| Responding to hate
President Bush and other government officials have done the right thing and denounced the backlash. "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," the president said during a visit to a mosque in Washington, D.C., a week after the terrorist strikes. Nevertheless, public attitudes toward Arab Americans have reached a low. Many people are even calling for security measures that amount to racial profiling. A poll taken right after September 11 found that 58 percent of those surveyed were in favor of more intensive security checks for Arab travelers even if they are U.S. citizens. Forty-nine percent favored ID cards for Arabs, and 32 percent supported "special surveillance" of people of that ethnic background. In spite of the statements made by Bush and other leaders against racial stereotyping, many Americans seem willing to trample over the rights of Arab Americans in the name of the war on terrorism. To make things worse, some police agencies are not doing what they should to protect the people being targeted for violence. Since September 11, Sin Yen Ling, a legal fellow at AALDEF, has received more than a hundred reports of racial harassment and violence from across the country. But in many cases, authorities aren't taking the cases seriously as hate crimes, she said: "There seems to be a resistance to the idea that there could be any bias related to these incidents." AALDEF has had some run-ins of its own since September 11. Some of the group's South Asian volunteers were driving through a neighborhood on Long Island, New York, when their car was pelted with rocks. After reporting the incident to local police, the volunteers were told that there was a school nearby and police cars also had rocks thrown at them, Ling said. The police claimed that the incident had nothing to do with anger over the terrorist attacks. Ling applauds the statements made by Bush and other politicians against racial scapegoating, but she says more has to be done to stop the violence. "The fact of the matter is, talk is cheap. Nothing is going to change if [the police] don't try and prevent these things from happening." Responding to hate |