In Detroit, the ‘Ellis Island’ for Arabs, Racial Tensions Simmer

An Arab-American community center is burned, twice. A couple returns home from their mosque to find “Go back” scrawled in shoe polish on their walls and carpet.

“They put sludge in my pita bread, took my lunch meat out. They wrote (a racial epithet) on my time card,” said Lebanese-American Fred Abbas, a Wayne County sewer plant worker who won $500,000 in a discrimination suit. The county is seeking a new trial.

But, nationally, anti-Arab sentiments are dwindling as people stop stereotyping Arab-Americans. So says Faris Bouhafa of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, which represents 2.5 million people.

In the early years of their immigration, Arab-Americans of their many nationalities tended to cluster together as other ethnic groups did. But as they fanned out over the country, the second and third generations, acquiring education, tended to assimilate, although keeping their ethnic devotion to regional culinary tastes, from lamb dishes to pita bread.

Sense of Identity

Now, some Arab-American experts say, the Lebanese and Palestinian havoc and the violence throughout the Middle East have reawakened a sense of identity.

In greater Detroit, home by most counts to about 250,000 Arab-Americans, the largest concentration in North America, the immigrants keep coming and tensions remain, according to Terry Ahwal, a board member on the ADC’s Detroit chapter and a Catholic who emigrated from Palestine to the United States in 1972 when she was 15.

Of the 22 Arab nations, most immigrants here are from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine-Jordan, Yemen and the Chaldea, the ancient area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that constituted Babylon. Some Arabs are Christians; others practice Islam. The Chaldeans are Roman Catholics from Iraq.

“Detroit is the Ellis Island of the Arab community. At first, it was economics--the car industry gave jobs to lots of unskilled people. And people bring families,” said Ahwal, whose chapter received threatening letters after a bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 in December, 1988, in Scotland.

“We always get threats. It’s normal. It’s a comedy here. We pass them around and laugh,” said Ismael Ahmed, director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, better known as ACCESS.

ACCESS, founded in 1971, moved into its third home in Dearborn last summer. The first two burned, said Ahmed, who blames arsonists. “I think people are frightened. Whole blocks become Arab very quickly,” said the Brooklyn-born Ahmed, who is Lebanese-Egyptian.

Each year, 3,000 to 10,000 Arabs land in Detroit, many from Lebanon.

And they are faced with problems.

The No. 1 issue is unemployment because of the language. “Most come from villages that have lived the same way for hundreds of years,” Ahmed said. “Their skills aren’t very transferable.”

But that was so when the first immigrants arrived. Their basic talents were agricultural and mercantile, so they took jobs at anything from grocery stores to peddling pots and pans in rural areas.

Arab immigration to the United States began with a trickle more than 100 years ago. When peddlers found business good, they stayed. A wave came from the Lebanon region after 1900, some to escape the crumbling Ottoman Empire’s oppression. In 1919, emigres built the nation’s first mosque, in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park.

“I think the thing that attracted people to this area was it was a nice place to live,” said Henry Saad, a Bloomfield Hills lawyer and a third-generation Lebanese.

The thousands who followed them to greater Detroit were lured by auto-industry wages.

“Detroit was booming. The real question is why they continue to come here,” said Nabeel Abraham, an anthropologist at Henry Ford Community College. “These people wouldn’t be here except for the war. . . . That’s my suspicion.

“One of the factors making Detroit different is we have this constant influx of immigrants and they pull you back from assimilation,” Abraham said. “They’re always trying to re-create home.”

Newer immigrants create some stress in Dearborn, dotted with Arabic coffeehouses, restaurants and markets and home to about 20,000 Arabs. “Their view of Islam often differs from the others,” he said, recalling one mosque whose congregation was made up of assimilated, longtime Arab immigrants.

“Now you go back and it looks like a scene out of southern Lebanon,” Abraham said. Arab Christians also maintained their own churches and many still do.

New arrivals come to join families here, or seek comfort in a place with the familiarity of their homeland. But they find life harder than did their predecessors.

‘They Need Everything’

“What you see is Hollywood. Go to America, the land of milk and honey. It’s not any more. It’s totally different than what they were told,” said Haifa Fakhouri, director of the Arab-American and Chaldean Communities Social Services.

At ACCESS, more than 16,000 families last year received English lessons and help with immigration, jobs, medical care, clothing and housing. “The problem is, they need everything,” Ahmed said.

“Twenty-five percent unemployment in Detroit is better than getting your head busted,” said George Moses, past president of the National Assn. of Arab Americans, the only registered lobbying group for immigrants and their descendants. “America has been good to Arab-Americans.”

As earlier immigrants join the mainstream, they say they are less tied to the diverse Arab community. But Arab antipathy does not make distinctions between the various nations, religions or cultures. Ties that bind include fighting discrimination or problems in their homeland.

“You get a crisis, like a war in the Middle East, people pull together, but it’s temporal,” Abraham said.

“There is a general feeling of pan-Arabism. One, they have a culture, a history, a background worth preserving. And there is a feeling that Arabs haven’t gotten a fair shake. And third, there’s a feeling that we’re under attack--stereotyping.”

Tired of Stereotypes

Stereotyping is blamed for unconfirmed reports that Nazir Jaafar of Dearborn may have unwittingly carried the bomb that caused the Pan Am crash, Ahwal said. Intimidations, such as last year’s scrawlings at the Arab couple’s home, increased in greater Detroit this year, she said.

“The terrorist--it goes with Arab--they’ll put it in the dictionary: Arab terrorist. There are no other terrorists,” said Osama Siblani, who created a bilingual newspaper in 1984 because she “was tired of being portrayed as a camel jockey.”

“I was in Beirut when American-made jets were bombing my hometown. And I hated Americans. But when I came, I saw a different story,” said Siblani, who emigrated after attending college in Michigan 12 years ago.

Siblani, like national ADC officials, believes Arabs are more accepted than a few years ago.

‘Humanizing’ Process

“It’s partly education efforts of organizations like ours,” and also because media coverage of the Palestine uprising “has humanized it” in the last 18 months, Bouhafa said.

The ADC discontinued its yearly violence report. Its 1986 report found the most incidents in Michigan, followed by California, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Southern California has the second-largest Arab-American concentration, and another large population is in New York.

Raising public consciousness was one goal when the ADC was founded in 1980 after outrage over “Abscam,” the FBI corruption investigation that had agents posing as wealthy sheiks offering bribes to congressmen.

Famous Arab-Americans

The ADC and NAAA are quick to point out well-known Arab-Americans: F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Wolfgang Mozart’s jealous rival composer in the movie “Amadeus,” U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), actor Danny Thomas, heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, radio’s Casey Kasem, poet Kahlil Gibran, Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Doug Flutie, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and teen pop singer Tiffany. In early days, many well-known Arab-Americans tended to play down their ethnicity, to fade into the fabric of society.

“Now it’s spinning, it’s going to take off. We just had an Arab-American appointed in the White House,” Siblani said, referring to White House chief of staff John Sununu, whose grandfather was Lebanese. “They’re starting right now, the American public, to realize we’re part of the salad bowl. We will add to the texture of this country, a new ingredient.”