Hate Crimes in America: Beyond free speech

On Friday, 11 July 2008, a resident of Arlington, Virginia, was sentenced to two concurrent one- year prison terms for threatening my life and using hate-filled intimidation to violate my civil rights and those of my staff at the Arab American Institute. Upon release, he will be on supervised probation for three more years and be required both to perform community service and undergo psychiatric counselling.

A simple enough story, on the surface. But there is a number of things here that need to be told.

While the Department of Justice (DOJ) has not been well-led during the past eight years, the career attorneys in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division and the FBI agents who work with them investigating rights violations deserve significant credit for tracking down and prosecuting hate crimes against Arab Americans and American Muslims.

Arab Americans, myself included, have been subjected to threats and violence for decades now. But never before have the agencies of the US government been so committed to hunting these criminals down and punishing them. Since 2001, in all, the Civil Rights Division has convicted 166 such criminals. I know of their work, firsthand, since three of these cases involved individuals who threatened me.

While credit is due to the above-mentioned law enforcement officials, serious questions must be raised about the behaviour of the US State Department in this affair. The person who was sentenced last week was a 25-year career Foreign Service officer at the State Department who had twice been stationed in Lebanon.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/907/op51.htm