By the time Imad Hamad could make it home after post-Sept 11 flight cancellations left him stranded in Washington, his telephone answering machine was full at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where he is regional director. Most of the calls were hateful, spewing epithets such as ‘‘Death to you towel-headed .’’ Dozens of others were from his neighbours, mostly women whose husbands and sons had been suddenly detained by federal agents, desperate for legal and financial help. ‘‘The situation was chaos,’’ he said. Many residents were afraid to leave their houses, to go to work. Families were encouraged to order food in, to keep the children out of school, to go in groups if they had to go out at all. Agents were fanning out, knocking on doors, handcuffing detainees. ‘‘Who knew the consequences? Because if you have trouble, God help you,’’ said Hamad. About half a million Muslims live in Michigan, and the Detroit suburb of Dearborn is 30% Arab-American; at the public schools, the figure is 70%. Many came here after World War II to take assembly jobs in the automobile plants. Hamad arrived as a young political refugee from Lebanon. It’s a community that has long reflected the tensions of the Middle East, even as many of its members sought out citizenship in their adopted country, swore allegiance to it and successfully assimilated into its economy. Terror, by numbers 3,044 Number of those killed or missing and presumed dead in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania 19 Number of hijackers 2,654 World Trade Center casualties 92 American Airlines Flight casualties 11 casualties 65 United Airlines Flight 175 casualties 125 Pentagon casualties 64 American Airlines Flight casualties, including 5 hijackers 44 Airlines Flight 93 casualties, including 4 hijackers The terrorist attacks and their aftermath confronted the community with difficult truths about their former homelands as well as their new one. None seemed more disturbing than the actions of a US Secret Service agent as he searched a Dearborn home. ‘‘Islam is evil,’’ the agent scrawled on a calendar posted on the kitchen refrigerator. ‘‘Christ is King.’’ The agent was suspended for six months without pay. ‘‘Things became a state of real anger here,’’ recalled Mohamad Ali Elahi, the imam at the Islamic House of Wisdom. ‘‘How somebody can do this is total ignorance.’’ Complaints came to a head in July, when Hamad and a dozen other Arab-American leaders told the US Commission on Civil Rights at a meeting in downtown Detroit that closed court hearings, lengthy detentions and the overall secrecy of the arrests were unfair. Ismael Ahmed runs an Arab community centre. ‘‘We have people disappearing,’’ he told the panel. ‘‘We don’t even know who disappears anymore. We still do not have the names and addresses and the charges against these people.’’ The commission took no action. One commissioner, Bush appointee Peter Kirsanow, commented that if there is another massive terrorist attack, ‘‘you can forget civil rights in this country’’. Just how many men eventually were detained in Dearborn is not known. Some local civil-rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 in Michigan were detained and that the INS conducted more than 650 closed deportation hearings. Nationwide, the government detained far more than the officially acknowledged 1,200. Zouhair Koubeissi is back home with his wife and baby boy, Ali, in Auburn Hills, another Detroit suburb. He was picked up in the spring and served 17 days—10 of them in a small holding tank with dozens of other men—after authorities noticed that he had taken private flying lessons in the early 1990s. ‘‘So they came to get me,’’ he said. Zouhair was arrested at Detroit airport where he works as a limousine driver. His wife, Nivine, was home alone, still pregnant then, and at 7 in the morning, he said, ‘‘they came to the house and searched everything.’’ Her husband, 39, in this country from Lebanon since 1984, cringed at recalling his time in jail. ‘‘I didn’t see the sun or air for 10 straight days,’’ he said. ‘‘I’d never cried before in my life. I was sick, had a virus, a leg fungus and a blood vessel broke. My knees and ankles were swollen. I couldn’t walk for a month. I was on medicine for two months. I lost two months’ work.’’ To raise the $15,000 bail and pay his lawyers, he has had to borrow from friends. ‘‘I never want to go back’’ to the Middle East, where he said he was treated badly by the Syrians and the Israelis. ‘‘Nobody loves this country like I do,’’ he said. ‘‘But all of a sudden you’re treated like a criminal.’’ (Courtesy The Indian Express’s exclusive arrangement with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)
