Are American civil liberties under siege?
I am no fan of John Ashcroft and personally campaigned against his nomination to attorney general. However I don’t find my civil liberties unnecessarily curtailed. In a recent NPR story about 9-11, a reporter interviewed a Moroccan who owns a Sicilian restaurant in New York City.Although most of his staff hail from Arabic speaking nations, since 9-11 he has forced them to place orders and speak to each other in English or Italian, fearing that the Arabic would unsettle customers. He also noted that while he has not experienced any discrimination from his neighbors or the authorities, he is afraid that he will be mistaken for “one of those bad men”. My first impression was: like the average New Yorker would know the difference between Arabic and Italian… My second thought was that here was a Muslim New Yorker who feared discrimination yet had not experienced any. After a whole year – in a city that had been the victim of the worst atrocity on American soil – this guy lived with not a
