My view: How do I steel my grandchildren against the anti-Arab-American rhetoric?
Eric Hyer
Deseret News
The morning started as usual; my alarm went off at 6:45 and I lay in bed listening to NPR. The regular news broadcast was interrupted by the announcement that a plane had just crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
There was the initial confusion about what had happened. But I jumped out of bed and turned on the TV. I saw the second plane hit the south tower 17 minutes later, and soon it was confirmed a third plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The assumption that this was a horrific terrorist attack was clear. That is all I knew at the time, but my gut told me it was likely carried out by radical Islamist terrorists as was the case in earlier incidents that targeted American embassies and citizens. Did America change that day or did terrorism simply reveal feelings we had always harbored?
As I drove my daughter to high school that morning, we had a conversation about how it would be a difficult day for American Arabs. I told her it was important to not lose her cool but acknowledge that possibly the attack was carried out by Arab terrorists. But, like most American Arabs, she did not condone this behavior and, like others, was horrified by the event.
When I returned home, my wife looked at me and with a deeply concerned voice asked, “Do you think they will put us in detention centers like they did the Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor?” I honestly felt she was overreacting and said, “America is better than that now.”
The internment of American citizens was something we had talked about a lot. A close family friend had told us how his father was picked up on the Sunday evening after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was sent to a judicial detention center. Our Japanese-American friend joined the U.S. Army and, because he spoke fluent Japanese, was assigned to military intelligence. Just before he was deployed to the Pacific, he was allowed to visit his father. He had to wear his military uniform, could not embrace his father, and had to converse in English while a military sentry watched over them. After 15 minutes of small talk about the family, the guard announced that time was up. His father stood up, bowed and said to him, “do not dishonor the uniform that you are wearing,” turned and walked out of the room. That is the last time he saw his father.
My father-in-law fled the Ottoman Empire and made his way to the U.S. in 1912. When the U.S. declared war, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to fight in the trenches of France. My wife’s six brothers carried on that tradition of defending their country. Their service spans the Korean and Vietnam wars, and more recently the youngest brother served in military intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq because of his fluency in Arabic.
Motivated by these examples, my own son joined the Air Force ROTC when he went to college. My mother-in-law was a property owner and taxpayer but only a permanent resident because she didn’t receive schooling, and U.S. law did not allow illiterate immigrants to become citizens when she arrived in the U.S. after World War I. In her later years, she fulfilled a lifelong dream of making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Would she have been allowed to return to her home and family in the U.S. if Donald Trump had a say?
After 9/11, life for Arab-Americans has been difficult; suspicious looks and profiling are common. On the evening before Thanksgiving of 2001, my son made a last-minute trip to the neighborhood store to get a few things for my wife. But he didn’t return home like we expected. A few hours later the phone rang and the caller ID indicated the county jail. On the phone, my son explained how he was pulled over while speeding to get home. But a simple traffic stop turned into a list of questions about national origins and relatives and, while he was in jail, a phone conversation with an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer with more questions probing for proof that he was an American citizen. Once, when my wife mentioned her brother was serving in the army in Iraq, a neighbor actually asked, “What side is he fighting for?”
Source: www.deseretnews.com