceal her Arab connections.

    Just as painful in these months leading up to war has been
the suggestion that citizens of Arab descent pose a security
risk that warrants investigation by the FBI, which has been
intensively questioning some Arab Americans about their
political affiliations and possible knowledge of terrorist
activities. The outbreak of war has heightened the scrutiny.
Pan American World Airways banned all passengers with Iraqi
passports, including legal residents of the U.S., from its
flights. At airports, Arabs are intercepted by police, frisked
and kept waiting for hours. The questions, says Boston attorney
Susan Akram, are mostly insulting. "Police explain they are
interrogating people for their own protection. Arab Americans
feel an obligation to respond. Then the questions land. `Do you
know any terrorists? Do you know anybody who wants to blow up
a federal building?'"

    The very notion of anything like a loyalty check raises the
specter of past overreactions in wartime, particularly the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Says
Congressman Norman Mineta of California, a Japanese American
who was interned when he was 10 years old: "The U.S.
Constitution must not become a casualty of our conflict with
Saddam Hussein." Addressing the concerns of Arab Americans late
last week, President Bush declared, "There is no place for
discrimination in the United States of America."

    In their sorrow and horror at the nightly accounts of
devastation, many Arab Americans are searching for any sign of
hope. Few see much prospect for stability or democracy taking
root in the Middle East anytime soon. But at the very least,
they hope that the war will raise consciousness. "For the first
time Americans are having to take a look at what is going on
in the Middle East," says Murad, "and I hope a lot of myths
will be dispelled." As the battle goes on, however, it is sure
to seem like a high price to pay for enlightenment.