In Chicago last week, as unknown gunmen fired shots into a place of worship while people were praying inside. Muslim Americans worry that they will again bear the brunt of hate crimes as they did in the weeks and months following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Since then, hate crimes against America’s Muslim community soared 1,600 percent in a span of one year, the FBI reported. Within the first three weeks after Sept. 11 alone, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported 625 incidents of attacks on Muslim Americans. Hostilities ranged from Muslims and Arabs murdered to mosques and businesses firebombed and vandalized and Muslim women chased and spat upon as they walked through their neighborhoods. Muslims in America are again facing reprisals in light of recent FBI warnings saying, “A US war with Iraq or another terrorist attack could trigger a wave of hate crimes against Muslims and Arab-Americans in the United States.”

This week CAIR began sending warnings to mosques about the possibility of a fresh wave of hate crimes directed at Muslims and Arabs. In light of these impending attacks, CAIR has also issued what they are calling a “Muslim Community Safety Kit” that is designed for Muslims and Arabs “who may be targeted by religious or ethnic profiling or bias-related crimes.” The kit is an eight-page list of precautions and resources including a bomb threat checklist and suggestions on how to handle incidents of anti-Muslim hate crimes, and tips on how to react to acts of discrimination.

At a time when people from the Middle East make up one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States, many of them are questioning whether they will be allowed to coexist peacefully in American society, or if they will always live under a cloud of fear, suspicion, or threat of arrest and detainment. A few months after the World Trade Center attack, approximately 8,000 Arabs were rounded up from all over the US. Hundreds of Middle Easterners were detained and many more were deported. In recent months, hundreds of Middle Easterners formerly living in the United States or seeking asylum there are now fleeing to Canada.

From her New York City apartment, Aisha, a long-term resident of the city, said that she and her husband were considering leaving the US because “America has become a very dangerous place for Muslims to live.” She went on to say that many Arabs and Muslim men were simply “disappearing off the streets” in New York.

The US has a long and sickening history of meddling in the affairs of other countries while there is clearly so much social injustice in its own country. President Bush is vowing to liberate the people of Iraq as he unleashes the full force of his military apparatus across Baghdad and sets it ablaze.

However, he and his military apparatus were unable to protect victims like the 18-year-old Lebanese-American who was beaten by as many as 20 thugs while they shouted anti-Arab insults at him in Southern California just last month. Nor were Bush and his Justice Department able to apprehend the criminals who just last week spray-painted a university’s bathroom walls with threatening messages, one of them saying, “Muslims will be shot on San Jose State University campus on March 12, 2003”. Nor was Bush able to protect four California Muslim women from being verbally assaulted by a man in a restaurant who referred to raping Muslim women and threatened to assault them.

The ostensible motives of the most recent campaign of the United States government contrast sharply with its own human rights record at home. Instead of working to heal the suffering and injustice in its own backyard, Bush has chosen to lay waste to Baghdad in a campaign designed to “shock and awe” the world. Judging from the anti-war demonstrations around the world, few people seem impressed.