Anti-Arab hate crimes reflect on Amerikan "workers" by MC5, December 27, 2001 CNN reported December 27th that an American Airlines pilot and subsequent airline officials refused to allow an "Arab-American" secret service official to board a plane going from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Dallas, Texas earlier in December. The secret service agent was going to President Bush's ranch for service and despite an appeal to call the Secret Service and despite vouching by the local transit police, the agent simply could not board the plane or even a subsequent one. Airline officials blamed him for "suspicious activity."(1) Being denied a seat on an airplane is an outrage, but it is not the most serious one by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, running such stories leaves the impression that serious crimes are not happening against Arab-looking people within U.S. borders. MIM only raises the case of the Secret Service agent, because it shows who is the leader in chauvinism--the Amerikan "worker." From the beginning of the World Trade Center furor, even the Confederate flag toting officials in the White House all spoke against hate crimes and discrimination.(2) Now one of their own officials has suffered at the hands of the labor aristocracy--a small matter but provocative and symbolic nonetheless. The U.S. Government and hence the capitalist ruling class is responsible for mass destruction and killing abroad, but internally it is also responsible for the indefinite detention of 1100 people, mostly for minor visa violations as the pretext. These pretexts are no different than those used in any repressive country hiding the politics of the state. Even in state-capitalist China, the regime does not usually say it is jailing people for "dissent." The 1100 detained are Arab or "Arab- American"--a "crime" even less active than "speaking out," the crime of ethnic origin. The U.S. Government did not mount a search for every persyn committing a minor visa violation for detention purposes. The U.S. Government focused on people of Middle Eastern origins. MIM believes the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is superior to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Proletarian repression is open and direct. Proletarian rulers do not claim that the humyn species is ready for "freedom" and then stab people in the back by detaining them indefinitely, starting military tribunals and imprisoning more people per capita than any other country, as the Amerikan rulers do. Proletarian rulers work on the causes underlying conflicts that lead to repression. The liberal American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) reported in its most recent bulletin of November 20th 6 murders and a total of 520 violent hate crimes within U.S. borders since September 11th against "Arab-Americans" and those who look Arab.(3) We do not mention the hundreds of people fired by private employers for being Arab or looking so. Likewise, the media has noticed racial "profiling" and reports on these incidents when Arab-looking people do not receive seats on airplanes--again relatively small matters. Those seeking the facts on hate crimes of this sort will find it difficult research, one of the main reasons that there needs to be a large-scale independent organization of the oppressed to do live interviews and collect information. For example, there is only one story in the Boston Globe since the beginning of October about hate crimes committed against Arab-looking or Muslim people within U.S. borders. That story was about kids at a school pulling scarves off Somali children.(4) Again by not dealing with the arson cases and bomb threats, the media is trivializing the problem out of existence. As of December 27th, the only hate crimes story in the Boston Globe for the month of December was about charges against three Black and "Hispanic" teens for an attack on a white youth. In other words, the concept of "hate crime" itself merits coverage according to the Boston Globe, but which hate crimes receive media coverage is the question.(5) That is why MIM Notes and MIM Theory always try to give the overall picture to the best of our ability at MIM. The "Department of Justice" of the U.S. Government started with an "initiative" against hate crimes in connection to September 11th, but there is no follow-up report in that department's web site "what's new."(6) It seems especially reasonable to ask the "DoJ" to come up with its own summary of the hate crimes against Arab-looking people since September 11th. Thus far all we know overall is that as of November 13th the FBI was looking into at least 205 hate crimes at 43 different field offices and calls at the federal hotline for hate crimes topped 70 per hour at one point in the anti-Arab backlash.(7) Although the Attorney General of California deserves credit for publishing a high-profile report on hate crimes statistics on October 11th, we do not see any follow-up to summarize the problem. Attorney General Bill Lockyer said over 180 incidents were under investigation from September alone in just six California cities. In October there were another 71 incidents in 16 cities. (8) There was nothing at all on the Texas Attorney General's web site about hate crimes. However, Texas did have a news item on fraudulent September 11th charities, as did the Attorney General of Ohio, who also did not have anything on hate crimes, despite the high-profile cases there. In fact, the Attorney General of Ohio released a statement offering free legal help to people serving in the war against terrorism abroad.(9) New York's Attorney General had a few press releases related to terrorism and had a hand in recently freezing the "Holy Land's" assets, but there is nothing about hate crimes. Likewise, Michigan's Attorney General had nothing on hate crimes in her "what's new" web page despite being in a state with a large "Arab-American" community.