Setback for Arab-Americans

On Sept. 11, Muslim leaders were to meet with President Bush about about the civil rights concerns of ethnic Arabs. Now they're more concerned about their physical safety.

By Jake Tapper

Sept. 17, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- Talk about bad timing. At 3 p.m. Sept. 11, President Bush was scheduled to meet with the leaders of a half dozen Arab-American and Muslim organizations. They were headed to the White House to discuss their desire to end ethnic profiling, as well as the policy of "secret evidence" that allows American law enforcement officials to detain non-U.S. citizens based on evidence they are not compelled to share.

The meeting, which had already been rescheduled twice, was of course cancelled after the terrorist attacks that morning. On Monday, members of the delegation that was supposed to have met with Bush expressed gratitude that the president and his administration had been decrying anti-Muslim and anti-Arab actions. Bush met with Arab and Muslim leaders for almost an hour Monday, and again lamented the backlash against Arabs and Muslims in the U.S.

But the meeting also had to have been a letdown. U.S. Arab and Muslim leaders came tantalizingly close to seeing their own legislative and civil rights issues championed by the president himself, who gave them his prominent support during the campaign. Now they must wonder how long they must put those hopes on hold.

Or whether -- given the reality that perhaps the most horrific act of terrorism against the United States was committed by 19 men of Arab and Muslim origin -- there will ever come a time when their desire for civil rights will outweigh, in the minds of the American people, the need to take security precautions to prevent it from ever happening again.

"The political assessment is that we have an uphill battle," says Mahdi Bray, national political director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of the six groups to have been represented in the Bush meeting. "I don't think people are going to be as cooperative or as easy to push this legislation as perhaps they would have been had this event not occurred."

That's surely an understatement. The more pressing issue seems to be an end to the attacks against members of their community, a cause that the Bush administration has certainly supported from the beginning of this ugliness.

Monday afternoon, Bush visited D.C.'s Islamic Center, where he was given a tour by Dr. Abdullah Khouj, chief imam of the center; it lasted 50 minutes, 15 minutes longer than scheduled. Afterward, Bush quoted from the Koran and made a show of solidarity with the community.

"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said. "That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war." Bush said that 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."

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, was originally supposed to meet with Bush last Tuesday, but he got his chance Monday when Bush met with leaders at the Islamic Center. Calling the meeting with Bush "constructive and useful," Awad was heartened to hear Bush's comments "that terrorism has no religion, no ethnicity, no nationality -- it is only an attitude."

He and his colleagues in the community raised the subjects they had intended to speak about last week, Awad says. When they raised Bush's endorsement of their opposition to ethnic profiling and secret evidence, Bush said, according to Awad, "he believes the same way, but of course we're now dealing with a much more serious issue, in dealing with the terrorist attack." Awad says that he, too, wants the U.S. government to ensure greater security for its citizens. "We are citizens so we are in the same boat," he says. But he sees no "contradiction between security and civil liberties" and still wants an end to those practices that infringe on Arab-American and Muslim citizens' rights, he says.

Next page: Polls offer little solace