Vigilante anti-Arab violence against immigrant store owners spiked after September 11

Evidence

The store was safe. Nothing terrible happened there. It wasn’t like the newsstand in the Bronx, where the Yemeni owner was beaten with a bottle by three men who were yelling, “You Arabs get out of my neighborhood. We hate Arabs! This is war!” Nor was it like the candy store in upper Manhattan, where five teenagers attacked the elderly Arab owner, breaking his dentures in half. Nor was it like what happened at the convenience store owned by a Palestinian-American man in Missouri. That was torched. Or the one in Venice, Illinois, where three men attacked the Iraqi-American store owner. Or the one in Somerset, Massachusetts, where three teenagers firebombed an Indian American’s grocery, later confessing to the police that they wanted to “get those Arabs for what they did to us.” Or like what happened to the Palestinian-American store owner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was shot four times in the back and killed in front of his grocery store. Or like the tragedy that befell Adel Karas, the Egyptian Coptic owner for twenty years of the International Market in San Gabriel, California. On that same day, September 15, two young men burst through the doors of his store and shot him dead. Nor was it like what happened to Waqar Hassan, a Pakistani immigrant who ran a convenience store in Dallas, Texas. Also on September 15, Mark Anthony Stroman walked into his store, ordered two hamburgers, and then proceeded to shoot Hassan in the face, killing him. Expressing no remorse, Stroman later said, “I did it to retaliate on local Arab Americans or whatever you want to call them. I did what every American wanted to do but didn’t.” Stroman also killed Vasudev Patel in another hate crime two weeks later. He was then arrested, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. Nor was it like what happened on September 29 to the fifty-one-year-old Yemeni immigrant Abdo Ali Ahmed. He was shot three times in the torso and died in his store in Reedley, California. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 504

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s framing in Bayoumi’s larger project on post-9/11 Arab American experience, and pairs with the Milgrom law-merchant material on how dispersed immigrant merchants rely on community reputation systems. — connects to: Postwar anti-alien mob violence burned out entire immigrant districts — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1586
• SEED: The litany of specifically Muslim- and Arab-owned convenience stores being attacked post-9/11 — while South Asian Sikhs and Hindus were also hit, as Stroman killing Patel shows — is an article angle on how ‘Arab’ became a catch-all target category.