Profile protest ignites debate

By Allison Sherry Denver Post Staff Writer

Sunday, October 21, 2001 - AURORA - A picket against racial profiling came to a broil Saturday on a sidewalk outside of a Circuit City store here as a handful of shoppers confronted the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace and said some profiling is to be expected in times of war.

The protest came after a Circuit City employee called police on a group of Arab American shoppers who came to the Aurora store on South Abilene Street on Oct. 7 to buy short-wave radios.

About 40 people on Saturday protested the store's action, and nine people were there in support of the store.

Rob Pollack, who has since resigned his position as an audio-video salesman, said the two men and a 14-year-old boy asked him about short-wave radios to monitor air traffic. Pollack consulted with other employees, and called police.

But Nihad Sarsour, 14, said his father, Ziyad Sarsour, and a blind family friend went in to buy a computer hard drive and wanted a short wave radio for the blind man to hear the news and weather.

"I was born in Littleton," Nihad Sarsour said. "Nothing like this has ever happened to me."

He stood on a sidewalk Saturday in a Gap sweatshirt face-to-face with 31-year-old Chris Kuroda, who argued that everyone's freedoms have been impinged upon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"At this point everyone's lost a little civil liberty," Kuroda said, noting his Japanese grandparents experienced racial profiling during World War II. "They were looked down upon, and they came through it fine."

But Saad Bokhari, a 28-year-old Manual High School teacher, said those countering the racial profiling protest take civil liberties for granted.

"Look over there and you see what looks like white Boy Scouts," he said. "During (the Oklahoma City bombing trial against Timothy McVeigh) they didn't say "We're going to target white Boy Scouts,' did they?"

Deana Ahmad, a 22-year-old student and protest organizer, said she's been in contact with Circuit City about the incident.

"What we wanted was a public apology . . . and diversity training for the employees," she said. "But they've chosen not to go that route. . . . That's why we're here."

John Ramsil, 45, of Aurora said he felt compelled to show his support for the store after reading about the incident in the newspaper.

"The guy shouldn't have lost his job," he said. "All he did was make a phone call. . . . I don't think there is such thing as profiling when we're at war."

-- Anonymous, October 21, 2001