This past Saturday, the weekly anti-war (now anti-occupation) demonstration at the corner of North Broadway and High Street was the scene of an ugly incident, which nonetheless serves to clarify just where the lines are drawn, both locally and globally.

As usual, a pro-war contingent – clad in bright yellow “Support Our Troops” T-shirts – planted itself in the middle of the protest. This time, one of them accosted a young woman named Spenta Kandawalla who was protesting the occupation. In an aggressive tone, he demanded to know if Kandawalla was in the country on a visa.

Presumably, he asked her this because, in his eyes, Kandawalla’s relatively dark features marked her as a foreigner (an “alien,” in the U.S. government’s evocative lingo). It was all the information he had to go on, but apparently, it was all he needed. Pro-war activist one second, ethnic-cleansing immigration cop the next.

Spenta answered that she was indeed a U.S. citizen. She and her friends asked why he would ask such a question. He replied that she looked Middle Eastern and that if she were from “one of those countries,” then she wouldn’t even be allowed to protest there.

Some of his fellow pro-war cadres joined in the exchange, laying bare the usually veiled racism that underpins their arguments. They defended the practice of racial profiling, adding that the large-scale roundups of Muslim and Arab men – hundreds of them detained indefinitely, without charges, and denied access to an attorney – are justified if it is “only to interrogate them.”

While certainly cause for outrage, their comments should be appreciated for their instructiveness. They reveal the forces at play – and the issues at stake – in the U.S. wars on the peoples of the Middle East and the attacks on the civil rights of Arabs and Muslims living in this country.

And they remind us that the struggle against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the fight against racism – wherever we live – are inseparably linked. How else can the government convince us that one of “their” lives is worth so much less than one of “ours”?

Like many people who grow up in this country, I was taught from an early age – through messages both overt and subtle from family, school, church and the mass media – that Islam was evil, menacing and frightful. By extension, so were all people from the Middle East.

Back then, it was the so-called Iranian “hostage crisis” that was typically invoked to back up these anti-Muslim messages. Those “damn Iranians” were, I was led to believe, a horde of marauding, maniacal fiends blinded by religion and out to get me personally.

Of course, no one bothered to explain to me the context that generated the “hostage crisis.” No one informed me of the reasons for the Iranian revolution, nor was I told of the provocative actions taken by the Carter administration that prompted Iranian students to take hostages at the U.S. embassy. Sadly, I would be an adult before I learned any of that.

By no means am I likening the Iranian revolution of 1979 to the attacks of Sept. 11. The two have almost nothing in common. But in both cases, the event was taken out context to vilify Muslims with a broad brush. For example, I was told back then – as many children are told today – that Islam commanded its followers to kill all non-Muslims. This slander stuck with me for many years, and I still hear it propagated today.

Central Ohio is home to 35,000 Muslims, with 2,000 attending OSU. This represents an invaluable opportunity to get to know people we might otherwise be estranged from and question commonly held conceptions about them, their culture and their religion.

We owe it to ourselves to join in a constructive dialogue and find our true allies in the fight against our real – rather than our imagined – enemies. Because while Arabs and Muslims may be primary targets today, they will hardly be the last. We can’t watch them be scapegoated and pretend that we are any safer for it.

Paul Coltrin is a future graduate student in Spanish, and is studying through Continuing Education. He can be reached at [email protected].