Loyalty Questioned : U.S. Arabs Close Ranks Over Bias

Ever since their forefathers came from the poverty-racked lands of the Middle East a century ago, they have been America’s invisible minority, a people whose heritage has made them vulnerable and often the subject of ridicule.

Their ranks include an unusually high number of successful professionals--among them heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, author William P. Blatty, football star Doug Flutie, poet Kahlil Gibran and the United States’ first wartime jet ace, Col. James Jabara. Yet for the country’s 2.5 million Arab-Americans, their ethnic identity remains a liability, not because of what they are but because of how America perceives Arabs and the problems of the Middle East.

In Boston an executive whose grandparents came from Lebanon dares not mention that behind his Anglo-Saxon name is an Arab ancestry for fear business will suffer.

In Los Angeles, a Syrian-American active in Middle East affairs, checks under his car for bombs after coming out of a restaurant one night and notes: “I may be paranoid but I’m also careful.”

‘Don’t Speak Arabic’

In Detroit, Hanan Warah, a Palestinian-American, hears her 6-year-old son say: “Please, Mommy, don’t speak Arabic when my friends are around. It makes them tease me.”

“Sometimes,” says Palestinian-born Terry Ahwal, who runs the Detroit office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “what people seem to be subtly questioning is my loyalty. I tell them my sister is in the Marines, that I’m in the police reserves, that almost everyone I know is active in the community, trying to make this a better country. And then if I then say I was against bombing Libya, they say, ‘Ah, see, that’s because it’s an Arab country. That’s your allegiance.’ ”

Ahwal’s office door bears the name of a fictitious company, a security precaution taken in October, 1985, when ADC offices around the country received bomb threats after Palestinian terrorists seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Killed by Bomb

In some places there were more than threats: Alex Odeh, ADC’s West Coast coordinator, was killed by a bomb planted in his Santa Ana office in October, 1985. Two months before Odeh’s murder, which the FBI labeled “a terrorist act,” a policeman was killed trying to defuse a bomb outside the ADC’s Boston office. Arsonists that year also damaged the ADC’s Washington headquarters, a Houston mosque and the Washington office of the United Palestinian Appeal.

In Detroit, ADC’s Ahwal keeps a file of what she calls her love letters. The first one, unsigned, begins: “Dear Arab Dogs: You scum will never be considered American but will always be Arab scum as your tradition is not American and you (expletive deleted) ugly scum have not paid your dues!!”

The irony of such invective is that Arab-Americans represent one of the nation’s more successful and moderate ethnic communities, having slipped unobtrusively into the U.S. mainstream. Now, better organized, better financed, more outspoken Arab-Americans are undergoing a cultural awakening, aware that their numbers alone could give them political influence and the ability to fight the stereotyped portrayal of hook-nosed, jewel-bedecked Arabs plotting nefarious schemes.

The Detroit-Dearborn area has 300,000 residents of Arab heritage, the largest such concentration anywhere outside the Middle East. More Palestinians (130,000) live in the United States than in any country outside the Middle East. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area the Egyptian-American population alone numbers upward of 50,000, and many of them are doctors, university professors and senior business executives. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, 7,000 Yemeni-American laborers form a backbone of the harvest work force. In San Francisco, 400 mom-and-pop grocery stores are run by Palestinian families all from the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Numerous Differences

Arab-Americans, however, have found it difficult to exploit their numbers’ potential because they carry with them the same religious, political and generational differences that divided their ancestors in the Arab homelands. And rather than being able to rally around a single ancestral homeland with a dominant religion, as can American Jews or Irish-Americans, Arab-Americans--about evenly divided between Christians and Muslims--have roots that extend to 22 countries stretching 4,500 miles from the Arabian Peninsula to Morocco’s Western Sahara. Thus, culture and ethnicity, rather than religion or political outlook, provide the focus for community life.

“I think it’s the whole attack on the Arab people the last 15 or 20 years that has awakened us, renewed our interest in our culture,” said Don Unis, a captain with the Dearborn Fire Department. “There was the ’73 (Arab-Israeli) war, then the oil embargo, and suddenly we were being held responsible for things we had nothing to do with and no control over and maybe didn’t even support in the first place. What you’re seeing now is that people who are proud of being American are also finding pride in their Arabness.”

Except for Jesse Jackson, national politicians have shunned the traditionally moderate American-Arab community because--given Israel’s extraordinary popularity in the United States--any Arab association is a political liability.

Campaign Issue

In the 1984 presidential primary campaign, for instance, Walter F. Mondale made an issue of the fact that Gary Hart had funds in Washington’s First American Bank, which was Arab-owned. (Hart withdrew the money.) Mondale even returned $5,000 in contributions he had received from four Arab-Americans. A fifth was returned because the donor’s name sounded Arabic. And a $100 personal check given last year to Joseph Kennedy’s Massachusetts campaign for Congress was promptly returned to James Abourezk of South Dakota, a former U.S. senator of Lebanese descent who is chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. One of Kennedy’s aides, Steve Rothstein, said the gift was too “controversial.”

“I used to brag about being the son of Lebanese immigrants when I first ran for office,” Abourezk said. “Then in ‘73--and you could probably say I was pro-Israeli at that point--I went to the Middle East for the first time and came home with some very different impressions.

“There was a big meeting in Sioux Falls and in front of 500 or 600 people I got into a huge debate with my campaign chairman, Marv Baylin, who turned out to be a Zionist. I was arguing that Israel ought to withdraw to its 1967 boundaries when a farmer in back stands up and says, ‘Why don’t you two settle this tribal fight so we can talk about something important, like hogs.’ So much for foreign policy discussions in South Dakota.”

