A Response to the October 7 Airstrikes from Two AAW Members

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This morning, we awoke to the news that the U.S. military was bombing Afghanistan.

Our government announced that only “military installations” are being targeted by bombs and missles, yet essential components of the infrastructure of cities, such as power plants and water treatment facilities have in the past been considered “military” targets, and civilians may live among and around these as well as the military installations and “terrorist training” grounds.

There are also well-founded concerns that mistakes might be made. When the U.S. bombed similar “military targets” in response to Osama bin Laden’s embassy bombings a few years ago, a factory producing harmless vaccinations in the Sudan was destroyed based on intelligence information of the sort that informs today’s attacks, depriving millions of much needed medical supplies.

As we watch this conflict unfold into catastrophic proportions, we will continue to be an alternative information source in hopes of providing a more balanced perspective than that of the corporate media. It is of vital importance that we share a compassionate and logical perspective on the downward spiralling futility of violence, even as our families, friends and neighbors are stirred into a war frenzy by selectively presented or false information and nationalist rhetoric issued under the guise of “news.”

A crucial part of our role as a source of information is to portray the activities of our military and intelligence agencies truthfully, even when their tactics are underhanded, and that we explore possible ways in which the underlying agenda of our government might be directed by economic interests to the exclusion of human values.

It has been reported that there is a “100%” chance of another terrorist attack in the United States. The U.S. military’s hostile invasion of a country of starving peasants can only serve to perpetuate this cycle of retribution. Is the possibility that forces behind the September 11th attack might be punished through these actions worth the risk of starting another World War?

There are global stakes on the table here, and important reasons for concern, especially given the prevailing climate of stifling dialogue on this issue. There are several factions competing for control of Afghanistan, and some are known to possess nuclear weapons. Contrary to what is being reported widely, several groups that oppose the Taliban have stated that they will support the Taliban in the interest of national unity in the event of a U.S. invasion.

While the president assures us that the U.S. has the support of the “nations of the world,” we know from past experience that many of our alliances in the Mid-East are tenuous, and contingent upon factors that are not necessarily under our control. While the governments of Britain, Canada, and France dedicate their military support, we know this is not necessarily representative of the sentiments of people living in those nations.

In response, international solidarity among peace movements is growing, and a global anti-war movement is being established that must be reckoned with by the power structures that dictate our participation in this conflict.

Filed Under: Casualties, Operations, Weapons Tagged With: , ,

Dangerous Trend: FBI Detains and Investigates Peace Activists

The FBI has detained the editor of Middle East News Online and he now faces deportation. The FBI is also investigating Women in Black and is threatening the group with a Grand Jury Invesitagtion. The two messages below give information about both cases. This is a dangerous trend, indicating that no person and no group is immune.

Middle East News Online:

I. Fadi Chahine, editor of Middle East News Online (message received from a friend on October 6, 2001):

Fadi Chahine is a young man who was very active in his community in North Carolina. He actively lobbied through his business (Middle East News Online) to influence congressmen in his area to support the cause of Palestine. He is Lebanese and came to this country when he was 13, 20 years ago. He is married and has two children, one is 4 months old. He is a permanent resident and his wife is an American.

After the attack on the US he was detained by the FBI, asked what did he know about the terrorists. The FBI sent his case to the INS to start deportation procedure.

His family asked to spread the news yet, for they are still hoping to have a “prive bill” passed in the Congress to free him. They are also worried about being abused by angry people in their community. They asked to contact organizations (Arabs and Muslims) here in the US so that these organizations may call a few congressmen and congresswomen to urge them to support the private bill.

II. Ronnie Gilbert on the FBI’s investigation of Women in Black:

For the second time in my life – at least – a group that I belong to is being investigated by the FBI. The first was the Weavers. The Weavers were a recording industry phenomenon. In 1950 we recorded a couple of songs from our American/ World folk music repertoire, Leadbelly¹s ³Goodnight Irene² and (ironically) the Israeli ³Tzena, Tzena, Tzena² and sold millions of records for the almost-defunct record label. Folk music entered the mainstream, and the Weavers were stars.

By 1952 it was over. The record company dropped us, eager television producers stopped knocking on our door. The Weavers were on a private yet well-publicized roster of suspected entertainment industry reds. The FBI came a-calling.

