Treatment of suspected Arab sympathizers now vs suspected Reds 40-50 years ago

Factual Questions
1

According to news linked in this thread, an American student was detained several hours by the Philadelphia TSA and interrogated briefly by the FBI, supposedly for having Arabic flash cards on his person. Contributing factors, though, seem to be his frequent travels to Arab countries and his carrying a book through security that was critical of US foreign policy. The questions the interrogators were asking him didn’t seem so much to be pumping him for information so much as browbeating him into giving up just whose side he was on in America’s conflicts with the Arab world.

That might seem a bit heavy for GQ (and please feel free to move if warranted), but I am interested in a factual answer: how would this compare to a student back in (say) the 1950s or the 1960s, making frequent travel to Soviet bloc countries, carrying Russian language flash cards and books critical of the US relationship with the Soviet Union? Would an old blacklisted Red look at today’s student and say, “son, you think you’ve got it tough . . .”

I’m interested in documented policies or attributed news stories, not just “oh, everyone was hysterical about the Reds back then.”

Also, I’m interested in a comparable level of suspicion/activity – not the execution of the Rosenbergs on formal charges and a conviction of actively spying for the USSR.

2

Not “likely true”. True. There is a mountain of declassified documents and intercepts of Russian cmmunications, showing the network of spies the Russians ran. Rosenberg was one, and his wife helped him. The general feeling was the Americans were playinag a game of chicken - they basically told Julius, if you don’t tell us all you know your wife fries too. He held out, so she fried.

I guess the major point is that there WAS a large level of communist spying, and locals with sympathies did in fact spy for the Russians - although generally the big leaks here were more motivated by money than ideology.

Whether there’s as much with the arabs today - well, you could hardly find them if you wanted to join. Most of the big arrests in the last few years have been entrapment by the FBI.

3

Just to state my own opinion, though I don’t know if I have much to back it up: I imagine the student in this scenario would not only be detained at the airport but also have a dossier compiled on him and have his mail opened and possibly come under active surveillance for several years afterward by J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men. And there’d be no question of suing the FBI, cause what are you, a Communist?

4

md2000,

what do you mean by “you could hardly find them”? While the ticking bomb type terrorists may be uncommon in America, surely you could find a few mosques where preachers spend lots of time bashing the foreign policy, Jews, racism/islamophobia and so forth, right? Indeed, they would be more than happy to have you convert and come listen to their lawful and appropriate exercise of the 1st Amendment rights on a regular basis. So I don’t think it’s all that hard to become an Arab sympathizer at present.

5

I can’t tell you anything specific from personal knowledge about 50 years ago, but I did study in the Soviet Union in the fall of 1989, and again in Russia in the summer of 1995. On one hand, many students in my various Russia-related educational programs were funded by the Federal government as part of various programs aimed at developing competency among Americans in languages considered to be of strategic importance to the United States. (One such program is the FLAS (Foreign Languages and Area Studies) program,which still exists, and which I applied for during my M.A. program in Russian & East European Studies, but didn’t get - at my grad school, they generally went to Ph.D. students in various disciplines.)

I did get a Dept. of Education grant intended for the same purpose, which covered basically all of my 1995 program, which was a specialized Russian-language program for students of natural and social sciences. Also my grad school had a domestic summer intensive language program that taught Russian and a number of other languages of the FSU region that are considered strategically important, and many students in this program are fully funded by the State Department under another fellowship program. And there were always a couple of students in my program, and in a related program at my grad school that focused on other portions of the former East Bloc such as Central Asia, who were active-duty military personnel and were having their way through grad school fully funded by Uncle Sam. There was also a grant available from the NSA, but those of us who intended to go on in academia were cautioned that NSA funding was liable to make later professional contacts in the FSU suspicious of us (basically, even though the funding came with no strings attached, people in-region might think we were spies). So I never applied for that grant.

So on one hand, the US Government considers it important to fund students of languages considered strategically important to the U.S. (of which Arabic is certainly also one, and if you haven’t read all the news stories in recent years of the desperation of various USG agencies in trying to find qualified Arabic translators and interpreters, you really haven’t been paying attention).

But on the other, let me tell you how much fun it was to go through a Federal security clearance for a relatively low-level job with the Dept. of Justice in 1991, not long after my first program; my clearance took 5x as long as it was supposed to, they interviewed practically everyone in any position of authority with my USSR study program (I requested a copy of the investigation report later under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was hilarious!), and although I was totally upfront about every personal relationship I had with a Soviet citizen, they really didn’t know what to do with the info - they ended up having me sign a sworn statement that if any of my Soviet friends asked me to do anything that would violate US national security, I would immediately inform the State Department. And that was for a Spanish interpreting job!

