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87 Everybody saw George Bush go to the mosque in Washington, D.C., and take his shoes off and enter the prayer room, the masjid area, as a show of solidarity with the Muslims in this country, and certainly, initially, we all thought that was a really good thing for him to have done and we appreciated that and really looked to him to defend our civil rights. And then it all appeared to be a dog and pony show. As the situation evolved a few weeks later, we started to see Muslims and Arabs just disappearing from the country. Actually they were being arrested, incarcerated, held without charge, without contact, without an attorney, just kind of disappearing. . . . And then, the infamous Patriot Act came into existence and we could actually see in black and white that all those things that George Bush said to us when he was running for office prior to 9/11, about how he was going to do away with profiling, about how he was going to do away with secret evidence, turned out to be a lie. Not only did he not do away with those things, he actually put his attack dog, John Ashcroft, in a position to strengthen those violations of our civil rights as Arab Americans, as Muslim Americans. —Ron Amen, 2005 interview This excerpt is drawn from “The Aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks,” by Sally Howell and Amaney Jamal. The full essay is available in Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 (Detroit Arab American Study Team 2009). This excerpt is reprinted with the permission of the authors and the Russell Sage Foundation, which published the original essay and funded the research on which it was based. Backlash, Part 2 The Federal Law Enforcement Agenda sally howell and amaney jamal 88 Sally Howell and Amaney Jamal When Arab Detroiters talk now about the impact of the 9/11 attacks, their greatest concern, echoing Ron Amen, is the erosion of their civil liberties and the profiling of their communities by law enforcement and the media. They speak of the silencing effect on those who want to criticize Israeli and U.S. policies in the Middle East.1 They worry about the constriction of economic and cultural flows that connect the United States and the Arab world, and the simultaneous expansion of U.S. military campaigns in the Muslim world. It is not always easy to see, but in Washington and in U.S. national media, Arab Americans are portrayed as potential threats to American security and as potential assets in the Bush administration’s campaign to reshape the Middle East and fight theWar onTerror (Hagopian 2003).This situation has yielded a heady mix of opportunity and constraint for Arab Americans, just as it has delivered an especially violent mix of opportunity and destruction to the Arab world. Nowhere in America has the two-edged nature of increased federal attention been more apparent than in Detroit’s well-established and recently arrived Arab communities. If Arab Detroit’s exceptional nature sheltered it from angry, intolerant individuals bent on revenge, did it also protect Arab Americans from ill-informed federal agents who saw culprits and conspirators around every corner? Did it situate Detroit’s Arab organizations to capitalize on new economic and cultural possibilities that followed (and were a part of) the backlash or did it force them to redirect their energies toward defensive educational and legal campaigns? Did it empower Arab Americans to influence policy on the national level now that many Arab ethnic associations were working closely with federal agencies? We will next explore how Detroit has responded to what Hussein Ibish, former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), has described as the Bush administration’s “message” to Arab Americans: “private citizens should not and cannot discriminate against Arabs and Muslims, but we [the federal government] can and will” (Ibish 2003). The Hunt for Terrorists in Detroit Courtrooms In the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and local law enforcement agencies rounded up and detained without charge more than 1,100 Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men as part of Investigation PENTTBOM, which sought out individuals who were suspected, on the most speculative of evidence, of having preknowledge of the 9/11 attacks or of planning additional terror attacks (U.S. Department of Justice 2003). For the most part, these men were held without charges and in complete...

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