Today, AM New York included a piece in their "five years later" coverage on a NY1/Newsday poll about New Yorkers' thoughts about possible further attacks. The story leads with this alarming statement:
Most New Yorkers expect another city terrorist attack in the next five years and a majority favor some form of profiling of Muslims or Middle Easterners, and are willing to surrender some personal freedoms to reduce the threat of terrorism....
Nine pages in, there is an unrelated human interest story by business writer Farnoosh Torabi, about a tailor whose shop was a block from the site of the World Trade Center. The piece includes plenty of empathy for this working-class everyman, still trying to put back together the pieces and get on with his life.
What the story fails to mention, however, is that the tailor, William Saad, is an Arab American, of Egyptian descent. Interestingly enough, the reporter, Ms. Torabi, is Iranian American herself, although google searches fail to turn up any biography that points that out.
AM New York recently ran a special feature about young Muslims in the United States. But much of the discourse in the press about Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans of other Middle Eastern descent still represents these people as members of a separate community, or, at best, doesn't show them as genuine stakeholders in overall society.
Meanwhile, AM New York manages to report on Middle Eastern Americans that are average pieces of the larger social fabric without pointing out to the public that such simple classifications would place their neighbors in the same category as the people they fear.
Farnoosh Torabi (not verified) @ September 19, 2006 - 5:07pm
Ms. Taha's describes the lack of attention to Mr. Saad's Middle Eastern roots in the article as a "failure." However, what Ms. Taha fails to recognize is that 9/11/06 AM New York article did, in fact, identify Mr. Saad as Egyptian, detailing his devotion to a Christian Orthodox Saint in Egypt. Saad's tailor shop bears the Saint's name.
To dive into Saad's ethnicity was uneccessary to what the story was trying to address. The fact is -- the plight of small business owners in and around the Fulton Subway Station, which was the point of the story, is a challenge shared by hundreds of neighboring business owners of all ethnicities, religions and beliefs. Mr. Saad just happened to be one of the luckier few who found a new working space in time.
Had I chosen to tell the tale of a Middle Eastern immigrant's views of living in New York in the post 9/11 climate and had I more than 350 words to summarize, more attention would have been given to Saad's heritage.
Finally - why is the fact that I am an Iranian-American, "interestingly enough" to Ms. Taha?
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