The Arab menace.

• Author: Bazzi, Mohamad
• Position: Discrimination against Arabs - Column

For years, I heard my relatives complain about the suspicious questions and endless searches they must endure when they travel. In the summer of 1991, I experienced the humiliation firsthand. While returning from a trip to Paris, I was stopped even before I reached the check-in counter. After asking some routine questions, an airline security guard examined my Lebanese passport and green card. He noticed a visa stamp from Alia International Airport in Jordan.

"What were you doing in Jordan in 1985?" he asked.

I told him that I was, as the visa indicated, in transit-changing planes to get from Beirut to New York. I should also have pointed out that I was only nine years old at the time. He then asked me to wait, while he "cleared" my travel papers. That was when I noticed how quickly everyone else was getting through security. They were simply asked the routine questions. No one was skimming through their passports, nor was it necessary to "clear" their papers. After my travel documents were approved, my luggage was checked by X-ray. Then. unlike everyone else's. it was thoroughly examined again, by hand.

This scenario is all too common. And lately, things have grown worse.

Two years ago, the day after Mohammed Salameh was arrested for the World Trade Center bombing, I was assigned to interview people at the mosque he attended in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was a troubling scene. Outside the mosque, people leaving the Friday prayer sessions were besieged by reporters and television cameras.

Out of anger and frustration, many refused to speak. The few that did talked of being victimized and stereotyped. But the media people didn't pay much attention. Neither did the men who passed by the mosque that afternoon in trucks, shouting: "They should kill them all," and, "Why don't you go back where you came from?"

A few days later, the New York Daily News ran a front-page photo of Salameh - a bearded Palestinian-under a headline that screamed FACE OF HATE. In the following weeks, the mosque was repeatedly vandalized. During the bombing trial, newspaper and television stories often described the defendants as Muslim "fundamentalists." extremists," and "militants."

Few in the media described Paul Hill, the anti-abortion activist convicted last year of killing a doctor in Florida, as a militant Christian fundamentalist." And the press did not besiege Hill's church, even though it could be argued that, like the Trade Center bombers, he was motivated by...