ARAB-AMERICANS UPSET BY PROFILING

At the height of the war on drugs, federal authorities classified the enemy
as Mexican, Colombian, and Jamaican drug couriers traveling the nation's
highways.

In this new war on terrorism, the enemy, federal authorities say, is a
cadre of Islamic extremists who feel it's their religious obligation to
kill Americans.

While the wars are vastly different, they pose the same law enforcement
dilemma: how to recognize the enemy among America's ethnically and racially
diverse faces.

"The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends," President Bush said
while addressing the nation Thursday night. "It is not our many Arab
friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists."

But separating friend from foe isn't easy, and since the Sept. 11 attack on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, people of Middle Eastern origin
have complained that they are being unfairly targeted by law enforcement,
especially at airports.

Their complaints echo those of blacks and Hispanics who complained that
they were racially profiled while traveling the New Jersey Turnpike and
other highways.

"You've heard of 'Driving While Black?' We call it 'Flying While Arab,' "
said Michel Shehadeh, West Coast regional director of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee. "Just like black men are stopped because
police think they are drug dealers, now any Arab who flies is thought to be
a terrorist."

Although suspicion of Arabs traveling by air is nothing new, the intensity
of that scrutiny since the attack is like never before, he said.

"I don't dare go to the airport for fear of being treated like a disease or
terrorist," Shehadeh said. "When you are treated differently, the message
is that you have something to do with the hijackers who killed 6,000 people."

Americans, even those who denounced racial profiling prior to Sept. 11, are
voicing support for a law enforcement shakedown of Arab-Americans,
especially at airports.

A Gallup poll taken three days after the attacks showed nearly 60 percent
of the 1,000 people surveyed think Arabs, even those who are U.S. citizens,
should face separate, more intensive security procedures at airports.

"We've come up with this thing that says you can't profile, but now
everybody wants it done," said George Andrew, a former FBI special agent in
charge of the anti-terrorism unit in the mid-1990s. "I don't want to get on
a plane unless the [Federal Aviation Administration] is doing everything to
keep the terrorists off."

Even some victims of racial profiling say they want more police scrutiny of
Arabs.

Antonio Freeman, a 31-year-old black Manhattan resident, said he knows what
it's like to fit a police profile. Officers have stopped =46reeman at least
15 times and searched his car for drugs four times. But instead of railing
against racial profiling, he gives a "that's life" shrug and offers a word
of advice to Arabs: "Don't take it personally."

"Police and security guards should keep an eye on the Arabs here,"
=46reeman said at Newark International Airport just before boarding a plane
to North Carolina. "I mean, this is America, and America is about freedom.
But when it comes to something like this, we have to protect ourselves."

Naimah Anderson, 23, of East Orange said fear for her safety overrides the
empathy she feels for innocent Arab citizens who are bearing the brunt of
suspicions.

"I'm paranoid. I'm scared," Anderson said as she waited to board a plane to
Atlanta. "It's not fair for them to be singled out for what the terrorists
did, but they have to realize that under the circumstances, everyone is
nervous and afraid."

Already there are reports of jittery pilots ordering Arabic-looking
passengers off planes. Islamic and Arab-American organizations are flooded
with complaints of harassment, police mistreatment, and new airline
security measures that seem to target the 3 million Arab-Americans and the
7 million Muslims living in the United States.

At Boston's Logan International Airport, where two of the hijacked flights
originated, people of Middle Eastern origin were taken off three different
flights in the weekend following the attack, according to news reports.

"This may set us back 30 years or so as far as tolerance in America," said
Joshua Salaam, civil rights coordinator of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations. "It's a witch hunt right now."

The council typically fields about 700 complaints a year. It has received
more than 500 complaints since Sept. 11, Salaam said.

"It's really insulting for any human being to be taken aside at the airport
because of his Arabic name," said Farah Munayyer, president of the New
Jersey chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We
resent this. It's not our fault that our names are different. This is our
country, too."

Airport security experts are going up against civil rights advocates the
same way drug enforcement authorities once did. The difference is that
aviation experts feel much more justified because, they say, the stakes are
much higher than they ever were in the war on drugs.

Drug traffickers never wiped out thousands of people in a single day, said
Neil Livingstone, chairman and chief executive of GlobalOptions, a
Washington, D.C.-based international risk management firm and author of
several books on terrorism.

"In a time when we are trying to save other lives, the profiling we are
talking about is hardly onerous," he said.

"Young Islamic males, like it or not, are the enemy," Livingstone said.
"There is no getting around it, and we have to profile them."

Livingstone is only half-joking when he says it's not like the hijackers
were little old ladies from Sweden. The comment is reminiscent of one made
by former New Jersey State Police Superintendent Carl Williams Jr. in
justification of state troopers focusing on Hispanics.

"The president of the United States went to Mexico to talk to the president
of Mexico about drugs," Williams said in a 1999 published report. "He
didn't go to Ireland. He didn't go to England."

Then-Gov. Christie Whitman promptly fired Williams, calling the remark
insensitive at a time when long-simmering outrage over racial profiling was
boiling over.

An unprecedented investigation into racial profiling revealed that state
police leaders and troopers interpreted intelligence from the federal Drug
Enforcement Agency about drug traffickers from Jamaica and Mexico as a
mandate to target black and Hispanic motorists for stops and searches.

Civil rights advocates fear airport security guards will translate
intelligence about suspected terrorists as a pass to target people of
Middle Eastern origin.

"It may be that all of the people involved in hijacking the airplanes were
of Middle Eastern origin, but we can't forget that before these attacks,
the single largest terrorist attack was done by a white man who went to his
grave believing in all his heart that he was at war with the United
States," said David Harris, a University of Toledo professor who
specializes in search and seizure law.

Timothy McVeigh, a white anti-government militia member, was executed in
June for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995.

The day after the Sept. 11 attacks, the FAA issued a security directive to
the nation's airlines.

"Extremist groups, with a history of targeting civil aviation, are actively
targeting U.S. interests, particularly in the Middle East," said the
confidential FAA memo obtained by The Record. "They retain a capability to
conduct airline bombings, hijackings, suicide attacks, and possess
surface-to-air missiles."

The memo instructs airline security to immediately conduct "random
identification checks" on passengers.

Harris said the memo's references to the Middle East could be
misinterpreted the way DEA memos about the drug underworld spawned racial
profiling.

Livingstone believes the FAA memo is shortsighted and meek. He says this
isn't the time to pussyfoot around or worry about offending sensibilities.

"We don't want random checks," Livingstone said. "We want specific checks
of people. Random checks is another politically correct answer to a
problem. . . . We all know who we are looking for."

Robert L. Crandall, a retired American Airlines chairman, said security
guards should question and search everyone traveling to and from countries
on America's terrorist watch list.

"We need an aviation security agency that is going to do what needs to be
done without any political apologies," Crandall said. "We've got to get
over the notion that profiling is a bad thing."