Date: Sat, 22 Apr 1995 20:10:50 -0500
From: Wail Hassan <w-hassan-AT-uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Oklahoma Bombing


If Americans have felt more vulnerable than ever over the past two days,
many Arabs and Arab-Americans have felt at least twice as vulnerable. For
them, it is not only the risk of being in any one of a million possible
places where a terrorist bomb can explode, and at the wrong moment; it is
also the significantly higher probability of being shown various degrees of
open and implicit hostility practically anywhere they happen to be, and at
any time, following a terrorist incident. Do they dare leave home if they
didn't have to? After all, who else but a Middle Eastern terrorist (and all
Middle Easterners are of course potential terrorists) can do such a thing?
Americans sure don't do that the Americans! Can Arabs in America afford to
feel ONLY horror at the news and the images, as anyone with a half-percent
humanity would, without at the same time being torn by a strange and almost
perverse sense of relief that for once at least they're not likely to be
scapegoated?
Wail Hassan
Comparative Literature
707 S. Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
Tel. (217) 384-4125



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