DAYTONA BEACH, Florida: Mazen al-Najjar of Tampa, is incontrovertibly guilty on one count. He overstayed a student visa in the early 1980s. By law, he should be deported. By law, so should half the au pairs and nannies imported from European nations to feed, burp and give American kids their first taste of a foreign language. Au pairs and nannies are notoriously cavalier about their visas’ expiration stamps. By law, so, too, should 8 million illegal immigrants, most of them from Mexico and Latin American countries, be deported. Swoop them up, shackle them down and shove them out. Of course, routine Immigration and Naturalization Service sweeps aside, no one is about to move on au pair Sophie from Marseille or on bodega owner Pedro Antonio from Juarez, because they’re not the nasty foreign flavor of the month. Mazen Najjar is. He’s an Arab. A Palestinian. And Arabs since Sept. 11 are America’s very public enemies, whether they happen to be students, as are most of the 5,000 Arabs the FBI is currently rounding up for questioning; teachers, as was Najjar, at the University of South Florida; or shopkeepers, as fresh Arab immigrants tend to be.
To be an Arab in America today is to be a suspect first, a man with civil rights last. Like Arab culture, American prerogative in this case is discriminating all the way to the sexes. Only men are suspects, while Arab women get to wear America’s version of the burkah: a veil of innocence, for now. The FBI is leaving Najjar’s wife and her three young children alone. The children were born here. They’re American citizens. Last Saturday, their father told them he was going across the street to get coins for the laundry. They never saw him again. The FBI was waiting for him outside his home a familiar sight to Najjar, who spent three years in prison in the 1990s on secret evidence that he sent money to terrorist organizations in Palestine. The evidence was so flimsy that when then-Attorney General Janet Reno finally reviewed it, she released him. George W. Bush, during his second presidential debate with Al Gore, decried the Clinton administration’ s sorry record of profiling Arabs and imprisoning them on secret evidence. The country has “got to do something about that,” Bush said.
What the country has done since Sept. 11 at Bush’s order is create a multi-tiered system of rights and suspicions according to race, religion and sex. Najjar’s case is only a test of the new decree. The gravity of his 1,307-day imprisonment on bogus evidence in “peace” times during the Clinton administration now pales compared to what he and potentially hundreds, maybe thousands of Arabs, face as the Bush administration wages, on< American soil, its vague new war on terrorism.
Technically, Najjar has no grounds to fight deportation. But having so publicly been branded a terrorist on such secret evidence, no country will now have him not even Saudi Arabia. As a stateless person, he faces the prospect of languishing in prison for years in America, much like non-Americans caught in the repressive web of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Back then those accused of communist sympathies, however wrongly, were deported, and if unwanted elsewhere (as their reputation had been slandered), they spent years in American prisons.
That is what Najjar’s case portends a return to McCarthyism under the name of terrorism, with notable< differences. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower excused< gross miscarriages of justice in the name of fighting the phantoms of a Communist menace, but even their hysteria never went as far as the Bush administration’s has in the short weeks since Sept. 11. Joe McCarthy never threatened Communist sympathizers< with military tribunals that put due process on Siberian ice. Bush is promising Arabs just that. Terrorism is a menace. But so is home-grown repression.
The war the Bush administration is fighting at home in the name of terrorism has quickly turned into a nasty, racist assault on a minority whose only fault is to share a religion and an origin, if that, with 19 suicidal terrorists and a delusional zealot cragged up in an Afghan fissure. But America’s Arabs are no more suspect than Scandinavia’s nannies. And they are less suspect than Bush’s domestic war on terrorism.