This week, I just found out that Women in Black, another group of peace activists I belong to, is the subject of an FBI investigation. Women in Black is a loosely knit international network of women who vigil against violence, often silently, each group autonomous, each group focused on the particular problems of personal and state violence in its part of the world. Because my group is composed mostly of Jewish women, we focus on the Middle East, protesting the cycle of violence and revenge in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

The FBI is threatening my group with a Grand Jury investigation. Of what? That we publicly call the Israeli military¹s occupation of the mandated Palestine lands illegal? So does the World Court and the United Nations. That destroying hundreds of thousands of the Palestinians¹ olive and fruit trees, blocking roads and demolishing homes promotes hatred and terrorism in the Middle East? Even President Bush and Colin Powell have gotten around to saying so.

So what is to investigate? That some of us are in contact with activist Palestinian peace groups? This is bad? The Jewish Women in Black of Jerusalem have stood vigil every Friday for 13 years in protest against the Occupation; Muslim women from Palestinian peace groups stand with them at every opportunity. We praise and honour them, these Jewish and Arab women who endure hatred and frequent abuse from extremists on both sides for what they do.

We are not alone in our admiration. Jerusalem Women in Black is a nominee for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Bosnia Women in Black, now ten years old.

If the FBI cannot or will not distinguish between groups who collude in hatred and terrorism, and peace activists who struggle in the full light of day against all forms of terrorism, we are in serious trouble. I have seen such trouble before in my lifetime. It was called McCarthyism. In the hysterical atmosphere of the early Cold War, anyone who had signed a peace petition, who had joined an organization opposing violence or racism or had tried to raise money for the refugee children of the Spanish Civil War, in other words who had openly advocated what was not popular at the time, was fair game.

In my case, the FBI visited The Weavers¹ booking agent, the recording company, my neighbors, my dentist husband¹s patients, my friends. In the waning of our career, the Weavers were followed down the street, accosted onstage by drunken ³patriots,² warned by friendly hotel employees to keep the door open if we rehearsed in anyone¹s room so as not to become targets for the vice squad.

It was nasty. Every two-bit local wannabe G-man joined the dragnet searching out and identifying ³communist spies.² In all those self-debasing years how many spies were pulled in by that dragnet? Nary a one. Instead it pulled down thousands of teachers, union members, scientists, journalists, actors, entertainers like us, who saw our lives disrupted, our jobs, careers go down the drain, our standing in the community lost, even our children harrassed.

A scared population soon shut their mouths up tight. Thus came the silence of the 1950s and early 60s, when no notable voice of reason was heard to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Look what we’re doing ourselves, to the land of the free and the home of the brave,” when not one dissenting intelligence was allowed a public voice to warn against zealous foreign policies we¹d later come to regret, would be regretting now, if our leaders were honest.

Today, in the wake of the worst hate crime of the millenium, a dragnet is out for terroriststs² and we are told that certain civil liberties may have to be curtailed for our own security. Which ones? I¹m curious to know. The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech or of the press? The right of people peaceably to assemble? Suddenly, deja vu – haven¹t I been here before?

Hysterical neo-McCarthyism does not equal security, never will. The bitter lesson September 11′s horrific tragedy should have taught us and our government is that only an honest re- evaluation of our foreign policies and careful, focused and intelligent intelligence work can hope to combat operations like the one that robbed all of us and their families of 6,000 decent working people. We owe the dead that, at least. As for Women in Black, we intend to keep on keeping on.

Ronnie Gilbert
received from Canpalnet News, Oct 6, 2001.
Jim Terral South Slocan, BC

Filed Under: News, Operations Tagged With: , ,

Austin Against War Statement on U.S. Airstrikes

Austin Against War Statement on U.S. Airstrikes
Call to End Bombings on Afghanistan Cities

Austin Against War has repeatedly called for a judicious response to the tragic attacks of Sept. 11. We were encouraged by Bush’s refusal to implicate Islam as a religion, his seeming reluctance to bomb Kabul, and the acknowledgement of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. As America began to recover from its initial grief at the horrific atrocities of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, cooler heads seemed to prevail.

Now, however, we are witnessing the sort of indiscriminate attack that we feared most: the bombing of cities with large civilian populations. People are dying simply because they live in the same country as the man the U.S. claims to have coordinated the Sept. 11 attacks.

