Monday, September 17, 2007

Nail Shop Owners Are Not the Enemy

Zoreh Assemi was born in Iran, moved to America, and became an American citizen. Now she owns the Givan Nail and Skin Center on Birchhill Road in Matinecock.

Saturday morning, two men attacked her as she was opening her shop.

"One of them was just beating me up with a stick, and the other one was cutting," she told WNBC-TV. The two men called her a "terrorist" and told her to "go back to your country."

The thugs damaged part of her salon, took some cash, and left.

She got patched up at a local hospital, but still had a mesh of cuts and bruises on her face, arms, and hands when WNBC-TV interviewed her.

"I'm in shock," Zoreh Assemi said. With an impressive display of understanding, she said she felt "terrorized ... not by American people, but by a very small group and prejudice. And it hurts."

I'll bet it hurts: physically and emotionally.

Between what Ms. Assemi said, and the anti-Muslim messages left by her attackers on a mirror in her shop, the Nassau County police are treating this as a "bias crime."

I hope that whoever did this is caught and treated to the greatest sanction available under American law.

This may be vindictve me, but I don't think so. One thing that America has going for it as a country is the way we've been able to attract the best and brightest from around the world, giving them opportunities to use their abilities.

Abusing people who enrich this country, in this case by providing nail care service for twenty years, hurts all of us.

Related posts, on tolerance, bigotry, racism, and hatred

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Blogroll

Note! Although I believe that these websites and blogs are useful resources for understanding the War on Terror, I do not necessarily agree with their opinions. 1 1 Given a recent misunderstanding of the phrase "useful resources," a clarification: I do not limit my reading to resources which support my views, or even to those which appear to be accurate. Reading opinions contrary to what I believed has been very useful at times: sometimes verifying my previous assumptions, sometimes encouraging me to change them.

Even resources which, in my opinion, are simply inaccurate are sometimes useful: these can give valuable insights into why some people or groups believe what they do.

In short, It is my opinion that some of the resources in this blogroll are neither accurate, nor unbiased. I do, however, believe that they are useful in understanding the War on Terror, the many versions of Islam, terrorism, and related topics.