Americans are angry, shocked and confused, and some of us are taking our anger out on Arab American citizens.

This is disgusting and wrong. But the scary part is that it is not very surprising. The fact that a small portion of Americans has reacted to this tragedy by mistreating Arabs is, unfortunately, quite predictable. This sort of thing has happened before in the United States. During WWII, Japanese Americans were even put into relocation camps on the West Coast, mainly in California. Two-thirds of the 112,000 Japanese put into relocation camps were American citizens, and this action was held up by the Supreme Court as a legitimate action in a time of war. The Japanese Americans were given little notice to report to train stations where they would be taken to relocation camps. That is how drastic the American actions and attitudes were toward our so-called enemies in the 1940s. How far will America be willing to go this time? Not that far, we hope, but where does any of the hate come from? There are no logical reasons for it.Incidents of racism toward Arab Americans have already been reported all over the country. Stories of beatings and harassment are numerous.

It is scary when one realizes that it was just over 50 years ago when the Japanese were separated from society. Ten years ago, violence was brought upon Middle Easterners right here at Sacramento State.

Hopefully this will not surface again, but Americans are angry, and not feeling very rational. Taunting Arabs in the United States with the American flag, as some have done lately, is nonsensical. The Arabs being harassed respect this flag as well.

If Osama bin Laden?s terrorist group is responsible for this horrendous attack on the United States, it still makes no sense to direct hate toward a group of people in this country. The Muslim religion has extreme radicals just like any other religion. Those responsible for the attacks have skewed the original doctrines of the religion and twisted them to fit their own agendas of hate. They are not representative of a country or a religion, much less an entire race.

The United States has hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and they should not be associated with this small terrorist group that attacked America.

I have seen the hate myself in the days since the attacks and as the body count rises, racist actions appear to be getting worse. Our country is in trouble, and it is being compounded by ignorance. We don?t know how far it will go, and maybe it will cease soon. We can cautiously hope so.

We have a history in this country of ostracizing entire races of people when our nation is in trouble, and now the degree of trouble has arguably been raised to a level that has never been seen before. Hopefully the racism that appears to be tied with it will not be raised to similar levels.

Russ Edmondson is a journalism major. He can be reached at [email protected].