We share the nation’s desire to bring the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks to justice. But further bombings only add to the tragedy. Kabul does not have sophisticated military technology; there is nothing there to be destroyed, except people. Afghanistan is, as one reporter put it, “the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world” (Fisk, Independent, 23 Sept., 2001).

And in any event, the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks were not aided by military technology of any sort in any Afghan city. Bombing cities will do nothing to prevent this sort of unsophisticated terrorist attack in the future. On the contrary, American bombings will only serve to increase anti-American sentiment throughout the world.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S.-directed NATO bombings struck alleged military targets in Iraq. We know the cost: bomb shelters harboring innocent, terrified civilians were destroyed; hospitals, airports, water sanitation facilities, and civilian infrastructures were destroyed; and the result was and continues to be massive civilian casualties. But despite this, Sadam Hussein remains in power.

Autocratic regimes such as Afghanistan and Iraq have caused tremendous suffering among their own people and are consequently not disturbed when the United States causes more suffering. Bombing cities results not only in a tragic loss of life, it is demonstrably useless at achieving American policy objectives.

We call for an end to the bombings at once.

Filed Under: Casualties, News, Operations, Weapons Tagged With: , ,

From an Afghan American

From an Afghan American

Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist in San Francisco who is a native of Afghanistan

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?”

Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.”

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.

When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.”

It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rat’s nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan–a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban–by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout.

It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants.

That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?

Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

- – -

Tamim Ansary

Filed Under: Geography, News, Operations Tagged With: , ,

US ‘Planned Attack on Taliban’

A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week’s attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

Russian troops were on standby
Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.

Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.

The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place – possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.

Mr Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.

Bin Laden would have been “killed or captured”
He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.

Filed Under: Casualties, News, Operations, Weapons Tagged With: , ,

Acts of Racism in the 21st Century

Lists of Racist Attacks Across the Country

These attacks have targeted Indians, Persians, Arabs, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians alike. Keep in mind that these are only the reported cases of violence, hatred, and discrimination.

CRIMES & EVENTS

1) In Mesa, Arizona, Balbir Singh Sodhi, 49, an Indian gas station owner was shot. The assailant then drove to another service station where a Lebanese-American employee was working; he fired shots but injured no one else.
(CNN: 9/14)

2) In Richmond Hill, Queens, an elderly Sikh man was beaten with a baseball bat; two others were shot at with paintball guns.
(NY Times)

3) In Gary, Indiana, a man in a ski mask fired more than 21 shots from a high-powered assault rifle at Hassan Awdah, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, who stood behind a 1-inch-thick shield at 3 am on Wednesday. Awdah fled as the gunman tried to shoot him again.
(Reuters/Chicago & MSNBC.com)

4) On Friday, a turban-wearing taxi driver was attacked by a man who accused him of being a terrorist. He was of Indian descent.
(Seattle Times/Detroit Free Press)

5) A car rammed into an Akron, OH Arab-owned grocery store by Jack Oueslati.
(News Net 5: 9/16)

6) In Huntington, N.Y., a 75-year-old man tried to run over a Pakistani woman in a shopping mall parking lot. The police said he screamed that he was “doing this for my country.” The man then followed the woman into a store and threatened to kill her for “destroying my country.”
(Seattle Times/Detroit Free Press & New York Times: 9/14)

7) Khaled Ksaibati, the faculty adviser for the Muslim Student Association at the University of Wyoming described an attack on the Muslim family at a Laramie Wal-Mart. “The people who screamed in her face wanted her to go back to her country,” he said. “This is her country. She was born here.”
(Seattle Times/Detroit Free Press)

8) On Thursday night, a group of demonstrators gathered outside of the Madina Masjid on First Avenue and 11th Street in Manhattan. The mob yelled angrily and carried a banner saying “Destroy the mosque or remove it from this place.” Neighbors shouted the crowd down as the police held them back.
(News Net 5:9/16)

9) On Wednesday, a well-dressed young Manhattan couple yelled insults at a Lebanese-American who was desperately searching for survivors from the arts center he had run on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower. “They told me, ‘You should go back to your country, you f–king Arabs, we should bomb the s–t out of you,” said the man, Moukhtar Kocache.
(Seattle Times)

10) Yasser Ahmed, manager of an Arab-owned candy and grocery store on Broadway in Upper Manhattan, said about 10 people had come in shouting, “You guys did it!” and other accusations.
(NY Times)