Abourezk went on to establish the ADC in 1980 after FBI agents, posing as wealthy Arabs, conducted a sting operation code-named Abscam (short for Arab Scam) against congressmen who accepted bribes in return for political favors. (Would the FBI have dared name it Jewscam or Blackscam? Abourezk asked.)

The 15,000-member organization does not accept contributions from any foreign government. It now has 61 chapters in the United States and Canada and has become increasingly successful in countering negative Arab stereotypes, among them the edition of Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus that lists these synonyms for Arab: vagabond, clochard, drifter, floater, hobo, tramp, vagrant.

Under pressure from the ADC--which maintains that the stereotyping of any one ethnic groups represents a potential threat to all ethnic groups--Coleco Corp. of West Hartford, Conn., agreed to discontinue television ads and sell off its inventory of the Arab-styled Nomad doll (who roams “the desert as an outcast. No country will accept this heartless terrorist.”)

A British rock group, The Cure, took the unusual step of writing to 800 U.S. radio stations and asking disc jockeys not to play its song, “Killing an Arab.” (A disc jockey in Princeton, N.J., had introduced the track last year with the words: “Now, here’s a song about killing A-rabs!”)

Hollywood Scripts Altered

Several Hollywood scripts have been altered so that Arabs no longer represented the typical “bad-guy” symbol of evil and treachery, and Columbia Pictures says it will let a group of Arab-Americans pre-screen its $40-million film, “Ishtar,” an adventure-comedy in production about two American businessmen (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty) traveling through the Middle East.

“More than a malicious attempt to demean, it is, I believe, misinformation, no information and laziness on Hollywood’s part that produces the stereotypes,” said radio and television celebrity Kemal Amin (Casey) Kasem, the son of Lebanese immigrants. “Writers and producers are looking for a bad guy and they say, ‘Why look any farther; we already have one--the Arab.’ So in the end they end up maligning about 1 billion Arabs and Muslims, one-quarter of the world’s population.”

The Arabs came to the United States in two waves. The first, between 1880 and 1920, was composed mostly of unskilled, illiterate Syrians and Lebanese Christians, escaping poverty and the harsh rule of the Ottomans. They landed jobs in the textile mills of New England, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and on the assembly lines of Detroit. Others became peddlers and tradesmen in a hundred small American towns.

Found Tolerance, Opportunity

Although some Americans referred to them as Turks or even Chinese and South Carolina backed legislation in the early 1900s that would have denied citizenship to Arabs, they generally found tolerance and opportunity in their adopted home, and they did what most immigrants before them had done: They assimilated.

With the birth of Israel in 1948 and political turmoil in the Middle East that continues to this day, the second wave came. Unlike their forefathers, who had often changed their Arabic names and forbade the speaking of Arabic at home in an attempt to be as American as the Americans, the new immigrants brought with them a sense of the unique Arab culture and a nationalism, centered on Palestine or the pre-Nasser Egypt or a peaceful Lebanon when it was a nation instead of just a place.

They were often the educated elite of their societies, and they melded easily into integrated neighborhoods and university positions and an American life style.

But as a group, they paid a price for the misdeeds of a small minority thousands of miles away. “All the violence we have seen here is linked to what is happening in the Middle East,” said Dr. Maher Hathout, an Egyptian-born cardiologist in Pasadena and former director of the Los Angeles Islamic Center. The center has hired guards and put in a security system following bomb threats, a fire that broke out at 3 o’clock one morning and repeated vandalism.

‘This Is Home’

“When things are quiet in the Mideast, we have no problem; if they are tense, so are we,” Hathout said. “On three occasions someone has put graffiti on the walls, saying, ‘Arabs Go Home.’ I was tempted to put on my own graffiti, saying, ‘This is home.’ ”

The FBI has yet to arrest anyone in the killing of Alex Odeh, but in a speech two months after the murder, the bureau’s director, William H. Webster, told the Washington Press Club that “Arab individuals or those supporting Arab points of view have come within the zone of danger, targeted by a group as of yet to be fully identified and brought to justice.”

Referring to Jewish extremist groups, he said some Arab-Americans had become targets of a conspiracy aimed at “enemies of Israel.”

Last August, the House subcommittee on Criminal Justice held hearings on ethnically motivated attacks against Arab-Americans. One of its findings was that discrimination against Arab-Americans takes an unusual form. Unlike most other minorities, Arab-Americans seldom encounter hostility as individuals in either personal or professional life. But as a group--as a symbol of a distant people in a turbulent region--they are vulnerable to both vilification and violence.

‘I’m Proud’ of U.S. Citizenship

“I’ve got my United States citizenship and I’m very proud of that--I married a girl from here, from Portland--but I’ve always been proud of my Arab identity too,” said San Francisco businessman Raffoul Assily, who left what had been Palestine in 1948 at the age of 20 after being jailed briefly by the Israelis.

“The way I see it, well, let’s face it, Israel gets whatever it wants from the United States. There’s nothing I can do about that. But that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t serve anyone’s interests to put any one people in a position where they’re viewed as a stereotype.

“You know, people look at me and say, ‘Why, you don’t look like an Arab.”’ Assily has white hair, a gray mustache and wears immaculately tailored dark suits. “And I say, ‘Well, what’s an Arab meant to look like?’ ”