Students and community members met Thursday evening to discuss Tuesday's terrorist attack, focusing on how to foster a nonviolent response and prevent similar hate crimes from happening again.
Organizers said they had originally planned the meeting before Tuesday's attack to be a forum on American foreign policy.
Ray Vogler, a member of Solidarity, a socialist and feminist organization, said there was a need to protect students and other community members of Arab descent who could become the victims of possible harassment or attack.
'We need to send our sympathies [to victims], but we also need to organize in our community for those being harassed,' Vogler said. 'We need to work and organize for those who are getting the backlash here.'
April Gonzolas, a UW-Madison student and member of the Multicultural Student Coalition, said racial profiling had increased on campus since Tuesday's terrorist attacks.
She said one Muslim woman said she had been blocked from getting on an L-line bus Thursday by a group of students and that the bus driver did not intervene.
Vogler said crimes against those of Arab descent had stemmed from the 'scapegoating of Palestinians' that she said is taking place in the media.
One audience member suggested that the image of Palestinians dancing in the streets, apparently celebrating the terrorist attacks on the U.S., was possibly fabricated by news sources. She said it had been taken from video archives of when Palestinians were rejoicing at the liberation of Kuwait. The location of the sun in the video would have made it a time of the day in Palestine earlier than when the World Trade Organization had been hit, she said, making it impossible for someone in Palestine to have had knowledge of the attacks.
Americans also need to look for reasons as to why the attack happened, Vogler said.
'I think this tells us volumes about how we are viewed in the world and how we've oppressed other countries,' she said.
Jennifer Lonstein, a Palestinian Rights activist who taught English in a refugee camp in Beirut, said her friends from the Middle East had expressed their sympathies to her about what had happened. She said although they sometimes felt anger toward the U.S. government, they made a distinction between the American government and the American people.
'I want people to try and understand what it's like living in the Middle East, ... [to be] dehumanized in the West,' she said.
She said the conditions of refugee camps, where there are 90,000 residents living on two kilometers of land, were very poor.
'The point is that you have no rights,' she said. 'You're told you're not worth as much as someone from the West. This makes people angry, [it] makes them feel intimidated ... [The situation] is not that simple ... it has historical roots that are grounded in U.S. foreign policy.'
