"What are you looking at, terrorist bitch?"
So said a surly gentleman on a Manhattan-bound subway to my sister, whoviolated the rules of overcrowded-island etiquette by stealing a glance at himas he discussed the pros and cons of prejudice.
Ordinarily, racist slurs would make her angry. As it was, having just watchedstricken people jump from burning towers to their certain deaths, her eyesfilled with tears and she hurried off the train.
A few days later, some thugs visited my cousin's convenience store/gasstation, demanding "Where are you people from?" and "Why don'tyou have a flag up?" My cousin rushed out and bought two gigantic flags andinstalled them prominently on his house and the store.
At least five South Asian or Middle Eastern Americans have been slain so farand dozens of incidents of harassment, intimidation, and terror have beenreported, against Arab-Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, Pakistanis, and other Southand West Asians, according to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
In Mesa, Arizona, a Sikh man was shot, the suspect shouting "I stand forAmerica all the way" as he was handcuffed. In Los Angeles, an EgyptianAmerican man was shot; a Persian woman was beaten; a gun was shoved into anotherwoman's face; a Spanish-speaking woman was attacked after being told "youforeigners caused all this trouble!"; and another was attacked after beingtold "America is only for white people."
In San Francisco, a bag of blood was thrown on the doorstep of animmigrant-services center. In Chicago, 300 people waving flags and shouting"USA! USA!" tried to march into a mosque; a firebomb was tossed intoan Arab-American community center; and a Morrocan man was attacked with amachete.
In New York, two Pakistanis were killed on Coney Island, a Sikh man wasattacked with a baseball bat; two others attacked with a paint-ball gun; anotherwas fired upon with rubber bullets; a taxi driver was pulled out of his cab andbeaten; and a Pakistani woman was chased by a car, whose driver threatened tokill her for "destroying my country."
In Cleveland, a Sikh temple was attacked with lit bottles of gasoline. InTulsa, a Pakistani was beaten by three men. In Dallas, a Pakistani grocer wasshot dead; elsewhere in the state shots and firebombs were lobbed at mosques,and a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Islamic Society building.
There have been others. Most of those who suffer such attacks won't reportthem. They'll just hide, lay low, wear baseball caps or bindis, as the Indianconsul-general advised, and pray they won't be targeted again. As word spreads,their friends and families will do the same. Even my liberal family says Ishouldn't take my small boys to the anti-war rallies, because they have brownskin, hair and eyes, and even Muslim names. What if they are targeted? What ifsomeone throws a rock?
Hate crimes hotlines have been set up, and I hope anyone who witnesses orsuffers harassment or violence will use them, at least so this wave of violencecan be accurately recorded for posterity. For anti-Asian violence organizations,calling these episodes of domestic terror "hate crimes" is tragicallyunderstated. For the news media and administration officials, however, it isoffensively, dangerously hypocritical. These are not just isolated actscommitted by crazed individuals, driven mad by fear and trauma. This wave ofviolence is a necessary extension of today's warmongering patriotism as definedby our political and media elites.
"There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this,"said former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on CNN, "and that isyou have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involvedin this thing." "People like this need to feel pain," saidNational Review editor Rich Lowry in the Washington Post. "This is no timeto be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in thisparticular terrorist attack," wrote syndicated columnist Ann Coulter in theNew York Daily News.
In other words, indiscriminate revenge, whether on millions of Afghans oragainst some random brown person on the subway, is what flag-waving patriotsmust do. "They" need to be punished, commentators say, whoever"they" may be. On a recent episode of PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer,even the learned commentators couldn't or wouldn't distinguish between Arabs,Muslims, Afghans (who are not Arabs), fundamentalists, and terrorists. All werejust simply "they."
It must be clear to most now. "We" are white. "They" arebrown. "They" celebrated--not only in Palestine, as the news mediawould have us believe, but also in Pakistan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere. This istaken as evidence of their inhumanity. But of course when the jocks in thesports bar in my old neighborhood cheered when Scud missiles hit Iraq years ago,that was good old red-blooded Americanism in action. "They" hate"us" not because of our government's violence and arrogance, butbecause…well, because "we" are so damn great. Because we are somodern, so advanced, so free, and so rich.
How sad to have to say that all of this is nothing compared to the carnage ofthe plane attacks, and will be entirely insignificant compared to the massive,sustained slaughter of innocent people that Bush is threatening. Bush's tepidresponse to the wave of anti-Asian violence at home was to say that theperpetrators should be "ashamed" of themselves. Ashamed? Like how youfeel when you steal a cookie from a baby? Like how you feel when you think youmight be reproached? Will Bush be "ashamed" when his bombs kill, maim,and further impoverish desperate men, women and children in South and West Asia?
