Everyone is familiar with the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered when al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in a field outside of Philadelphia.
Very few people are aware that eight or more Americans were killed in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks, as a result of Sept. 11th linked hate backlash.
While the families of the Sept. 11 victims qualify for funding and public support, the families of victims killed because they were either Arab, Muslim or because they simply "looked Middle Eastern" have gotten scant attention. Scant attention, that is, from everyone but a petite Jewish woman who lives in a suburb of Chicago who believes the post-Sept. 11 backlash victims deserve the same compassion as the nearly 3,000 who died on Sept. 11.
"Three of these murders are incontrovertibly linked to Sept. 11," says Anya Cordell, who launched the Campaign for Collateral Compassion in February 2002 to bring attention to these subsequent Sept. 11 killings.
"There is no question at all that these three victims were the result of hate backlash linked to Sept. 11. At least five other murders are highly probably linked to the 9/11 hate-backlash."
Cordell, who has followed reports of Sept. 11 related hate backlash incidents closely, says the majority of the cases she has focused on took place in the three months after the terrorist attacks in New York. Yet none of the murder victims have been officially categorized as Sept. 11 related killings, and none of the families or relatives of these murder victims have qualified for any of the more than $2.9 billion raised to help Sept. 11 victims.
"I focused on the murders, because I knew that if I couldn't get attention for those victims, then I certainly would not be able to do anything for the victims of assaults and vandalism," Cordell said.
"They deserve to have their experience validated and have the public recognize what happened to them."
In most cases, reports of the Sept. 11 hate backlash were restricted to local news stories and local police investigations.