Stand beside her

Fearing a post-terrorism backlash, many Muslim and Arab-American women are afraid to leave their homes. Volunteers are helping to make them feel safe.

By King Kaufman

Oct. 22, 2001 | ST. LOUIS -- Neema (not her real name), an Egyptian woman, brought her second-grade daughter to register at an elementary school in the inner-ring suburb of Webster Groves last week. She says that as she pulled into the parking lot, where lots of parents were picking up their kids, two women blocked her with their cars, preventing her from parking. They also blocked her exit, she says, and she had to maneuver in reverse to get away. "And when we were leaving, some of the kids from that school were throwing plastic -- well, thanks, my God, it was plastic bottles."

Though Neema dresses in Western clothes, she has always worn a hijab, the traditional head covering of Muslim women. "I have only put a very small veil on my head. We're required that by the Quran."

But Neema has stopped wearing her veil, and she doesn't drop her daughter off at school. She says she made these decisions partly so she doesn't make others feel uncomfortable -- "just really to give peace and tranquillity for people" -- but she's also scared.

"If I am in my country, and they are saying, 'Americans will bomb my country,' what am I going to do? I will try to do the best I can to avoid the bombing, right? So that's what I'm trying here," she says.

Recently, Neema has had some help in avoiding "the bombing," as she puts it. Local volunteers have come forward to act as escorts for those who have been threatened, or feel threatened, by knee-jerk reactions to their clothing or appearance. Similar ad hoc programs have sprung up, with varying degrees of formality, in several other American cities with large Arab-American and Muslim populations, providing company and a measure of protection in public for those afraid to leave their homes.

Violence and threats against Muslims and Arab-Americans, and those, such as Sikhs and Hindu Indians, who are often mistaken for them, have skyrocketed since the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within hours of the plane crashes, a mosque in Texas was riddled with bullets. Killings in California, Arizona, Texas and Michigan have been attributed to the backlash. The FBI has opened more than 160 hate crime investigations since the incident. Various Muslim and Arab groups report that anywhere from 300 to 800 anti-Arab or anti-Muslim incidents have come to their attention since the attacks, ranging from verbal abuse to murder.

But, as President Bush noted last week, there's been another side to the situation. "I was struck by this, that in many cities when Christian and Jewish women learned that Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid of going out of their homes alone, that they went shopping with them, that they showed true friendship and support, an act that shows the world the true nature of America," Bush said in a nationally televised speech.

In St. Louis, longtime peace activist Bill Ramsey, who runs the Human Rights Action Service, a network of activists and a political letter-writing service, hastily rounded up nearly 200 volunteers to accompany Muslim and Middle Eastern people, most of them women, who were afraid to go out after the terrorist attacks. He had checked in with Arab-American colleagues and friends in the hours after the disaster to find that many were going to their children's schools to make sure the kids were not being harassed -- and in some cases pulling them out of school -- and making plans to hunker down at home.

Ramsey also learned from the local International Institute, an organization that helps immigrants and refugees settle in St. Louis, that the group just settled more than 100 Afghans in the past six months, and also had a large community of Somalis and a large community of Iraqis that they were concerned about.

Angie O'Gorman, who directs the Immigration Law Project at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, trained the volunteers in techniques of accompaniment developed for Central American refugees in the 1980s.

"It's basically good communication skills and learning how to use your body in ways that are not aggressive, even if you may be feeling angry," O'Gorman says. She says the idea is for the volunteer to place herself in a position to protect the person being threatened without becoming a threat herself.

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