The Arab scare: when the heat is on, Arab-Americans lose their rights.

• Author: Abourezk, James G.

We don't yet know, at this writing, who was responsible for the late-February bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, but whoever is ultimately convicted of the crime, there is no question that Arab-Americans in general and Muslims in particular are in for a rough time of it. Even before the first suspects were placed under arrest, the news media engaged in heavy speculation about the nationality and religion of the possible perpetrators and focused on the likely involvement of Arab governments or Arab movements.

There are, of course, Arab-Americans who are not Muslims and Muslims who are not of Arab descent. Such distinctions matter little to those who began, almost at once, to assign blame for the bombing. Arab-Americans and Muslims felt the targets being placed on their backs by FBI and police briefers at the scene and by reporters covering the daily developments. Arabs are America's new scapegoats, and anti-Arab hysteria has been building in this country for many years. We knew from painful past experience that after the twin-towers bombing, there would be an increase in the violence directed at us and the FBI would seize on a new pretext for stepping up its constant surveillance and harassment of the Arab-American community.

Three weeks before the New York bombing, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Jersey City mosque attended by the bombing suspects, told a Newsweek interviewer, "The FBI has called hundreds of Muslims and asked them questions relating to me and my preaching in different mosques. They took some from work and some at 5 o'clock or 4 o'clock in the morning. Where is the freedom, then? All this is happening in America, and we never expected that from a country that is called the leader of the free world."

As a former member of the U.S. Senate, a lawyer with extensive contacts among Arab-Americans, and chair of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), I've long been acquainted with the problem. In the mid-1970s, for example, I dealt with the case of Sami Ismael, a Detroit Arab-American who had flown to Israel to visit his dying father. He never reached him. Immediately upon landing at the Tel Aviv airport, Ismael was arrested and jailed by the Israeli authorities on a charge of having contact with terrorists. More specifically, the Israelis said he had taken terrorist training in Libya. Ismael denied the charge.

In the midst of it all, the FBI was accused of having provided Israeli authorities with intelligence it had gathered on Ismael. I was then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, so I took the occasion of a hearing at which the then FBI'S counterterrorism chief was testifying to ask him whether it was true that the FBI provided information on American citizens to the Israeli government. The agent requested an opportunity to talk off the record, and I agreed. In a room behind the Judiciary Committee hearing chamber, he admitted that the FBI had a practice of providing intelligence to Israel. "But in Ismael's case, they already knew all about him," he explained, as if that justified the FBI'S actions.

Sami Ismael was eventually released from Israeli custody, but only after he had spent several long months in an Israeli prison. He...