11) One student, Basel Al-ken, whose family is from Syria, was taking his mother to Wal-Mart one night this week. A man in a parked car turned a laser-pointer in her face and made a throat-slitting motion with his hand.
(NY Times)

12) Four men chased Amrik Singh, a Sikh who wears a turban, on Tuesday as he fled lower Manhattan to return home to Hicksville. He jumped on a train to Brooklyn and took off his turban and stuffed it into his briefcase.
(NY News Day)

13) The local Sikh Temple in Richmond Hill was vandalized and received threatening phone calls.
(Masala.com)

14) A Pakistani family’s house was burned down in Sacramento.
(Masala.com)
15) One man stormed into a South Seattle mosque and threatened to burn it down. Another poured gasoline on a North Seattle mosque and tried to fire a gun at some of its members.
(Seattle Times/Detroit Free Press)

16) A 57-year-old Punjabi man was shot in Yuba City, California. Several cars of Punjabis were vandalized as well.
(Masala.com chatroom)

17) A student of either Indian or Middle Eastern origin was attacked on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Other colleges have reported similar stories of their students under attack.
(MTV News & Seattle Times)

18) The Islamic Institute of New York received a telephone call threatening the school’s 450 students. The male caller said he was going to paint the streets with the children’s blood. The school is closed, but continues to receive several threats a day.
(Seattle Times/Detroit Free Press)

19) A mosque in Denton, Texas, was firebombed, and another in Lynnwood, Wash. had its sign defaced with black paint.
(New York Times: 9/14)

20) In Bridgeview, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, police stopped 300 marchers–many of them teenagers–as they tried to march on a mosque on Wednesday night. Marcher Colin Zaremba, 19, told The Associated Press, “I’m proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have.”
(Seattle Times & Detroit Free Press/ Reuters: Chicago)

21) 43 percent of Americans said they thought the attacks would make them “personally more suspicious” of people who appear to be of Arab descent.
(ABCNEWS/ Washington Post poll: 9/13)

22) 10 people were removed from an Amtrak train in Providence, R.I., on Wednesday, and held by the police and questioned for an hour and 40. Sher J. B. Singh, a telecommunications consultant, was one of three Sikh men escorted from the train at gunpoint, handcuffed and questioned about whether he had anything to do with the terrorism. The others held all appeared to be of Arab or South Asian descent, said Mr. Singh and Meera Kumar, a financial services officer at the Ford Motor Company, who was also held by the police. Those detained included a Hispanic and an African- American. “They broadcast four Arabic males, so four Arabic males is what we are looking for,” Colonel Sullivan said.
(September 14, 2001/New York Times)

23) An Indian girl was beaten to death in Long Island…Suspects are supposedly in custody.
(Masala.com chatroom)

24) From Texas to Chicago to Long Island, there have been reports of arson, personal attacks and the police stopping men in Middle Eastern-style head coverings.
(New York Times: 9/14)

25) In suburban Cleveland, Sukhwant Singh, a Sikh priest who lives at the Guru Gobind Sikh temple, awakened early Wednesday to find bottles filled with gasoline hurled in the temple’s windows and flames pouring out.
(New York Times: 9/14)

26) In Louisiana, schools in Jefferson Parish were closed on Wednesday after officials reported that students of Middle Eastern origin were being taunted and harassed.
(New York Times: 9/14)

27) On Long Island, a market in Smithtown owned by a native of Pakistan was the target of what the police considered a probable arson attack Wednesday morning. The entire store was burned to the ground.
(New York Times: 9/14)

28) In Ronkonkoma, a man was arrested on suspicion of waving a pellet gun and shouting obscenities at a South Asian gas station worker.
(New York Times: 9/14)

29) Early Wednesday in Manhattan, a Sikh man said he was pounced on by three white men yelling “terrorist” at Broadway and 52nd Street.
(New York Times: 9/14)

30) On Wednesday morning, three Sikh men waiting at Grand Central Terminal for a Connecticut-bound train were stopped and had their bags searched by the police.
(New York Times: 9/14)

31) In Denton, Texas, a Molotov cocktail fashioned out of a beer bottle was tossed at a mosque and Islamic school, a day after windows were shot out at a similar Islamic center near Dallas.
(Reuters/Chicago)

