Bias Against U.S. Arabs Taking Subtler Forms

Muhammed El-Nasleh wrote it off as a stupid joke when a few co-workers at McDonald’s started asking him why his “cousins” bombed the World Trade Center. But when his boss picked up on the banter, the Inland Empire teenager was flush with anger.

“Hey Muhammed, we’re going to have to check you for bombs,” El-Nasleh said the manager told him--both behind closed doors and in front of other workers. “I felt like I was being targeted. It was humiliating. Some things just aren’t funny.”

Things got worse. Days later, El-Nasleh said, he was fired after he accidentally threw away a paper cup that the manager was using. McDonald’s management, unable to corroborate his account, says he was let go for “performance deficiencies.” The Fontana high school senior suspects it was because he is a Muslim.

Whether misunderstandings or outright discrimination, such episodes are happening more frequently in a trend that is worrying human rights advocates and law enforcement officials. Five months after the Sept. 11 attacks, an initial spasm of random violence against Arab Americans has dropped off dramatically, but allegations of subtler and more pervasive forms of discrimination are spiking sharply, records and interviews show.

Reports of violence and hate crimes “have dwindled to almost none” in the last few months, Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Ralph F. Boyd Jr., the nation’s chief civil rights enforcer, said in an interview. But in schools, workplaces, housing complexes and airports, Arab Americans around the country are reporting harassment and discrimination in record numbers.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has received 260 claims of discrimination in the workplace from Muslims since Sept. 11, an increase of 168% over the same period a year earlier. Other government agencies in Washington and California also report sharp increases, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of several advocacy groups that is tracking the Sept. 11 “backlash,” says it has received more than 1,700 reports of public harassment, school confrontations, ethnic slurs, job bias, hate mail, threats and other claims of discrimination. California led the way with 315 complaints.

A phalanx of public and private interests has mobilized to determine the extent of the problem.

California has created a hotline to take complaints. Communities around the state have held interfaith worship services, and corporations have held training seminars to highlight the dangers. Islamic advocacy groups have been tracking bias complaints and meeting with government officials to pass on their findings. The Justice Department has created a task force to track the backlash. And the EEOC has even created a special classification, Code Z, to designate complaints tied to Sept. 11 and begin investigating them.

But as aggressively as many agencies are working, some civil rights experts suspect that the actual instances of bias may be much higher than the numbers suggest. Many Arab Americans, experts say, are reluctant to bring formal complaints because of cultural and language barriers--and the fear of getting swept up in the FBI’s terrorism investigation.

“There’s a perception in the community that if you report a hate crime, you’re treated as a perpetrator, a suspect, and you’re opening yourself up to questioning,” said Ghada Saliba-Malouf, chairwoman of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission.

Arab Americans both prominent and obscure have complained recently of harassment based on their religion or ethnicity, with many of those incidents involving claims of bias that may be difficult if not impossible to prove.

* An Arab American Secret Service agent assigned to President Bush’s security detail is removed from a flight after the pilot questions his credentials.

* A congressman of Lebanese descent, Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), is denied a seat on a flight to Saudi Arabia.

* A Pakistani neurologist in Fresno is thrown out of a barbershop--with his hair half cut--after he tells his stylist that he doesn’t want to talk about Osama bin Laden.

* A California employee is allegedly fired without explanation after her boss tells her not to reveal to anyone that her husband is Palestinian.

* A New York City nurse is ordered to take some time off and given a lesser position “for her own safety” after she reports that a co-worker threatened to “kill Muslims.”

“Sometimes what we’re seeing is an out-and-out hostility, an attitude that ‘we don’t need any Arabs here,’ ” said Hodan Hassan, civil rights coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.

“But there’s also an awful lot of understandable anxiety out there--the ‘terrorists among us’ theme. People want to be the eyes and ears of the government, to focus on possible threats, and a lot of people are much quicker these days to [suspect] a Muslim,” Hassan said.

