American Muslims Watchful After Tape

Dec. 14 -- As the grainy, close-captioned tape of Osama bin Laden rolled on TV sets across the country on Thursday, many Americans confessed to getting so mad, they wanted to reach into their televisions and smash the man chuckling over the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

A day after the White House released the incendiary amateur videotape, some American Muslims worry that anger against the terrorist mastermind might be directed against them.

It's apparently not an unjustified fear. In the week following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations received 960 complaints by people who said they were targeted because of their ethnicity, or because they appeared to be Middle Eastern.

"One has to be concerned about a potential backlash especially since we are already suffering from the effects of the backlash after Sept. 11," said Hussein Ibish, a spokesman at the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC), a Washington-based civil rights group.

At the Masjidat-taqwah, a mosque in Brooklyn, New York, that has followers of Arab, Asian, African-American and Caribbean descent, security officials and community leaders were taking no chances.

"Anything can set peoples' minds off," said Abdul Karim, a follower who also handles security at the mosque. "If there's already a prejudiced mindset, it could bring about a backlash. We just have to be prepared because in Islam, you have to be prepared."

Red Alert, Yellow Alert

But while Karim admitted the Masjidat-taqwah was on "security mode," he hastened to add it was just on "yellow alert" not "red alert."

By "red alert," Karim meant increasing the number of security personnel at the mosque as well as making provisions to grant temporary refuge and escorts for followers who felt threatened.

The Masjidat-taqwah was on "red alert" for weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, but three months after the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, the situation for American Muslims had improved, Karim added.