The Home Front: Walking a Tightrope

By NANCY GIBBS

For the Bakal brothers, Eddie and Jake, the road to the American dream runs dead center through one of the most lethal neighborhoods in Detroit. The brothers, who moved there from Iraq in the mid-1970s, own a convenience store at the intersection of Seven Mile and Van Dyke roads, an easy rifle shot from streets lined with abandoned houses and open-air drug markets. To look at their tidy store, swaddled in bulletproof glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras and equipped with a small arsenal in back, one would think they too were in the middle of a war.

These are crushing days for the Bakals. Two other brothers, still living in Baghdad, have been drafted into the Iraqi army, and two of their American cousins are serving in the U.S. armed forces. "The hardest thing is when my 10-year-old daughter asks me whose side am I on," says Jake, 35. "I tell her instead that it's not what I'm for, it's what I'm against. I'm against the war." Jake recalls a man who entered the store wearing camouflage and presented his brother and him with a calendar bearing a photo of the tomb of the unknown soldier. All the dates but Jan. 15 had been crossed out.

Such unnerving incidents have become common for the 250,000 Iraqi Americans living in the U.S., along with 2.2 million other Americans of Arab descent. For this diverse, and often divided, community, the outbreak of war has brought despair, anger, threats of attack, charges of disloyalty and fears for family still living in the line of fire. "These two civilizations that have defined us are now clashing," says James Zogby, executive director of the Arab American Institute. "It's like a bus is coming at us at 100 m.p.h., and it's 10 ft. away, and we just want it to stop."

The Arab-American community, not surprisingly, mirrors the Middle East, with opinions about the war breaking along the battle lines: those with roots in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia largely support the effort, while those with ties to Iraq, Jordan and Syria are most adamantly opposed to the war. There are few apologists for Saddam Hussein. "This guy has been giving me nightmares for 12 years," says an Iraqi now living in New York City whose father was imprisoned and fatally poisoned by Saddam's security forces. "There is not a single Iraqi who likes Saddam." But at the same time, many Arab Americans echo the charge that the U.S. employs a double standard, enforcing these U.N. sanctions against Iraq, while failing to press Israel to address the Palestinian problem. They are also bitter at the bigotry they have encountered since the crisis erupted. "I agree that Saddam is a ruthless dictator," says Mike Maatouk, 19, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, "but the end result of all this killing is that my Arab race, my people, are being pulled back 100 years. And all of a sudden every Arab person is your enemy."

In the months since Iraqi tanks rumbled into Kuwait, stores and restaurants owned by Arab Americans in Los Angeles and Detroit have been set afire. Many Arab-American leaders are receiving regular death threats. At the home of a Lebanese family in Dearborn, vandals burned an Iraqi flag on the front lawn. On Jan. 19 in Blissfield, Mich., 60 townspeople helped scrub clean the walls of a Dairy Queen, owned by a Palestinian American, on which vandals had sprayed U.S.A. NO 1. Last week the Dairy Queen was burned to the ground.

The attacks are one measure of widespread ignorance about the Arab-American community. Few are aware, for example, of the degree to which Arab-Americans have flourished in this country, rising to the ranks of White House chief of staff and Senate majority leader: both John Sununu and George Mitchell are of Arab descent, as are Paula Abdul, Ralph Nader and Danny Thomas. Arab Americans are better educated than the U.S population as a whole, more likely to hold management or professional positions, and wealthier: the average household income of $22,973 is above the U.S. average of $20,973.

The success of Arab immigrants and their offspring has not protected them in the past, either from hate crimes or from subtler forms of discrimination. In recent days, press accounts have implied a lack of loyalty and patriotic zeal in the wake of war. Arab Americans respond that opinions may be divided -- as they are throughout the American public -- but loyalties are not. "Where else is my loyalty going to be?" asks Kay al-Askari, the northern New Jersey representative of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We've been here 35 years." Brenda Murad, a second-generation Lebanese American, agrees. "I am not dealing with the conflict as an Arab American," she says. "I just see it as very wrong. When we went into Panama, I felt the same way."

But the right to speak out against the fighting seems a luxury to many these days. Ismail Ahmed, director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, reports that a major Arab group in Detroit "told me they're going to support the President, that that's the only way they can be safe. I said, 'But you don't believe what you're saying.' They said, 'That's the only way we can be safe.' " In Wellesley, Mass., a woman of Iraqi descent who works at Harvard as a computer designer used to speak out at neighborhood meetings on Middle East events. Now, friends say, she stays out of sight and tries to conceal her Arab connections.

Just as painful in these months leading up to war has been the suggestion that citizens of Arab descent pose a security risk that warrants investigation by the FBI, which has been intensively questioning some Arab Americans about their political affiliations and possible knowledge of terrorist activities. The outbreak of war has heightened the scrutiny. Pan American World Airways banned all passengers with Iraqi passports, including legal residents of the U.S., from its flights. At airports, Arabs are intercepted by police, frisked and kept waiting for hours. The questions, says Boston attorney Susan Akram, are mostly insulting. "Police explain they are interrogating people for their own protection. Arab Americans feel an obligation to respond. Then the questions land. 'Do you know any terrorists? Do you know anybody who wants to blow up a federal building?' "

The very notion of anything like a loyalty check raises the specter of past overreactions in wartime, particularly the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Says Congressman Norman Mineta of California, a Japanese American who was interned when he was 10 years old: "The U.S. Constitution must not become a casualty of our conflict with Saddam Hussein." Addressing the concerns of Arab Americans late last week, President Bush declared, "There is no place for discrimination in the United States of America."

In their sorrow and horror at the nightly accounts of devastation, many Arab Americans are searching for any sign of hope. Few see much prospect for stability or democracy taking root in the Middle East anytime soon. But at the very least, they hope that the war will raise consciousness. "For the first time Americans are having to take a look at what is going on in the Middle East," says Murad, "and I hope a lot of myths will be dispelled." As the battle goes on, however, it is sure to seem like a high price to pay for enlightenment.

With reporting by Kathleen Adams/New York, S.C. Gwynne/Detroit and Michael Riley/Washington