Anti-immigrant feeling has roots in America

Randi Kreiss

Life imitates art, so to me, the recent xenophobic rants against foreigners seem to jump right off the pages of “The Lazarus Project,” an award-winning novel by Aleksandar Hemon.

In this story within a story, an immigrant from Sarajevo becomes obsessed with the real-life case of a young man mistakenly shot to death in Chicago in 1908. The shooting took place in the midst of widespread public outcries against suspected European “anarchists,” particularly Jews and other Semitic-looking immigrants from Italy and Armenia and Eastern Europe.

I didn’t fully understand the book until last week’s arrest of a Pakistani-American man who was charged with planning to blow up a car in Manhattan’s theater district. When I read that the suspect was Faisal Shahzad, a 35-year-old American from Pakistan, I felt distressed that he fit the all-too-familiar profile of a young man from the Middle East who lived and worked here in the States and then veered off track, embracing the most extreme tenets of radical Islam.

We know suspects can be home-grown or foreign-born. We’ve arrested people of color and blond, blue-eyed white guys. Jihad Jane, a woman accused of terrorist activities, is far from the stereotype. Still, it matters that all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the Christmas Eve bomber and numerous other suspected terrorists have come out of the training camps in Pakistan and other countries friendly to Al Qaeda.

Recently, on a flight to California, I was seated next to a man who looked Mideastern. He was in the window seat; I was on the aisle. As soon as he boarded he told me he had a bad back and would be getting up frequently to stretch.

And so he did, up and down, every half hour or so. In the row in front of us, in the aisle seats, were two husky young men. After my seatmate got up for the third time, one of the young men turned back to me and asked, “What’s with him?” I said I didn’t know him.