Letters to the Editor
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It is More Than Just an Article
The Korean students' "fear" of backlash is completely legitimate. Maybe "My Man Godfrey" overlooks the fact that is was just in 1992 when the LA Riots targeted Korean American business owners.
I was born and raised in Northern Virginia and am a Korean American. And though Northern Virginia has a reputation for being more "liberal" (because of its proximity to Washington, DC), my family still endured racial slurs. I'm going to assume that the blogger "My Man Godfrey" cannot identify with the experience of a minority population, as one can infer from his letter.
It's not a lack of "evidence", it's a lack of media attention...a major reason why the salon.com even exists. Korean American newspapers report beatings in Georgia, harassment and eggings in LA, and my own mother expressed fear, as well as the Northern Virginian Korean community's fear, of leaving her own home.
Perhaps this outrageous "backlash" is contrived to you, but might I remind you that it took one man to injure or kill more than 50 people. It will only take a handful of more madmen for a backlash to the Korean American community. Furthermore, if it took that little for Schlussel to voice her anti-Arab sentiments, what else do you think she is capable of?
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Racism
I have a dear friend who is a wonderful person and is also Korean. She too has been distressed by the fact that the young man who perpetrated the horror at Virginia Tech was also of Korean descent. I must aplogize for all of my fellow Americans, black, white, et al to the Korean community for any negative statements that have been made to imoung your heritage. Like each of us, you should be judged solely on your character and not your race or gender.
That said: Grow up America and stop looking for other things and people to be the fall guy for our tragedies...It's time we put our house in order!
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Please do not apologize on my behalf.
People are entitled to their feelings as long as they don't act them out. How dare you apologize on anyone's behalf but yours. Your presumptuousness nauseates me.
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hatred, enacted
Could Salon possibly pause before banging its reflexive drum and remember, for a moment, that what really happened here is that a man acted on HIS hatred and killed dozens of innocent people? That's the hate crime that happened. Those are the victims killed by hatred.
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I can't believe people think that the idea of a backlash is so implausible.
Here's something for everyone who scoffs at Koreans fearing that they might be targeted and that they are the ones being "racist", as many of you put it. You all have very short or very selective memories about how minority groups get unfairly tarred after a member of their ethnic/religious group commits a crime:
http://www.hanania.com/hatevictims.html
Anya Cordell launched the Campaign for Collateral Compassion in February 2002 to bring attention to these subsequent Sept. 11 killings. These are just some of her findings:
Balbir Singh Sodhi was gunned down on Sept. 15, 2001 in Mesa, Arizona. The turban-wearing Sikh was killed outside his gas station. Sodhi's killer spent the hours before the murder in a bar, bragging of his intention to "kill the ragheads responsible for September 11." He has been convicted and sits on death row.
Waqar Hasan of Dallas, Texas was also murdered on Sept. 15, 2001. The 46-year-old Pakistani, was shot to death in a convenience store he owned. Hasan was murdered by Mark Stroman, who was convicted of also murdering Vasudev Patel days later in nearby Mesquite, Texas. Stroman admitted to authorities to blinding a third victim, a Bangladeshi, in between the murders of Hasan and Patel. After his arrest Stroman bragged, "I did what every American wanted to do after Sept. 11th but didn't have the nerve."
Another victim was Ali Almansoop, an American citizen and father of four. He was murdered six days later on Sept. 21, 2001 at his Detroit, Michigan home. Almansoop was a Yemen native. Prosecutors charged a Garden City man with first-degree murder in his shooting death. Allegedly, Almansoop was dating the ex-girlfriend of his killer, although the killer reportedly claimed he was glad he shot him because of Sept. 11.
Jawed Wassel of Queens, New York was an Afghani American (according to a friend of the family). Wassel had just finished producing a film about Iraq when he got into a dispute with one of his film's investors. The investor was later charged with decapitating Wassel and chopping up his body in the days after Sept. 11. Cordell said, "It was as if Sept. 11 gave the investor permission to vent his rage against this guy. He had some conflict. Maybe he would have assaulted him. But would he have decapitated him and chopped his body into pieces, if not for the climate after 9/11?"
The day before Abdo Ali Ahmed, 51, was murdered, he found a note on his car threatening to kill him and deriding his ethnicity. Ahmed, a Yemeni shopkeeper in Reedly, California, showed the note to friends and family but threw it away after concluding the threat was little more than typical post-Sept. 11 rage. The next day, on Sept. 29, Ahmed was found murdered. Police have never charged a suspect in the case and they did not find the note he showed to his friends and family. Ahmed was a father of eight. The family lived in California for 35 years. The killing so frightened his surviving family members that they moved and till this day remain in hiding.
Abdullah Mohammed Nimer, 53, was a door-to-door salesman who lived and worked in Los Angeles, California. The motive in his Oct. 13, 2001 murder did not appear to be robbery. When his body was found, his car was unlocked and filled with valuable merchandise worth thousands of dollars. Police found several hundred dollars in cash with the victim that was also untouched.
Cordell said the killings fit into a 1700 percent increase in the number of overall assaults and vandalism cases reported by Human Rights Watch during the first year after Sept. 11.
Across the country in Houston, 30-year-old Iraqi Hassan Al-Asfur was shot in the leg while sitting in his car on Sept. 21, 2001. Police said a man approached Al-Asfur's car, held a gun to his head and said, "Your people killed my people."
Further west in California, Swaran Kaur Bhullar, a Sikh, was stabbed in the head at a traffic light in early October 2001. The attackers fled when another car pulled up to the victim's car. Said Bhullar, "If that car hadn't driven up, I might have died."
To quote John Adams: "facts are stubborn things." Guess what, folks. Backlash does occur, even in this country.