"What are you looking at, terrorist bitch?"

So said a surly gentleman on a Manhattan-bound subway to my sister, who violated the rules of overcrowded-island etiquette by stealing a glance at him as he discussed the pros and cons of prejudice.

Ordinarily, racist slurs would make her angry. As it was, having just watched stricken people jump from burning towers to their certain deaths, her eyes filled with tears and she hurried off the train.

A few days later, some thugs visited my cousin's convenience store/gas station, demanding "Where are you people from?" and "Why don't you have a flag up?" My cousin rushed out and bought two gigantic flags and installed

them prominently on his house and the store.

At least five South Asian or Middle Eastern Americans have been slain so far and dozens of incidents of harassment, intimidation, and terror have been reported, against Arab-Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, Pakistanis, and other

South and West Asians, according to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. In Mesa, Arizona, a Sikh man was shot, the suspect shouting "I stand for America all the way" as he was handcuffed. In Los Angeles, an Egyptian

American man was shot; a Persian woman was beaten; a gun was shoved into another woman's face; a Spanish-speaking woman was attacked after being told "you foreigners caused all this trouble!"; and another was attacked after

being told "America is only for white people." In San Francisco, a bag of blood was thrown on the doorstep of an immigrant-services center. In Chicago, 300 people waving flags and shouting "USA! USA!" tried to march into a mosque; a firebomb was tossed into an Arab-American community center; and a Morrocan man was attacked with a machete. In New York, two Pakistanis were killed on Coney Island, a Sikh man was attacked with a baseball bat;

two others attacked with a paint-ball gun; another was fired upon with rubber bullets; a taxi driver was pulled out of his cab and beaten; and a Pakistani woman was chased by a car, whose driver threatened to kill her for

"destroying my country." In Cleveland, a Sikh temple was attacked with lit bottles of gasoline. In Tulsa, a Pakistani was beaten by three men. In Dallas, a Pakistani grocer was shot dead; elsewhere in the state shots and

firebombs were lobbed at mosques, and a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Islamic Society building.

There have been others. Most of those who suffer such attacks won't report them. They'll just hide, lay low, wear baseball caps or bindis, as the Indian consul-general advised, and pray they won't be targeted again. As

word spreads, their friends and families will do the same. Even my liberal family says I shouldn't take my small boys to the anti-war rallies, because they have brown skin, hair and eyes, and even Muslim names. What if they are targeted? What if someone throws a rock?

Hate crimes hotlines have been set up, and I hope anyone who witnesses or suffers harassment or violence will use them, at least so this wave of violence can be accurately recorded for posterity. For anti-Asian violence

organizations, calling these episodes of domestic terror "hate crimes" is tragically understated. For the news media and administration officials, however, it is offensively, dangerously hypocritical. These are not just

isolated acts committed by crazed individuals, driven mad by fear and trauma. This wave of violence is a necessary extension of today's warmongering patriotism as defined by our political and media elites.

"There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this," said former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on CNN, "and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this

thing." "People like this need to feel pain," said National Review editor Rich Lowry in the Washington Post. "This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack," wrote syndicated columnist Ann Coulter in the New York

Daily News.

In other words, indiscriminate revenge, whether on millions of Afghans or against some random brown person on the subway, is what flag-waving patriots must do. "They" need to be punished, commentators say, whoever "they" may

be. On a recent episode of PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer, even the learned commentators couldn't or wouldn't distinguish between Arabs, Muslims,Afghans (who are not Arabs), fundamentalists, and terrorists. All were just

simply "they."

It must be clear to most now. "We" are white. "They" are brown. "They" celebrated--not only in Palestine, as the news media would have us believe, but also in Pakistan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere. This is taken as evidence

of their inhumanity. But of course when the jocks in the sports bar in my old neighborhood cheered when Scud missiles hit Iraq years ago, that was good old red-blooded Americanism in action. "They" hate "us" not because of