Michigan Capital of Arab America Reflects on 9/11
Dearborn is a little different from many of the communities across the nation marking the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with memorial services.
The Detroit suburb that’s the hometown of auto magnate Henry Ford also is widely recognized as the capital of Arab America. Many of its individuals and institutions reflected on a decade spent trying to deal with rising fear, misconceptions and suspicions, despite the presence of an Arab community that goes back a century. Ford had lured immigrants with the promise of $5-a-day pay at his auto plants.
Visitors enjoyed the normal free Sunday admission to the city’s Arab American National Museum, which was capping off several days of 9/11-themed events and activities.
The attacks were a catalyst of sorts for the museum, which opened in 2005. The museum was in the works for at least a decade, but its backers have said he fear and misconceptions caused by the attacks gave new meaning to the project and pushed it forward.
Christie Eagle, 21, of the Detroit suburb of Warren came with two friends in the early afternoon. The nursing majors and psychology minors at the University of Detroit Mercy took notes at an exhibit called “Coming to America” as part of a project for a college class called Cross Cultural Socialization.
“I was kind of intimidated to come here when I first thought about it,” Eagle said of the museum. Yet as she and her friends wandered through the exhibits, she said she started to see the danger of generalizing about ethnic groups.
“I could imagine you kind of group everyone — all Arabs — into one,” said Eagle, whose afternoon also was to include visits to two other area museums, the Holocaust Memorial Center and Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. “You come here, learn the background, and you see the hardships they had to deal with and you start to see them as individual people, instead of one whole group.”
Gov. Rick Snyder said the country’s strength is its diversity and people should “rise above” blame, whether over politics, religion or ethnicity. He spoke Sunday evening at a Remembrance and Unity Vigil at the Henry Ford museum.
The Detroit area quickly became the focus of attention after 9/11, including by federal law enforcement.
Five days after the attacks, the FBI raided a house in Detroit and arrested four men on terrorism-related charges in what became the first major terrorism trial after 9/11.
Two were acquitted and two were convicted of conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists, though the convictions were thrown out because the government said evidence was withheld from the defense.
Beefed-up investigations by federal law enforcement officials in the Detroit area in the years that followed merited little in the way of terrorist activity, according to authors of a new compilation of essays entitled “Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade.” Of its findings: six Arab-Americans with ties to Detroit have been found guilty on charges related to providing material support for terrorism — “scant return on the money and man-hours invested.”
Among the cases often cited by Arab-Americans were the 2006 arrests of five young Arab-American men buying large quantities of discounted cell phones for resale. They were accused of providing material support for terrorists but those charges were eventually dropped.
The 9/11 anniversary wasn’t the reason that Ali and Alwan Kassem came to the Arab museum. The brothers who came to Dearborn as teenagers from their native Yemen said they find it reassuring to learn about the contributions of fellow Arabs to the U.S. and the world through science, medicine, art and many other areas.
Alwan Kassem, 21, said they brought “light to humanity,” not terror.
“There is a big difference between them and those who attacked on 9/11,” he said.
Jeff Karoub
Associated Press