These meetings usually end with oh-so-diplomatic remarks about the "full and frank exchanges of views" and praiseworthy statements from each about each.
Yet, though Arab-American and other Muslim organizations are reluctant to discuss the issue for the record, they tell me privately that they are worried that the Bush Administration is sending dangerously mixed signals precisely to those whose "hearts and minds" it claims to be trying to win.
Consider the following:
At the same time, the FBI and the DHS continue to practice racial profiling and to harass and prosecute Arabs and other Muslims here at home. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces work with local law enforcement to snoop on Arab and Muslim communities and wiretap mosques. We tell the Arabs we don't want them running our ports. And legitimate Muslim charities can't raise a nickel without fear of being put on the government's "support for terrorists" list.
Which of these contradictory messages do you think resonates most loudly in the U.S.? Just take a look at the myriad of polls that measure the degree of pervasive insecurity among these constituencies at home, and attitudes of other Americans toward these minorities! The common denominator is fear, one of the other. And fear breeds intolerance and even violence.
Why should we care what Arab- and Muslim-Americans think and what we, their neighbors, think of them? For one thing, they're Americans. They live here, among us. They are business and labor leaders, clergymen, sports figures, engineers and mathematicians and physicists, teachers, doctors and nurses, ordinary working citizens, even members of Congress.
Secondly, their ties to family and friends in other countries can provide us with important bridges to understanding. They might just be capable of helping Karen Hughes to explain U.S. policies to parts of the world we desperately need on "our side". Or to better understand how the "other side" sees us.
Thirdly, Arab- and Muslim-Americans vote. And that, if nothing else, ought to capture the attention of our elected officials.
Finally, how our government acts toward these sizable minorities helps shape how the rest of us act.
Jingoism has no good consequences, for anyone.
No one ever said that balancing these competing interests would be easy. Terrorists in our midst must be identified and prosecuted. So must so-called charities that illegally use their organizations as fronts for laundering material support for those who would harm us and our allies.
At the same time, there is zero evidence that Arab- and Muslim-Americans are anything but loyal to our country, and just as horrified as the rest of us by the attacks of 9/11. Thousands of these hyphenated Americans are now serving in the U.S. armed forces, many of them in Iraq and Afghanistan. And how many terror-related convictions resulted from the mass roundups of Arab and Muslim men in the weeks following 9/11? None.
Yet there appears to be no consistent effort anywhere in the upper reaches of the Bush Administration to engage these communities or to explain or coordinate what much seem to them as grossly contradictory and conflicting efforts.
Which should make us wonder whether this is about ideology: the "clash of civilizations? Or about creating smokescreens: blaming the media for not reporting all the "good news" from Iraq? Or about more of the unbelievably uncoordinated incompetence that gave us the Katrina disaster? Or about the political tone-deafness that resulted in Harriet Myers?
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