(10) So again, the problem of hate crimes against Arab-looking people can and should be on the agenda for the attorney generals of all the states, and these prosecutors prove interest in the terrorism issue, but they mostly offer no overall analysis of the problem of hate crimes. Since most of the bourgeois media only reports news if it comes from bourgeois government officials, the fact that attorney generals with the exception of California's have taken such a low profile on anti-Arab hate crimes and the fact that the federal attorney general has not published any attempt to summarize and confront the situation means that the media does not cover the story either. A number of organizations have attempted to collect statistics on the hate crimes by publishing Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) forms on their websites for people to fill out. For example, the ADC seeks a "respectable" image and lobbies the government. It has a form available for victims to fill out. An organization for an ethnic group from India called Sikhs has done the same thing at www.attacksonsikhs.com. However, such an effort relies on people who get to the Internet and specifically who visit the ADC website. The risk is that many victims--including those dead--will never be counted. Nonetheless, MIM favors everything done by the ADC and others to do their own independent data-collection and reporting. The best overall view of the situation at the present can be found on the Council on American- Islamic Relations web page. CAIR has reported 1441 incidents so far since the World Trade Center attack, including 8 deaths.(11) Outside U.S. borders it may be tempting to look to the Amerikan "worker" for help while Uncle $am bombs thousands to death in Afghanistan and causes refugee flows in the millions. Yet it is the Amerikan "worker" who is committing hate crimes within U.S. borders. The tenacious parasitism of the Amerikan should not be underestimated. Hate crimes as the backdrop to war across the globe prove it is not a matter of opportunist "tactics" to be used with Amerikan "workers." Amerikan "workers" watch TV and view the Internet. They know the government is bombing Afghan children to death and causing refugees flows all over the world--and they support it. The bottom line problem is that these "workers" consciously value other people's lives less than their own. This is not a "tactical" problem. This is an issue of what hurdle the revolutionary movement, the anti-war movement and the anti-racist movements have to cross to succeed. This is our huge challenge within U.S. borders. For the quality of Amerikkkan politics to change, we have no choice but to leap that hurdle. No flattery of "workers" and no pretending the problem is not urgent and severe will help us to leap that hurdle. That hurdle within U.$. politics is parasitism, the fact that the vast majority of people within U.S. borders lives off the labor of the whole Third World and is comfortable with that fact. It will be no easy task, but no movement failing to target the labor aristocracy enemy will succeed in reaching our internationalist goals. Notes: 1. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/27/rec.agent.airline/index.html 2. http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/race/hate/homepage.htm ; In order to rally international public opinion for war, especially in the Arab countries, the U.S. Government trotted out Liberalism, and even left-leaning liberalism of the sort opposed to discrimination. See the impression the State Department tries to create above. 3. www.adc.org ; e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A48101-2001Oct24 4. Boston Globe 12Nov2001 & 10Nov2001. 5. The September 28th Boston Globe ran a story about a racist hate group targetting both Jews and Arabs, but again, nothing in particular about the effects on Arabs or "Arab-Americans." 6. http://www.usdoj.gov/01whatsnew/01_1.html 7. http://www.fbi.gov/page2/mueller.htm ; The FBI told of its role in stopping anti-Arab bombings in one California story: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/losang.htm 8. http://caag.state.ca.us/newsalerts/2001/01-103.htm ; see also the Sacramento Bee, http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/1216748p-1284260c.html 9. http://www.ag.state.oh.us/pressrel/index.htm ; http://www.oag.state.tx.us/newspubs/whatsnew.htm 10. http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/agpress01.html ; http://www.ag.state.mi.us/index.asp 11. http://www.cair-net.org/html/bycategory.htm ; see also, http://www.islamicity.com/community/hatecrimes/ ; http://www.asata.org/resources/articles/hatebacklash/ ; http://www.stopthehate.org/features/aftermath/ ; Further notes: Thanks to the Progressive Media Project for research. Also, see the Southern Poverty Law Center's article on this subject, again to get a flavor of what is going on in Amerika: http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?dirname=/intelligenceproject&pagename=ip-4t6.html Another interesting source is a Jewish one: http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/adl_responds.asp There are a number of individual stories available from bourgeois sources, especially from September: http://www.uniontrib.com/news/nation/terror/20010920-9999_7m20sikh.html http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,310989-412,00.shtml http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/39262_mosque18.shtml http://www.nctimes.net/news/2001/20011005/63139.html http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Sep-18-Tue-2001/news/17023994.html http://www1.arabia.com/egypt/life/article/english/0,5127,17783,00.html http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_regional/ausarab09142001.htm http://www.dailypress.com/news/nationworld/sns-worldtrade-hatecrimes-ct.story?coll=sns-newsnation-headlines http://www.townonline.com/25089221.htm http://www.clickondetroit.com/det/news/stories/news-96854620010920-220956.html http://www.thewmurchannel.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-95910220010913-100923.html http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-111001hate.story http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/010920/threat.shtml http://www.asianweek.com/2001_10_19/bay_hatemonger.html http://www.cjonline.com/stories/091301/ter_arabsmuslims.shtml http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2001/12/16/world/sikhs&sec=world http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/08/MN87116.DTL