So yeah, not exactly McCarthyism, but still kind of ridiculous. And meanwhile, just look how long it took to catch a guy like Aldrich Ames.

6

The fact that we were really, really stupid in 1956 does not excuse the fact that we’re a little bit stupid in 2010. I’m not sure that’s what your point is - just wanted to make that clear.

7

I posted this in General Questions for a reason; I hope that’s clear.

8

Queer question as an important minority of ***Arabs are Christian and the overwhelming majority of Muslims ***by numbers are not Arabs.

I presume answers would be rather clearer if this was reframed.

9

I posted this in General Questions for a reason; I hope that’s clear.

10

Two, two mints in one:

“In the suit he contends the agents asked him if he was an Islamist or a Communist. He said no.”

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/84030737.html

11

Sorry. I got here from a link in another thread. I assumed we were in GD.

12

No worries, I should have made clear in the link.

13

Well, it’s unlikely an old-fashioned Commie would have been able to make frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain – both the Soviets and the U.S. had pretty stringent travel restrictions .

As for what kinds of stuff the government was looking for , take a look at the FBI dossier for Lillian Hellman.

For a not-unrelated analogy, take a look at Nixon’s Enemies List, which ended up with 823 individuals and organizations on it. Among the tactics presidential counsel John Dean suggested using against the enemies were tax audits and “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.”

14

The biggest difference is that today there’s no blacklist. People suspected of “Arab sympathies” aren’t being systematically denied jobs. And there’s no formal government committee investigating people who like Arabs, no equivalent of HUAC.

But note also that there’s something of a false equivalence here. “Arab” today is more analogous with “Russian” in the 1950s, while “Communist” in the 1950s is more analogous to “terrorist” today. Even lowest red-baiters in the 1950s would sometimes at least make nods toward sympathy toward the Russians as a people, oppressed by the Communist tyranny. And likewise, declaring yourself a a sympathizer of terrorists today will land you in a lot hotter water than merely sympathizing with Arabs; the more so, since a lot fewer Arabs live in terrorist states today, as compared with the proportion of Russians who lived in Communist states in the 1950s.

15

Even if studying Arabic WAS some kind of indication of terrorist sympathies, this distinction could be unclear because there are at least a couple non-Arabic languages that use Arabic script.

I studied Persian last year, and decided not to go through my Persian flashcards at the airport at one point precisely so I would avoid going through whatever this guy had to endure. To anyone who isn’t familiar with the languages, Persian and Arabic look identical.

Of course, if an airport security guy had approached me and asked why I was studying Arabic, I don’t know that a clarification that it was actually Persian would have helped me any.

16

The big factual difference between the Macarthyite persecution and the modern war on terror is what happens when ended up on the wrong side of it.

The victims of the Macarthyism may have had their careers damaged by insinuation and accusations. But they were never kidnapped and flown to the Middle East to be tortured.

17

Yeah, quite bloody clear. All the more reason to get your terminology right, although the other note re confusing Communists with Russians and vice versa gets one somewhat in the same space.

True, but most Muslim majority languages use latin script, Indonesian, Turkish, etc.

Quite.

However, this returns to the issue, measuring discrimination would have to take into account - if one is trying to be factual - both that a majority of Muslims are not Arabs and don’t typically use Arabic, and that non-Muslims like Sikhs are confused with Muslims.

I do believe that I have read that most Arabs in the US are in fact Christians, and that most Muslims are of Indian extraction.

18

I think you must distinguish between the treatment of Americans during the two eras, and the often much more ruthless treatment given to foreigners. At no time, in the Red Scare or the War on Terror, was an American kidnapped and sent to be tortured abroad.

Arar was a Canadian-Syrian dual citizen, who was deported to Syria (not kidnapped) after being falsely identified as a terrorist; in fact, his deportation would have been legal if not for the fact that I think we have a law against deporting people to their native countries if we’re substantially certain that they’ll be tortured there.

I don’t have a specific case at hand, but I’m pretty sure there would have been more than one occasion during the Cold War when we deported or otherwise funnneled a foreigner suspected of Communist ties into the hands of the Shah of Iran or some savage Latin American dictator, in the full knowledge that he would be tortured and murdered there. In fact, I’m not sure if such behavior would even have been illegal yet in the 1950s.

19

On the other hand, Jose Padilla is an American citizen, and his lawyers said he was tortured; I’m not sure if that’s true, but his confinement was probably harsher than that of any suspected Communist during the Red Scare.