When the son asks about the history of the missing structures, the father explains that the towers were destroyed by some evil Arabs. "WHAT'S an Arab, dad?," asks the son, who has apparently grown up in a future United States where Arab-Americans were not merely endangered species, but were simply extinct.

Although the United States is a country of immigrants, virtually every single group of newcomers, including Italians, Irish, Polish, Greeks and Jews, have suffered the pain of discrimination during their early years.

But the most entrenched discrimination has been - and continues to be - against blacks who arrived mostly as slaves from Africa. The late Sammy Davis Jr., one of the foremost black comedians who later converted to Judaism, regaled his audiences with a hilarious anecdote of how he took a bus ride down South where racial discrimination was so unremittingly intense that blacks were allowed to travel only on the back of the bus.

As he took his seat in the front, the driver of the bus took a long hard look at him and shouted: "Hey, you, back of the bus, back of the bus."

But Davis protested - even as he pressed his credentials as a new convert: "I am not a black. I am a Jew. I am a Jew".

The bus driver, who was also anti-Semitic, then threw him out of the bus. The double discrimination was two for the price of one.

The late Martin Luther King Jr., one of the prominent black civil rights leaders who fought against institutionalized discrimination, led the political rallying cry of the early 1960s: "We Shall Overcome".

But the battle to overcome racial bias is still not over because discrimination is more subtle despite the fact that the United States has made legislative advances in levelling the playing field for American blacks.

However, the current backlash against people of Middle Eastern origin, has come in the aftermath of the Bush administration's restrictive policies on Arabs, Muslims and Arab-Americans.

A country fighting terrorism is arguably justified in its vigilance - but not when that battle borders on paranoia.

The culprits are not just politicians and bureaucrats but also religious leaders and the media.

On September 1 last year, less than two weeks before the terrorist attacks on the United States, the US Postal Service introduced a colourful stamp commemorating a Muslim festival.

The stamp with the greeting "Eid Mubarak" printed in Arabic calligraphy made its appearance after nearly 10 years of lobbying by Muslim groups.

The stamp turned out to be so popular that the Postal Service has decided to reissue it every year - an honour thus far bestowed only on stamps commemorating very few religious festivals, including Christian and Jewish.

But the anti-Islamic feelings generated after September 11 has prompted one talk radio host to express the preposterious view that even the Eid stamp has hidden evil connotations.

The reason: Eid spelled backwards reads Die. How paranoid can one get?

The Bush administration's war against terrorism - although justified in the national interest - has unfortunately taken the good, the bad and the ugly, along with the innocent.

Last week, the Washington Post highlighted the story of Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston taxi driver, who was held in solitary confinement on terrorism charges for over eight months without access to either a judge or a lawyer.

According to the Post, human rights groups are outraged because his case is one of the more extreme examples of how the United States has violated the due process rights of hundreds of mostly Arab-Americans who are being held in custody - but not charged - for their alleged ties to terrorist groups.

"If you read about something like this happening to a US citizen in China, or in Cuba - that they have held an American citizen for eight months without bringing him before a judge - the State Department would go crazy," says Mark Kriger, a defence lawyer.

Last week, the Arab-American Discrimination Committee joined five men, mostly Arab-Americans, in filing a civil rights law suit against four major American airlines for alleged discrimination against passengers perceived to be of Arab descent.

They were all ordered out of the aircraft primarily because they were "suspicious looking" - despite the fact that they all went through security checks prior to boarding.

Since most law enforcement and airport officials cannot distinguish between Middle Easterners and South Asians, one of the five who was thrown out of a flight was a Sri Lankan mathematics professor from a University in Florida.

The United States has also announced new anti-terrorism measures, including finger printing of resident visa holders and visitors from "high risk countries", including Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba.

The new measures have triggered strong protests from the American Civil Liberties Union and also from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

CAIR Executive Directore Nihad Awad says: "What is next, forcing American Muslims to wear a star and crescent as a means of identification for law enforcement authorities?"

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