Polls Paint Public Opinion Red
And who is this "we" who hate some unspecified, brown"them" so much and are so willing to forego all the rules andprocedures usually insisted upon (for even the most disgusting, murderousAmerican thug) in order to hunt "them" down and kill them…whoever"they" are?
A spate of polls paid for and trumpeted by the warmongering news media in thetwo weeks following the September 11th attacks told us who. They are us.
But these polls asked loaded questions to handfuls of people who by anymeasure were still in shock. Their "findings" intensified in eachre-telling, as reporters referred to them in their articles, columnists referredto the articles, and letter writers referred to the columnists. The sense ofwidespread blood-thirst calcified into a basic truism rationalizing the rush towar.
Although most news reports on public support for war simply cited"numerous polls" or some such, most referred to the two ongoing,nationally representative polling efforts on this topic--by CBS News/New YorkTimes and by Gallup/CNN/USA Today. Both circumscribed and contained people'spotential responses to paint a portrait of a vengeful, angry America, one thatwill support Bush's war in South Asia and not coincidentally, sell a fewnewspapers too.
Questions aren't neutral. Their timing and wording reveal the questioners'expectations and assumptions. Gallup's and CBS News's crude questions seemdesigned to gauge the extent of U.S. rage and vengeance and couldn't havecaptured a complex, nuanced perspective even if they wanted to.
For instance, on the dark evening of the attacks themselves, CBS pollsterscalled 402 shell-shocked people and asked them the following incendiaryquestions. "Are these attacks another Pearl Harbor? they wanted to know."Should the U.S. retaliate even if innocent people are killed?" About6 in 10 said yes, 2 said no, and 2 said…well whatever they said wentunrecorded.
Then the interviewers went on to goad people into apportioningblame--at least toward the two immediate culprits they could think of."Should U.S. intelligence have known about the attacks?" they asked."Could the attacks have been prevented by tighter airport security?"And then, click, interview over. The "findings"--two-thirds ofAmericans want retaliation even if innocents are killed, as they put it--weretrumpeted eagerly. "America Wants Retaliation" their headlineproclaimed.
The next day, our intrepid pollsters bothered another 638 people. Do you feelbad? Do you feel angry? Horrified? Or shocked? pollsters asked. Assuming eachrespondent picked just one answer (a big assumption, unilluminated by CBS's pollwebsite), about 80 percent felt one of those ways.
So how did the other 20 percent feel? Nobody asked. (How about scared? Howabout sad? That's how I felt.)
About 25 percent said they were angry, and despite the fact that pollstershad no idea how many people would have said they were angry the previous day(it's within the realm of possibility that some portion of Americans are alwaysangry)--CBS announced that "Americans are no longer shocked, they'reangry." Seventy-one percent wanted retaliation, they found.
Over the next two days--Thursday September 13 and Friday September 14--ourpollsters again took to the phones. They demanded answers from 959 people. Theyasked essentially the same questions, except this time they added a new one.
"Are Arab Americans more sympathetic to terrorists?" they wanted toknow.
Twenty-seven percent said yes, CBS noted ominously.
(But this is a meaningless question, by itself. Which terrorists? Irish ones?Sympathetic how? Like they know how to pronounce their names? Like they knowwhere they are coming from? Like they'd give them loads of cash and theirpassport? What?)
The Gallup Organization, "one of the world's leading managementconsulting firms" according to their website, in partnership with USA Todayand CNN have also been conducting ongoing much-cited national polling. Theyasked much the same questions that CBS did, with much the same results, but theyalso wanted to know how many people attended memorial services, cried, displayeda flag, or prayed in response to the attacks.
How many wrote letters to their editors? How many gave flowers to theirMuslim neighbors? How many attended peace rallies? Gallup won't say. The unaskedgoes unanswered.
Since my whole argument here is that these polls are worse than useless, itmay not be fair to note one underreported finding. When asked whether the U.S.should act immediately against known terrorists or only against thoseresponsible, over sixty percent said that only the proven perpetrators should betargeted.
Doesn't that just blow all the other findings about wanting war,indiscriminate revenge, and all the rest of it out of the water?
Gallup's and CBS News' numbers frighten me. But I'm going to try not to makemuch of them either way. As a statistician friend of mine who used to work atHarris Polls says, "polling companies burn through hundreds if notthousands of phone numbers to get the sample sizes they need. But there isprobably good reason to think people who refuse to participate, who aren't home,who don't answer the phone, who don't have phones would respond quitedifferently from those people who do participate."
"In other words the samples are not truly representative of the Americanpublic," he says.
That's good to hear.
(Sonia Shah is a writer and editor of "Dragon Ladies: Asian-AmericanFeminists Breathe Fire" (South End Press, 1997. The above appears byarrangement with Zmag).
