Terrorist by Association
“They were not from the southwest side of Chicago, not from the big Arab-American concentrations in Detroit, not from our communities,” Abunimah continues. “They were people who came from outside and it seems were deliberately trying to be undetected. It’s possible they felt they would have been more vulnerable to being detected among people who shared their cultural background and who might have spotted their devious and evil intent.
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The son of a Jordanian diplomat, Abunimah works at a University of Chicago research center, but it’s his Web site–www.abunimah.org–that he wants to be known by. He identifies himself there as a “lonely little guy” who monitors news reports on the Middle East and fires off a rebuttal whenever one’s called for–which in Abunimah’s view is almost always. I signed up for Abunimah’s E-mail list before writing about him two years ago, and in a little over a month received some 80 letters, many of them long and all thoughtful. A diplomatic correspondent for National Public Radio told me then he heard from Abunimah two or three times a day–and he read every word: “He distills into very useful short commentaries the point of view of the Palestinians and the Arabs.”
After a few hours’ sleep he wrote again. “I woke up in the dark, hoping and praying that I had woken up from a nightmare. The nightmare is still there….File footage of Ussama Bin Laden appears on every screen. Rumors of Arabs being arrested, or Arabic-language materials being found by police are already being made much of. On top of the pain we are all feeling for the continuing tragedy, this fills me with fear.”
“There are concerns about the fact that hundreds of people were apparently detained and not allowed to see their chosen counsel. They were held on minor technical violations–kind of a dragnet. I can understand the desire to catch anyone who may be involved in this, but we have to judge the government and society by what happens next.
He tells me, “I’m not trying to ask how the events in the Middle East caused September 11. I’m now trying to understand how September 11 will affect events in the Middle East.” Because “it’s important to preserve our ability to criticize the United States,” he won’t criticize it now. American feelings are too raw. Besides, he doesn’t see “a direct causal relationship” between U.S. policy in the Middle East and the hijacked planes.
No one ever stood so tall as a congressman rising to denounce Castro by name. Politicians built careers on hating him. Just last summer senators Jesse Helms and Joseph Lieberman introduced the Cuban Solidarity Act, which was going to authorize Washington to somehow funnel $100 million to Castro’s opponents within Cuba. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act gave wealthy Cuban-Americans who claimed that Castro owed them for property confiscated 37 years earlier the right to try to recover it from foreign companies doing business with Cuba by suing them in U.S. courts. The outrage of nations such as Canada was a small price to pay for this flamboyant piece of legislation.