Fred Persily, executive director of the California Assn. of Human Relations Organizations, said: “We’re hearing a lot about episodes in the workplace, [Arab Americans] who say they can’t get jobs, can’t get promotions. . . . What’s real clear is that before [Sept. 11] incidents against Islamics were so few and far between as to be off the radar screen altogether. Now they’re surpassing those of most other groups except gays and lesbians.”

Typical are workplace complaints from Muslims and non-Arabs, such as Sikhs, who say they have been encouraged, or even ordered, not to speak Arabic around the workplace and to avoid wearing turbans and other traditional Muslim articles of faith.

Some Arab American workers charge that they have been fired for refusing to do so, while others say they have shaved their beards and changed the way they dress just to keep their jobs.

David Grinberg, a spokesman for the EEOC, said employers may have a lawful and legitimate reason for refusing to allow an employee to wear a turban or a beard--such as the danger that it could become caught in factory machinery and pose a hazard.

But generally speaking, he said, “employers are required to make reasonable accommodations for the religious beliefs of employees, as long as those accommodations don’t pose an undue hardship on business operations. . . . You can’t just say, ‘You have to shave your beard or else we’re going to fire you.’ Otherwise it’s discriminatory.”

Law enforcement officials and civil rights advocates say that the most severe and lethal outbursts of Arab-bashing have waned considerably since September and October.

In those first weeks, as the nation prepared to go to war, reports of violence against Muslims or those perceived to be Arab Americans captured headlines around the country. Arab American groups suspect that as many as a dozen killings may have been hate crimes.

In the most clearly linked killing, an Indian immigrant gas station owner in Phoenix was shot to death days after the Sept. 11 attacks “for no other apparent reason than that he was dark-skinned and wore a turban,” authorities said. The shooter allegedly told police after his arrest: “I’m an American. Arrest me. Let those terrorists run wild.”

But most cases have not been so clear cut. ‘Stores get robbed and owners get murdered, unfortunately, on a regular basis,” said Bob Jordan, head of the FBI’s civil rights section, and determining whether the killer acted out of hatred can be a difficult task.

In the September shooting death in San Gabriel of an Egyptian at the mom-and-pop store he owned, for instance, the FBI began probing a possible hate-crime motive only after an initial round of publicity. That case is still under investigation.

And in the December beating of an Orange County security guard who was left in a coma for five days, authorities have brought attempted murder charges against two suspects but have not established any anti-Muslim motive.

The beating victim, Mohamed Slam, was punched and kicked unconscious while guarding an apartment complex in Costa Mesa but does not remember the attack. However, he and his family are convinced it was a hate crime. “I’m 100% sure it was hate. He had credit cards, a gold bracelet, a watch, and they didn’t touch anything,” said Slam’s wife, Nuha Jaludi.

Federal authorities have opened more than 300 hate-crime investigations related to the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing charges in about 60. But Islamic activists credit the government’s strong public stance against bias as a key factor in stemming the early wave of violence.

From President Bush on down, senior officials in the administration have visited mosques, met with Arab Americans and spoken out forcefully about the need for the nation to show tolerance and respect toward Arab Americans and not engage in Arab-bashing.

“It was important to have the president get out front and say, ‘Hey, these folks are us,’ ” said Boyd of the Justice Department.

But the irony, some Arab American leaders maintain, is that the federal government’s fierce investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks may have fueled the more recent outbreak of bias and discrimination. Activists say law-abiding Muslims are hurt because the government has moved so aggressively against Arab suspects--detaining more than 1,200 people, mostly Arabs with no connection to the attacks; requesting interviews with 5,000 more; and moving to deport 1,000 people from the Middle East and other nations with an active Al Qaeda presence.

Many in law enforcement and the public at large say that the extraordinary events of Sept. 11 demand some sacrifice of civil liberties. But Ra’id Saraj, spokesman for the Southern California chapter of the American-Islamic council, said, “The concern is that, in the process of going after those suspects, we don’t want to see innocent members of the community have their civil rights violated.”