The knock on his neighbor’s door upset Niaz Hussain the most.
More than the invasive questions about which mosque he attends and his level of religious observance, the FBI’s accidental visit to the house next door left the Pakistani native feeling the sting of humiliation.
“They look at me very, very funny any time I’m walking by,” Hussain said of the family that lives next to him in Berwyn. “They look at me like, `Why is the FBI after me?’ The whole neighborhood looks at me funny.”
In the spotlight again amid heightened terror alerts, revelations of government efforts to track them and high-profile arrests, Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. are feeling the pinch of negative publicity and wondering if they will ever stop feeling like they are under a microscope.
In the last few weeks, police have arrested several Muslims in separate alleged terror-related incidents. The most recent high-profile arrest came Friday in Chicago, when Muhammad Salah, 51, of Bridgeview was charged, along with two other men, with helping to raise money for Hamas, a militant Islamist Palestinian group based in the Gaza Strip.
And the FBI has intensified voluntary interviews of Arabs and Muslims in advance of the November elections.
Even more troubling to activists, the U.S. Census Bureau twice gave demographic information about Arabs–including ZIP codes and nations of origin–to the Department of Homeland Security, officials acknowledged in July. The revelation sent shivers up spines in a community already fearful of being rounded up like Japanese-Americans were during World War II.
“People feel very vulnerable,” said Ali Abu Nimah, an activist with the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based advocacy group. “I don’t think that most people think their door is about to be broken down. But it creates an air of uncertainty.”
Many of Chicago’s Arabs and Muslims said they have little sympathy for suspects arrested in alleged terrorism plots like the two leaders of a mosque in Albany, N.Y., fingered in a sting operation involving the sale of a shoulder-fired missile.
“For me, it’s like: `Here we go again,'” said Itedal Shalabi, a community activist who wears the hijab, the coat and scarf worn by Muslim women. “We don’t know who’s who anymore [in our own community].”
But Shalabi and others said they worry a climate of fear created by the arrests, media coverage and constant terror alerts has made otherwise innocuous actions seem sinister.
They point to the recent case of 13 Syrian musicians whose rambunctious behavior aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles scared the crew into calling federal agents and police to meet the plane at the gate. A passenger later wrote an article on a Web site that described the fear caused by the musicians’ odd-shaped bags and repeated trips to the bathroom.
The Syrians were interviewed by authorities and released, and FBI spokesmen have since confirmed that the men were not engaged in terrorist activity. But the incident got plenty of play on conservative TV and radio stations, casting a suspicion on the men amid the passenger’s insistence that she had witnessed a terrorist “dry-run.”
“I’m really sad to see that three years [after Sept. 11, 2001], we’re still where we’re at,” Shalabi said.
Many Muslims and Arabs–including Christian Arabs–said they haven’t changed their routine. If they’re Muslim, they still wear Muslim dress and pack copies of the Koran on airplanes. They still fly where they need to go.
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But they’re constantly aware that their behavior can arouse suspicion. When a Pakistani Muslim shot footage of a bank in downtown Charlotte, N.C., police detained him. Then they discovered tapes that showed the man had also shot scenes of a Texas dam and public transportation systems in several Southern states. Authorities still have not determined whether his actions were the work of a terrorist or a video buff.
To Shalabi, that’s not the point.
“The other day, I was downtown and there was a couple taking pictures of the Sears Tower and I was thinking, what if it was me?” she said.
Arab and Muslim groups in the United States were outraged recently when they discovered that the Census Bureau had passed data to the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and 2003 detailing concentrations of Arabs by ZIP code and divulging their countries of origin.
The government wanted the information to make Arabic language signs at international airport hubs, said officers at the Customs and Border Protection office of the Department of Homeland Security. But to some, the request signaled the first step in a possible nightmare in which the government rounds them up.
“The rationales that this particular administration gives for some of these draconian and unconstitutional measures they’ve taken are just laughable,” said Junaid Afeef, a Chicago lawyer on the board of the Muslim Bar Association.
Afeef has represented several Muslim and Arab clients questioned by the FBI, which has stepped up interviews based on ongoing investigations and not as a result of a new round of questioning, an FBI spokeswoman said. Afeef said his clients have fared well during questioning that centered on such things as the content of sermons at mosques and rumors about future terrorist attacks.
And he said he had heard of incidents in which federal agents knocked on doors at night and drew the suspicion of the neighbors.
When FBI agents visited Hussain in Berwyn six weeks ago, they came to his neighbor’s house because that is where Hussain lived until he sold it and moved next door.
The neighbors called Hussain’s wife and told them the FBI was looking for him, he said. He drove home from work to answer their questions, but he still doesn’t know why the agents sought to question him among Chicago’s roughly 400,000 Muslims.
Maybe it’s because of his name, he said.
“Maybe it’s weird to them,” he said. “My last name is Hussain.”