32) In New York’s Kennedy airport, law enforcement officers searched passengers boarding an American Airlines flight who appeared to be of Arab decent. “Anyone with dark skin or who spoke with an accent was taken aside and searched,” one passenger said. “And they went to any male with too much facial hair.”
(NY Times & MSNBC.com)

33) An Islamic information service reported that a bag of pig blood was left on the doorstep of an Islamic community center in San Francisco.
(Reuters/Chicago)

34) An Islamic center in Ohio received menacing messages and a bullet was fired through one window.
(Toledo Blade & Reuters/Chicago)

35)One Muslim woman said she, her husband and their eight children endured a night of terror when an angry mob rose outside of their home in Oak Lawn, Ill. The woman, who asked not to be identified out of fear, said “We had people riding up and down our block shouting obscenities. ‘Go home you bleeping ragheads, bleeping a-rabs, we’re gonna get you.’” My husband and I stayed up all night guarding the windows,” she added. “My husband is of Arab descent. He gave four years of his life in the U.S. Navy … to have some skinhead with an American flag screaming at your house.”

She said the family was afraid to call the police because it would single out their house, adding that other Muslim families in the neighborhood were considering whether they should leave the area Thursday evening.
(Reuters/Chicago)

36) Police in northern Indiana were investigating several other hate crimes.
(Reuters/Chicago & MSNBC.com)

37) A Pakistani Muslim store owner was shot and killed in Dallas Saturday evening.
(MSNBC)

38) The FBI has initiated 40 hate crime investigations involving reported attacks on Arab American citizens and institutions.
(MSNBC)

39) In Palos Hills, Ill., two Muslim girls were beaten at Moraine Valley College.

40) In Evansville, Ind., a man driving 80 miles an hour rammed his car into a mosque. In both cases, police arrested suspects.
(MSNBC)

41) Damage was reported at another Arab-owned gasoline station in Indiana, as well as at a restaurant owned by a native of Jordan, where windows were broken and the windows of a parked car were shot out.
(Reuters/Chicago)

42) At Jacksonville State University, tensions over the terrorist attacks have extended beyond the Islamic students. Students from abroad with dark complexions, including one Brazilian woman, reported hostile looks, snide comments and fearing for their safety.
(MSNBC)

43) Muslim schools in several areas have canceled their classes as a precaution against threats and reported violence.
(Reuters/Chicago)

44) In Alexandria, Virginia, Hazim Barakat, a native of Jerusalem who came to the United States 11 years ago, said he arrived to open his Islamic bookstore the day after the attack to find windows shattered with note-bound bricks. “You come to this country to kill our people. We want to kill you” and “Death to the Arab murderers,” read the notes, according to Barakat, a U.S. citizen.
(Reuters/Chicago)

45) The LAPD said 8 hate incidents have been reported in the city of Los Angeles, including four that have been classified as hate crimes–2 cases of vandalism; one assault with a deadly weapon, in which a gun was put to a woman’s face; and an “annoying” phone call to the Southern California Islamic Center. Four other incidents involved racial epithets and slurs but were not classified as hate crimes.
(Los Angeles Times)

46) Two students at Pierce College in Woodland Hills wrote “die” on a Persian Club booth on campus. An altercation ensued between the suspects and one or two students, but the victims did not press charges.
(Los Angeles Times)

47) At the University of Southern California, some Muslim students have been harassed and some Muslim women have had their veils pulled off, according to Sarah Eltantawi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
(Los Angeles Times)

48) Some Jewish Americans express fears of being targeted for blame that this terrorism stems from continuing US support for Israel.
(Seattle & Detroit Free Press/ Reuters: Chicago)

49) Arab-Americans have been singled out in airports for searches by security agents and assaulted by thugs, according to published reports. The Internet has also become a hotbed for the harassment of Arab-Americans.
(MSNBC.com)

50) Fairfax County police are investigating two weekend bias crimes they say may be linked to the terror attacks.
(MSNBC)

51) The Windows 2000 French-language spell-checker suggests replacing “anti-stress” with the word “anti-arab.” The head of Microsoft’s European and Middle East operations said on Wednesday the problem should be fixed in “a few weeks” and that customers would be offered a new version free of charge.
(Reuters)

Filed Under: News, Operations Tagged With: , ,
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