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As with all events of great social significance, the horrendous attacks last week have generated the necessary and healing act of remembering through stories. Stories of bravery, grief, terror, and hope. But the stories that are only beginning to be heard, that are destined to burn on this nation's conscience, are in many ways even more frightening. These are stories of ethnic and religious revulsion, stories that threaten to change the psyche and challenge the moral core of this nation.

There are growing reports, nationwide, of physical and verbal harassment of people believed to be Middle Eastern or Islamic, of firebombings at mosques, persecution of school children, assaults in public places, and at least one murder of a South Asian man that appears to have been motivated by a blind desire for revenge. Sadly, these are not just solitary incidents, and
they are not occurring in remote places only. As a tall Pakistani man who would stand out in a police lineup like a sore thumb, I recently observed this increasing fear and intolerance first hand.

Last Sunday, a friend and I arrived early in the waiting area for our American Airlines flight from Palm Springs, CA to Chicago. Two people, a middle-aged gentleman and his younger female companion, arrived a bit later and kept starring at me with almost tangible hatred. We tried to ignore them as best we could. As we were boarding the plane, the couple whispered something to the gate personnel, who asked us to step aside for a minute; apparently we had been seen putting "something suspicious" in our bag. (Our flight coupons, in point of fact.) Airport security was called, and they quickly cleared us. However, when we tried to board the plane, we were told that a frightened flight attendant had refused to fly with me. In a bizarre decision, rather than re-route either the suspicious couple or the paranoid flight attendant, the airline told us to take another flight instead. We finally arrived in Chicago at around 1:00am, about six hours after our original flight.

I have lived in this country for most of my adult life. I am well educated, successful at what I do, and I dress well. There is nothing about me that could frighten anyone in that airport - other than my ethnicity. That I fly regularly for business and have been a valued American Airlines customer
with a high mileage status did not matter. In fact, while apologizing for the `inconvenience,' the American employees also asked us to be understanding of people's fears during these difficult times; in other words, I was refused boarding because of the irrational (after all, security had cleared us) panicking of a few individuals, and then expected to be sympathetic to their fears!

To suspect someone a terrorist because of his ethnicity is racial profiling, pure and simple. To treat a person like a terrorist when one KNOWS this not to be true is the ultimate victory of the terrorist acts of last week.

There is a revulsion towards Middle Eastern and Islamic men in this society, and unfortunately it is not new. Most of mainstream American society has grown up with a threatening stereotype of dark men with an Islamic or Middle Eastern background. Last week's heinous crimes have only brought this stereotype out in the open, and made it just as acceptable as anti-Semitism in early twentieth century Europe, or racism against African Americans more recently in this country.

Such open fear and hatred towards an ethnicity or a religion are sentiments that are all too common around the world; however, Americans take pride in rejecting racism of all forms.
President Bush has made a few gestures towards promoting tolerance at home, but has simultaneously proposed new rules that would limit the rights of millions of legal immigrants in
this country. That goes against the administration's public words that blaming any ethnicity or religion, both within the US and abroad, is unacceptable and contrary to the values of this great nation.

American society has to stand up and face the challenge of intolerance; else the terrorists would indeed have won. Not by demolishing a building or two, not by killing a few thousand innocent people or by crippling the economy, but by destroying the very essence of America, the humanist values that make us who we are.
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