Hate crime punished

On Friday, July 11, 2008, a resident of Arlington, Virginian, was sentenced to two concurrent one year prison terms for threatening my life and using hate-filled threats to violate my civil rights and those of my staff at the Arab American Institute. Upon release, he will be under 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 are a number of back stories 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 down these criminals and punishing them. Since 2001, in all, the Civil Rights Division has convicted 166 such criminals. I know of their work, first-hand, 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 (DOS) in this affair. The person who was sentenced last week was a 25-year career foreign service officer at DOS who had twice been stationed in Lebanon.
His two phone calls and four email messages to my office were so obscene and so violent that I cannot reprint them in full. Sent to me, and some members of my staff, in the midst of the Israeli-Lebanese war of 2006, he said, in part, “The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab;” called me and my staff “wicked and evil”, said that “we should burn in the fires of hell for all eternity” and that the “US would be safer without” us. There was worse. Much worse.