During the summer of 1976 in England – the hottest in the century – not a day would pass without news of a thrashing of a Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi, at the hands of skin heads or National Front gangs. Pakistani Ambassador Mian Mumtaz Daultana, stationed in London at the time, decided that enough was enough. The time had come for the ambassadors from the three aggrieved countries to come together and consider various options to help protect their respective communities in England.

India’s Ambassador B. K. Nehru, a cousin of India’s Prime Minister Jawahir Lal Nehru and Daultana’s friend, described the situation in a nutshell: “Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis call West Indians ‘black,’ while Asians living in East Africa call Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis ‘black.’ However, as far as whites are concerned, they consider people from all these communities to be ‘blacks’ who should be hated.”

I remembered this story when I read the narrative by Abdur Rasheed, an African-American Imam from New York City’s Harlem, about an African American Muslim and his impressions on post-9/11 life in America, who said, “It seems that I am a not just a ‘black man’ but ‘doubly black.’”

African American Muslims complain that South Asian and Arab Americans discriminate against them. This is not surprising for many of us, since we [Pakistanis] consider all Africans, whether they are Muslims or not, to be ‘black cobras’ or dangerous blacks. An African American officer in the American Foreign Service, who spent a few years in Lahore, told a friend, at the end of his assignment, that he had never felt ‘so black’ as he felt during his days in Pakistan.

Therefore, I hope that in the future, whenever we level the charge of racism and discrimination against white people that we will also remember our own biased behavior.

The people who pray at Harlem’s Islamic Brotherhood mosque, which was built by the followers of Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam, say that Islam came to the United States 400 years ago. African American Muslims have fought in all of this country’s wars and they have never had differences with the West. This thinking separates them from Pakistani Muslims, who deliver fiery speeches and wear unusual clothes.

Imam Abdur Rasheed showed his folded Arabic dress in his cupboard to the Newsday reporter and said he’d stopped wearing it five years ago. “It’s part of my effort to show something different culturally. Something which is not Arab. I don’t believe that I have to wear this dress in order to become a pious Muslim.”

Newsday reporter Carol Eisenberg writes that as far as African Americans are concerned, they have been treated as second class citizens for a long time. And it is not just being done by the dominant American society, but also by South Asian and Arab Muslims who came to the United States recently. The majority of Muslim immigrant organizations do not consider African Americans influential.

At a conference last year, African American Islamic scholar Amina Beverly McCloud said: “In their quest to be white and to become American, the newcomers (Arabs and South Asian Muslims) have mostly ignored the African American Muslims. They believe that they can thrust upon African American Muslims their understanding of Islam.”

An African American describes this situation beautifully, “We have stepped off the bus and gone back to riding the camel.”

In the meantime, the campaign to demonize and belittle Muslims continues. Last Monday, who else but the Fox Television Network introduced on its popular “24” program a series on a fictional well-to-do Muslim family, which is an Al-Qaeda cell living in the United States. The husband and wife have already been instrumental in derailing a train and, as a part of their public service (at least in my opinion), had already kidnapped the U.S. Defense Secretary. The couple then gets their young son involved in their cruel designs. The son’s non-Muslim girlfriend discovers that what they are doing could have dangerous consequences. The parents tell their son to kill his girlfriend. When he hesitates, one of his parents does the job.

Sabiha Khan of the Council on American Islamic Relations has lots of reservations about such programs. She said that the portrayal of Muslims living in America as terrorists creates an environment that not only incites anti-Muslim feelings – exposing the community to danger – but also brings pain to Muslims in real life. Khan said she has never known a family to be terrorists as portrayed in “24.” “None of the hijackers involved in the 9/11 atrocities had such a family background. In fact, it is based on none of the facts that we are facing today.”

Khan has made a good effort to protest, but who will heed her?