by:Colin KINNIBURGH
(FRANCE24) In the days that followed the September 11 attacks, America’s state of shock quickly turned into calls for vengeance. Even before the War on Terror spread across the globe, Arab and Muslim Americans felt the backlash at home — and many in New York City are still navigating those waters today.
The attacks may have taken place twenty years ago, but memories of September 11, 2001 still bring tears to Rabyaah Al-Thaibani’s eyes.
Al-Thaibani, who immigrated to New York from Yemen with her family as a child, was working at the Arab-American Family Support Center, a nonprofit based in the Arab-American enclave of downtown Brooklyn. Just across the river was lower Manhattan, then with the iconic Twin Towers studding the skyline.
“On that day, I get to work… We go on the roof, and we actually witnessed the second plane hit. And then we also witnessed when the buildings fell,” she tells FRANCE 24.
Even as ash and debris spilled into Brooklyn from miles away, Al-Thaibani and her colleagues and family were already feeling another kind of fallout. Her office was quickly shut down as they began receiving “death threats”, and the communities they served began to panic too.
Al-Thaibani’s father rushed to pick up her siblings from the Islamic school they were attending at the time. She, her mother and her sister stopped wearing their hijabs, and for a week, the entire family stayed home, “literally on lockdown”.
“We were just terrified,” she recalls.
