Editorial
Terror aftermath must not lead to prejudice
The word was heard often yesterday: evil. The cowardly attack on America was evil. Those who committed this deed are evil. The mind that would devise such destruction must be evil.
All this may feel unarguably true. But as we begin to come to grips with the bitter aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, we must continually remind ourselves that the evil was in this specific deed and those who supported it.
We must be vigilant against the temptation to fall back on group blame or scapegoating that sweeps up entire races, regions or religions.
We must not allow ourselves to slip into the blind hatred that must surely have driven the terrorists to the point that they committed this ultimate act.
It is becoming increasingly clear that this terrorist act of war has its seeds in the twisted roots of hate and despair in the Middle East. That leads to an easy assumption that the terrorists are associated with "Islamic fundamentalists" who have a holy hatred of the United States and everything it stands for.
And that may be the case.
But in our desire for vengeance — in our understandable but not always justified sense of righteousness — we must guard against going where those observations could take us.
Muslim groups in the United States already fear a backlash. They remember the easy assumptions following the Oklahoma City bombing that pinned the crime on foreign terrorists.
Islam is not responsible for this attack on America. Arabs, or Arab Americans, are not responsible for this attack. Muslims are not responsible for this attack, nor are dark-skinned or bearded or Semitic people or any other easily scapegoated group one might come up with.
Those responsible for this barbarous act of war are the specific individuals who hijacked those airliners and the people, organizations or governments that may have helped them. They will be identified and they will punished. That is as far as it should go.
Hawai'i and Japanese Americans everywhere know only too well what can happen when prejudice and hysteria overturn reason and sound judgment. We must not let that happen again.
