Going Gets Easier for Arab-Americans
By NIDAL M. IBRAHIM
In the weeks after the terrorist attacks, Mohamed El-Erian said his expectation of getting searched at an airport was “nine out of 10.”
“Especially straight after Sept. 11, security checks became much more prevalent and thorough, including secondary screenings,” said El-Erian, a managing director at Newport Beach-based bond fund manager Pacific Investment Management Co.
A year later, El-Erian and other local Arab-American businesspeople say the closer scrutiny afforded to them in the wake of the attacks has eased.
“Because I tend to travel with the same airline a lot, that frequency has come down,” said El-Erian, who manages about $7 billion in assets for PIMCO. “In my case, it has to make a difference that I’m a recurring passenger.”
In the initial days after the attacks, it wasn’t unusual for businesspeople of Middle Eastern descent to get yanked off of planes and questioned. Take Amin Khalifa. Just days after Sept. 11, security officials pulled the chief financial officer at Fullerton-based Beckman Coulter Inc. off an American Airlines jet in handcuffs. They threw him in an airport jail and questioned him for hours before letting him go.
To be sure, life got harder for many Arab-American businesspeople after the attacks. Some, including restaurant and shop owners in Anaheim’s “Little Gaza” area, found themselves the target of threats, slurs and other outbursts. Many businesses in the area cater to other Arab-Americans, providing specialty foods or services such as travel.
Not everyone’s had it rough, though. Emile Haddad, president of Lennar Communities in Mission Viejo, a unit of Miami-based homebuilder Lennar Corp., said he’s seen little impact from the attacks.
Haddad, who hails from Lebanon, said he regularly travels to evaluate potential acquisitions and land deals.
“I haven’t felt anything different at all,” he said. “We joke because I don’t even get searched or anything. I travel a lot, and maybe that’s why. I’m a familiar face.”
It also could have something to do with how Haddad carries himself, he contends.
“My appearance may be Middle Eastern, but I don’t think of myself that way,” Haddad said. “I think of myself as an American. My attitude, my thinking is that of an American. To be honest, I think a lot of it has to do with one’s attitude. We can sometimes feed our own paranoia when we walk down the street and feel people staring at us. I really feel it’s all in the mind.”
Ali Rayes, president of Anaheim-based TransTour Express Inc., said there’s nothing imaginary to what has happened to his business in the past year. For the four months following the attacks, his phones were dead as customers stayed away, he said. Even today, business continues to suffer.
Rayes, whose agency caters to Arab-Americans traveling to and from the Middle East, said he laid off two workers,half his staff,due to the slowdown.
Echoing the sentiments of other travel agencies in the Anaheim area that cater to Arab-Americans, Rayes said business continues to be slow because the “travel decision is not a fun decision anymore.”
“The travel decisionmaker has to go through so many concerns until they come up with a decision,” Rayes said. “As far as Arab-Americans,and especially those that look Arab in the clothes they wear and their accent,they have a really tough time at the airport.”
A year after the attacks, Rayes said business has recovered somewhat but remains slow. He cites customers who used to travel two or three times a year and now say they only will travel to the Middle East once every two years.
“You’re going through a (security) hassle, so they figure ‘let’s minimize the hassle,'” Rayes said.
To deal with the slowdown, Rayes said he is seeking to diversify beyond Middle East travel.
The Arab Festival, an annual three-day fair that draws thousands to Garden Grove each year, was one of the causalities of the attacks last year. After seeing last year’s event cancelled, Anaheim businessman Ahmad Alam is looking to resume the annual festival, which is set for Sept. 20-22.
But there’s a hitch. Alam said he’s had no luck attracting sponsors. Last year, ChevronTexaco Corp. agreed to be the main backer of the event.
“We’ve approached several sponsors that have shied away,” Alam said.
The festival is expected to draw roughly 70,000 people, Alam said. Even without a sponsor, 108 booths have been sold, the highest number yet for the seven-year-old event, he said.
Interest in the festival is one sign that business among Arab-Americans has recovered in the past year.
Alam also owns an Arabic-language weekly newspaper and has a real estate practice on the side. Advertising at the paper has held steady, he said. As for real estate, the current housing boom has extended to Anaheim and his clients as well, he said.
Raad Ghantous, an interior designer with San Clemente’s RG & A;, counts himself among the fortunate. He said his firm hasn’t seen any noticeable fallout from the attacks.
“In many ways, it did not impact much at all,” he said. “It’s almost eerie. I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. A lot of it did not come at all.”
Ghantous has been stopped at airport security, he said. But he said he can’t say he was singled out.
“You look around you and you see there’s a guy by the name of Sven and a Mexican taking their shoes off too,” he said. “I don’t know that I experienced (profiling) in a sense of it being unfair or discriminatory. And if it was it was, it was very well done because it wasn’t something I could see.”
Ibrahim is editor and publisher of Arab-American Business magazine and a former Business Journal reporter.
