Chris Colin, author of The Blue Pages has a heartbreaking story an Iraqi-American Hamid Sayadi in today's SFGate.com What has happened to us?
Hamid Sayadi was a an Iraqi officer who worked indirectly with the CIA in support of the Kurdish revolution in the 70's. The US gave him amnesty in 1977 and he settled here and became a productive and patriotic citizen. He was first settled in North Dakota then he relocated to San Francisco.
When the cold finally got to him, Sayadi came to San Francisco in 1978. He was hired as a journeyman mechanic at Greyhound, where he stayed until his job was sent to Mexico in 1990. That summer he was brought on as a mechanic at New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI, the large automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont where both GM and Toyota cars are made.
"It was very nice, I had no problems," Sayadi says of the beginning. But two months later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and in January 1991, Congress authorized the use of military force to push him out. Life for Sayadi at NUMMI wasn't the same, he says.
First, a rechristening: co-workers began calling him "Ali Baba," he says. Another simply referred to him as "Kuwaiti." He shaved his mustache so as not to draw comparisons to Hussein. Sprinkled in with the insults were constant requests for tutorials on all things Iraqi — perhaps benign curiosity, perhaps a way of emphasizing his differentness.
This was when Saddam started becoming a household name in US. And keep in mind, this was back in the early 90s. The middle east was not a threat to the US and no terrorist attack had happened yet. It shows that for a lot of people in America, tolerance is just a thin veneer and given the least bit of prodding, the ugliness shows through the surface. But the worst was yet to come:
When the Gulf War ended, things calmed down at NUMMI. Like America itself, Sayadi enjoyed a decade of relative peace at the plant. Then came 9/11, and overnight everything changed.
"Oh, NUMMI hires terrorists now?" was the sort of remark he says he heard commonly. His presence among co-workers invariably brought about mention of jihad or terrorism. One day, he was told by a superior that his lunchbox needed to be searched. When he asked why, he said he was led to believe he was considered a possible suicide bomber.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was Glen Beck's attack on congressman Keith Ellison. But they went much further than just verbal abuse. The worst started just after Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" moment.
The worst had yet to come, he says. It was in spring of 2003 that President Bush had his famous "Mission Accomplished" moment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and Sayadi reports that NUMMI hosted its own celebration. He estimates that between 500 and 1,000 workers gathered in the plant's cafeteria for a rally over the seeming victory in Iraq — he himself had purchased a special American flag hat just for the occasion. A marching band played, various speakers gave remarks and in general "it was a very intense rally," he recalls. "But I didn't see more than five minutes of it."
Do any of you recall having a "Mission Accomplished" rally at your place of work? I know we certainly didn't.
Sayadi had just arrived when two security guards approached him. One put a finger on Sayadi's mouth, he remembers, the other held his hands behind his back; together they escorted him from the cafeteria.
"They took me to the boiler room just outside, and left me alone with this one big guy, big like a mountain. Very intimidating, very sadistic-looking with this toothpick in his mouth. I remember that look. It was like he'd eaten my meat and was now cleaning his teeth out."
The man ordered Sayadi to take his coveralls off. As Sayadi tells it, something finally snapped in him. He broke down and wept.
"I was crying like a woman. I was sitting on a chair, sobbing," he says. "They broke me down. I was done. I didn't have any defense besides my crying."
He proceeded to strip down to his underwear; he guesses now that somebody suspected he had a bomb. At some point a co-worker happened to open the door. Sayadi says the man's jaw fell open. Sayadi begged him to bring him his clothing from his locker.
"I was like a person drowning in a river, grabbing at a piece of hay," he says of that moment.
Eventually he was released, but that night he checked himself into his local hospital — something like an emotional breakdown had occurred, he says.
JEEBUS! This was at the guy's JOB!! If so called "ordinary Americans" can behave this way, is it such a stretch to think that trained military personnel would torture? And frankly, what happened to Sayadi was one step away from torture. And if you want to split hairs, to me this was "cruel, inhuman and degrading" as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Luckily, a lawsuit is currently being filed against GM, Toyota, and NUMMI.
San Francisco employment attorney Kelly Armstrong is representing Sayadi in a $40 million lawsuit against his former employer, as well as Toyota and GM, the two companies behind NUMMI.
"It's a $40 million message to NUMMI that they cannot mistreat, humiliate, degrade, harass, discriminate and retaliate against and fail to protect the very people that make NUMMI what it is today," Armstrong says. "It's a message that Mr. Sayadi deserves justice."
I just don't get this country any more. Maybe I'm naive, but while I knew that there was significant dislike of Arab Americans in this country, I had no idea that people would react this way to a coworker of 12 years. Is this what 6 years of the Bush Administration and 6 years of "24" as the top tv show have brought us to?
Sayadi says it best:
For his part, the man who first discovered the United States via frigid North Dakota 30 years ago says he still loves his adopted country. Ignorance, Sayadi says, can be cured. But the country needs to find its way back to its original dream, he says, one that's perhaps grown obscure in the turbulent years since 9/11.
"We were a melting pot, we were getting mixed well. Now we're a salad bowl, everyone's sticking out like a sore thumb. I became like a cherry tomato in that bowl," Sayadi says with a sad chuckle.
Will this country ever recover?