TV's talking heads started calling it another Pearl Harbor from the moment pictures of a burning World Trade Center were broadcast to the world.

In many ways, the terrorist strikes on September 11 are similar to Pearl Harbor. The attacks have shattered America's sense of security. They have taken the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. And they have fueled an anger and desire for vengeance not seen for many years in this country.

People are justified in their anger, and the United States should bring those who planned the attack to justice. However, at this time of great tragedy, when emotions and patriotic fervor are running high, terrible mistakes can be made. Such was the case sixty years ago: After Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment exploded in the United States, leading to the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

From the outset, Middle Eastern terrorists have been the prime suspects for the September 11 attacks--just like they were after the second-worst terrorist attack on American soil, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist, was eventually convicted of that crime. This time, however, all evidence points to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network as the masterminds behind the attack.

With the suspects identified as Arab Muslims, some Americans have found a convenient target for their rage. Across the country, Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and other people who look "Middle Eastern"--Muslim and non-Muslim--have been verbally attacked, beaten, and killed in the days since September 11. Among the incidents:

• In Mesa, Arizona, gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15. Police charged a forty-two-year-old local man, Frank Roque, for the killing. Roque allegedly first shot at Sodhi, an Indian Sikh, from his pickup truck and then drove away; minutes later, he shot at a Lebanese clerk at another gas station and then fired shots into the home of an Afghan family. No one was injured in the last two shootings. "I stand for America all the way," Roque shouted when police arrested him.

• Abdo Ali Ahmed, an immigrant from Yemen who moved to the United States thirty-five years ago, was gunned down in his convenience store in Reedley, California. Nothing was taken from the store. A few days earlier, someone had left a note on the windshield of Ahmed's car threatening to kill him because he was from the Middle East.

• Four Arab American men were forced off a Northwest Airlines flight before takeoff in Minneapolis, after other passengers refused to fly with the men on board. In a similar incident, a Delta airlines captain told a Pakistani American passenger to leave the plane before it took off from San Antonio because he and his crew did not "feel safe." 

• In a September 17 radio interview, U.S. Representative John Cooksey, a Republican from Louisiana, made inflammatory remarks about Arab Americans and endorsed racial profiling. "If I see someone come in and he's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked,'' Cooksey said, referring to people who wear turbans. Cooksey later apologized for his remarks.

The racist finger pointing started from the moment the hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. An Indian Sikh man running away from the buildings after they exploded was chased by four men who called him a "terrorist," according to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), a New York-based advocacy group. AALDEF is tracking these racial incidents and providing legal assistance to victims of harassment.

The enemy within

Responding to hate

Moving beyond hate

Story Index