Arab-Americans Feel Backlash

Sept. 14, 2001 -- In New York, a caller threatened to harm hundreds of students in an Islamic school. In Texas, a mosque was firebombed. And in Wyoming, an angry group of shoppers chased a woman and her children from a Wal-Mart.

Days after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, a nation's shock has turned into an outpouring of hostility towards people of Middle Eastern heritage. Around the nation, Muslim and Arab communities say they are being targeted, and the anger is nationwide.

Hours after the attacks on Tuesday, the Islamic Institute of New York received a telephone call threatening the school's 450 students, said manager Azam Meshkat. "The gentleman was very angry and he started threatening the children. He said he was going to paint the streets with our children's blood," she said. The school is closed, but continues to receive several threats a day.

On Wednesday, a Lebanese-American man was verbally abused while he desperately searched for survivors from the arts center he had run on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center's north tower. As he waited outside one of the emergency centers, a well-dressed young couple yelled insults at him, said the man, Moukhtar Kocache. "They told me, 'You should go back to your country, you f--king Arabs, we should bomb the s--t out of you," he said.

A mosque in Denton, Texas, was firebombed, and another in Lynnwood, Wash. had its signdefaced with black paint. In Huntington, N.Y., police say a 75-year-old man tried to run over a Pakistani woman in a shopping mall parking lot.

Khaled Ksaibati, the faculty adviser for the Muslim Student Association at the University of Wyoming, described the attack on the Muslim family at a Laramie Wal-Mart. "The people who screamed in her face wanted her to go back to her country," he said. "This is her country. She was born here."

And in Bridgeview, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, police stopped 300 marchers as they tried to march on a mosque. Marcher Colin Zaremba, 19, told The Associated Press, "I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have."