Deep Distrust of Government Still Simmers
Many Americans Who Deplore Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11 Question or Criticize U.S. Actions

by DARRYL FEARS

The Washington Post, October 29, 2001, page A2

During a forum on war and peace in Washington, Damu Smith said the United States is wrong for bombing Afghanistan. He believes the Sept. 11 attacks on America were the result of misguided U.S. foreign policy. When he reminded an audience of about 350 that Nelson Mandela was once considered a terrorist by a wrongheaded South African government, they erupted in applause.

On the telephone in Los Angeles, Rudy Arcun a said a very similar thing. The people suffering in the U.S. bombardment, he said, "are not terrorists. I don't think the people suffering in Iraq are terrorists." If Martin Luther King Jr. were still around, Arcun a said, "he would ask questions" about how the United States could bomb those countries.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, American trust in government hit a historic high. A Washington Post poll in September found that 64 percent of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing "most of the time" or "just about all the time," the highest figure since the poll began in 1966. Similarly, a Pew Research Center poll taken about the same time found that 90 percent of Americans supported President Bush's decision to bomb Afghanistan. Support among blacks wasn't as strong -- but registered at 70 percent. But Smith, a longtime community and environmental activist, and Arcun a, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University at Northridge, represent minorities whose thoughts on government run contrary to popular opinion. They are attorneys, former police officers, authors and intellectuals who deplore the terrorist attacks that left about 5,000 people dead. They also have a deep distrust of government. Their suspicions are rooted in a history of government harassment, profiling, police brutality and internment experienced by their communities.

"I'm not justifying what happened on Sept. 11," said the Rev. Grayland Hagler, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Northeast Washington. "But it's clear that when Bush said if you're not with us, you're with the terrorist -- when he said he wanted the man [alleged terrorist sponsor Osama bin Laden] dead or alive -- he was calling out the posse, and black people know the posse. They come by and get you in the middle of the night and kill you without due process."

Hagler and Smith recently sat on a panel of 12 black activists, lawyers, students, professors and law enforcement officials at a forum called "A Black Community National Dialogue" at Howard University's School of Law. Others at schools, think tanks and churches questioned U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Stuart Kwoh, an activist for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, said like everyone else he wanted justice for the attacks.

"But we do have to live up to ideals as Americans," Kwoh said. He cited a Sierra College Research Institute poll that said a third of New Yorkers favored internment camps for Arabs. "Asian Americans have seen internment camps, the scapegoating of Koreans during the L.A. riots [in 1992] and the scapegoating of Chinese Americans during the Wen Ho Lee case.

"My agency doesn't engage in foreign-policy issues," Kwoh said, "but we can see the fear in our communities that people will take out their frustrations on people who look Middle Eastern."

But other minorities do engage in foreign-policy issues -- particularly America's support of Israel. Several said the treatment of Palestinians in Israel reminds them of apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States before the civil rights movement.

"Growing up, I remember images of people in Israel with machine guns shooting at children who were throwing rocks at them," said Gabriel Gutierrez, director of the Center for the Study of the People of the Americas at California State University at Northridge. "If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is."

On this point, some minority activists and scholars sound strikingly like another group noted for its distrust of government -- white rights activists and supremacists. But the comparison goes only so far.

David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who runs a white rights organization called European American Unity and Rights, wrote on his Web site that U.S. bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with its support of Israel, led to the Sept. 11 attacks.

When informed that he and some minorities were saying similar things, Duke seemed encouraged. "I think that's great," he said from Rome, where he's researching a book on the Roman empire. "I think a lot of portraits being painted of myself and black nationalist groups are unfair portraits."

But in the next breath, Duke revealed where he and minority activists part company: "I favor European rights," he said. "I'm against forced integration. I know that Jewish people want the same thing. The only difference is, the only people who are allowed to do that . . . is the Jewish minority [in Israel]. The Israeli state is an apartheid state."

The word association is "a problem" for minority activists, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst for Political Research Associates, a group that monitors conservative and extreme white rights rhetoric.

"The rhetoric is similar, yet the goals are very different," Berlet said. Minorities seek inclusion and equality in a nation run by white people; white rights organizations want exclusion.

"Some people are failing to distance themselves from the racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia," Berlet said. "There's a way to criticize Israel and not be anti-Semitic. To me, the answer is . . . clear, and that's to articulate openly what your position is."

When told of Duke's remarks, the Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, a black poet and author, shuddered. His eyes narrowed as he thought before speaking.

"I think the difference between the extreme right and the black community is their ends are diametrically opposed to ours," said Sekou, an author and a poet. "The extreme right is concerned with returning America to pre-1960s. Their desire is to rescind the promise of the civil rights movement, ban abortions, increase American isolation throughout the world.

"They share very much in common with the Taliban," he said. "Like the Taliban, they go through so much trouble to say they think it's their way or the highway, and God is on their side. We don't stand in solidarity with them."

At one time, Smith said, the government Duke criticizes shared a face with the Ku Klux Klan that Duke once led. He remembers when white mayors, police officers and residents joined in terrorizing black communities.

"As I recall, while growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s, there were no Arabs riding horses terrorizing black folks," he said. "We have known terrorists in the community. I have been stopped on some dark roads in Mississippi, and just how that police officer who stopped me walked toward me the way he did was terrifying."

Sekou said he hadn't forgotten COINTELPRO, the covert FBI Counterintelligence Program that set out to erase organizations described as radical in the 1960s. Everyone from King to the Black Panther Party were targets of the program's informants, illegal wiretaps and police raids.

In those days, Smith and Arcun a pointed out, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled King "the most dangerous man in America." Leaders of the NAACP and the National Urban League Inc. abandoned King after he called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" in April 1967, when the Vietnam War still enjoyed popular support.

The anti-terrorism legislation moving through Congress is another source of fear, said Gutierrez. He said white people who have not been profiled or jailed on the scale of minorities don't understand its implications.

If the anti-terrorism legislation passes, he would feel less secure, said Ronald E. Hampton, director of the National Black Police Association. "I don't believe we're any safer now than we were before Sept. 11," Hampton said.

Hampton wasn't worried about Arab terrorists. He was worried about the Justice Department and police. "They have a distraction now," Hampton said, "but the government will get back to us."