By Ramzy Baroud
I dread US airports. From
the moment I enter until the moment I leave, I feel as if I am trapped by my
own fears generated from countless experiences of racial profiling, prolonged
interrogations and baseless suspicion.
I have done nothing
deserving of incrimination. True, I have been very critical of successive US
governments for their horrendous foreign policies and immoral wars abroad, as
well as the devastating social injustice and economic inequality at home. But
what is the worth, or even the use, of being an intellectual or a journalist if
one turns a blind eye to injustice?
The first time I was held
for hours was at JFK Airport in 2003. The hyped fear of terrorists lurking
everywhere was at its peak. Expectedly, Muslims stood accused, paying the price
of unwarranted US military adventures in the Middle East and the resulting terrorism
and violence everywhere else.
“What do you have against
our president?” a large officer with a black baseball cap asked, as if my
criticism of George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a violation of the
US’s most sacred laws. He expected no answer, and carried on rummaging through
my belongings in a small, poorly lit room.
Speaking Arabic while
flying
Soon after, I was held at
the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. The ill-informed officers found a receipt in my
bags that read: “Halal Restaurant”. One officer tried to argue that my culinary
choice reflected my extremist religious beliefs. I told him that his logic
would indict half of the city of London due to the proliferation of halal kebab
restaurants there.
But the harassment never
stopped. In fact, it worsened, progressively becoming routine. Good Americans
are asked to remain vigilant. “If you see something, say something,” they are
constantly reminded.
The underlying message
seems to always point at reporting dark skin men and women, usually Muslims for
behaving “suspiciously”, as in speaking Arabic, or uttering the word
“inshallah”, which means, “God willing”.
Per the above logic, even
blatant racism goes unpunished. Numerous accounts of Muslims being thrown out
of aeroplanes, often kicking and screaming, is becoming an acceptable norm.
When Khairuldeen Makhzoomi,
26 was kicked out of a Southwest Airlines flight last year for speaking Arabic
on the phone, the agent who escorted him reprimanded him for using his mother
tongue in public considering “today’s political climate”.
More recently, Anila
Dualatzai was shamelessly dragged down the aisle of a plane heading to Los
Angeles.
Her lawyer described her
ordeal in an interview with the Washington Post. She was “profiled, abused,
interrogated, detained, and subjected to false reporting and the trauma of
racist, vitriolic public shaming precisely because she is a woman, a person of
color, and a Muslim”.
Countless government
officials and journalists have fanned out to find out “why” Paddock would carry
out such a heinous act, as if white man’s violence is a rare phenomenon in a
country supposedly threatened by blacks, Mexicans and Muslims.
None of this is new. It has
become the norm for many years in a country that consistently makes a spectacle
of other nations for their poor human rights records and mistreatment of
minorities.
Stories of abuse of US
Muslims are numerous and constantly growing. Only some of them become news,
because of the sheer inhumanity or absurdity of the events. In 2015,
14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was detained and hauled off to a police facility in
handcuffs when he brought a handmade clock to school to proudly show his
teachers. Instead, they reported him to authorities for making a bomb.
Such anti-Muslim hysteria,
stimulated by media fear-mongering is precisely the type of verbiage that an
opportunistic, populist president like Donald Trump needs to present himself as
the protector of the nation. His incessant efforts to prevent citizens of
Muslims countries from travelling to the US only feeds such irrational fear and
distracts everyone from the real problems that continue to afflict his country.
Trump’s anti-Muslim
rhetoric has been taking place for years, especially after he ran for the
Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The more his popularity grew, the
more detestable his anti-Muslim propaganda became. In a statement he issued in
December 2015, he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders
“until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
He bemoaned Muslims’
purported “great hatred towards Americans”.
US Muslims concerned about
place in society
Without looking at various
polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension,” he
said.
But a quick look at the
polling data may surprise Trump, who has hardly been a fan of facts to begin
with.
Newsweek reported on
statistics first assembled by Mother Jones showing that white men have
committed most of the country’s mass killings. Since 1982, the “majority of
mass shootings – 54 percent – were committed by white men,” numbers show.
Stephen Paddock, the
64-year-old white man who massacred 58 people and wounded hundreds more at the
Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on October 1 was only one of an
ever-growing list.
Countless government
officials and journalists have fanned out to find out “why” Paddock would carry
out such a heinous act, as if white man’s violence is a rare phenomenon in a
country supposedly threatened by blacks, Mexicans and Muslims.
Some sunk to new lows,
attempting to connect the deranged Paddock to the Middle East – as if such a
connection can offer the only rational explanation for his reprehensible act.
“Investigators remain
stumped as to Paddock’s motives, but said he visited the contentious region (of
the Middle East) on a cruise,” reported the Independent. The fact that he has
also travelled on 11 cruises with numerous destinations and many stops seemed a
superfluous fact.
Yet the truth is the white
man’s profile is the most violent in the United States, according to
irrefutable data.
“White men commit mass
shootings out of a sense of entitlement,” John Haltiwanger wrote in Newsweek.
Research conducted by Eric
Madfis from the University of Washington argued in 2014 that in the US
“middle-class Caucasian heterosexual males in their teenage years and in middle
age commit mass murder … in numbers disproportionately high relative to their
share of the population.” He ascribed this finding to “white entitlement” and
“heterosexual masculinity” among other reasons.
Yet, a whole race, gender
and religion are not held suspect. Christian white men are not dragged off
planes or interrogated for hours in airports about the type food they eat and
the political ideas they champion.
Earlier this year, two
officers sought me from within a crowd at the Seattle airport. They seemed to
know who I was. They asked me to follow them, and I obliged. Being an Arab
often renders one’s US citizenship almost irrelevant.
In a back room, I was asked
numerous questions about my politics, ideas, writing, my children, my friends
and my late Palestinian parents.
Meanwhile, an officer took
my bag and all of my papers, including receipts, business cards, and more. I
did not protest. I am so used to this treatment and endless questioning that I
simply go through the motions and answer the questions the best way I know how.
The fact that I am an
American citizen, who acquired high education, bought a home, raised a good
family, paid my taxes, obeyed the law and contributed to society in myriad ways
is not enough to exclude me from the suspicious “brown men” category.
I remain an Arab, a Muslim
and a dissident, all unforgivable sins in the new, rapidly changing America.
Certainly, anti-Arab and
Muslim sentiment in the US has been around for generations, but it has risen
sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy
scapegoat for all of America’s failed wars and violence.
It mattered little that,
since September 11, 2001, the odds of being killed by terrorism are 1 in
110,000,000, an extremely negligible number compared with the millions who die
as a result of diabetes, for example, or shark attacks, for that matter.
The views expressed in this
article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s
editorial policy.
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