In the war on terrorism, we’ve all been deputized. Governments at every level have asked us to be on alert, and to report anything we find suspicious. The federal government even has a terrorist threat index, which was elevated last week to its second-highest level.
All this, of course, is for good reason. The arrest of alleged members of a terrorist cell in upstate New York last week reminded us that people undoubtedly are lying in wait among us, intent on doing harm. Most of us had already spent the past year paying closer attention to our surroundings.
In being alert to real dangers, though, we may be creating another.
In Florida last week, three Muslim medical students were held for 17 hours after a woman told police she overheard them at a restaurant plotting a terrorist strike and laughing about the Sept. 11 attacks. The three men, all U.S. citizens of Middle Eastern heritage, denied the woman’s account, and were released the same day. Police called the incident a false alarm.
But the damage had been done for the three — Omer Choudhary, Ayman Gheith and Kambiz Butt, third-year medical students at Ross University in Dominica, an island in the Caribbean. They were traveling to Florida to begin clinical training at Larkin Community Hospital in Miami, but the hospital’s director pulled the plug after receiving several threatening e-mails.
It’s hard to argue that anyone in this case did the wrong thing. The woman who overheard the men’s conversation apparently believed she heard them making threats. Even if she misconstrued their remarks, she felt a duty to call police — after all, the nation was at high alert for an attack. The police, of course, had to follow through. And who can blame the hospital director for wanting to keep his staff and patients safe?
Still, three medical students, who like their fellow Americans deplored the acts of Sept. 11, have been forced to move to another hospital for training, perhaps for only one reason: a misunderstanding based on their ethnicity.
In times of war, there’s a constant danger that our capacity for prejudice and stereotyping will rise. The interment of Japanese Americans during World War II will forever serve as sad evidence of this. While fighting a shadowy enemy, we must also fight the urge to suspect the worst in others simply because of their heritage or religion.
The horrors of a year ago brought the American melting pot together in a common bond of respect for our freedoms and way of life. Those freedoms apply to all of us. We must resist letting our vigilance be overtaken by paranoia.
If we allow fear to foster hatred of our fellow citizens, the terrorists will have won their biggest victory.
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