Robert Fisk: Glimmers of hope and decency during a bad week for Arabs in America

This week was a bad week to be an Arab in America. It wasn't, frankly, a great week to be an English journalist either, with a message to a university audience on the eve of 11 September about the failings and injustice of US policy in the Middle East – especially when the 2,000 people who came to listen included relatives of those so savagely slaughtered a year ago.

George Mason University is in Fairfax, Virginia, just across the county line from Arlington, where Patriot missiles were positioned to ensure America's attackers did not return.

Hanan Ashrawi, among the sanest and least radical of Palestinians, was in Virginia, lambasted in a co-ordinated campaign by pro-Israeli lobby groups and Christian fundamentalists so virulent in their remarks that the Bush administration gave her bodyguards.

"Never have I experienced language like this," she told me. Her daughter Zena – a student at George Mason – says that she did not leave home for days after the attacks last year.

Other Arab students said they could not bear to watch television for the past year. "The coverage is so anti-Muslim, so anti-Arab that it is disgusting for me to watch," a young woman – who wore an Islamic headscarf – announced. "You can see the effect of the television, the way people look at us. They don't say anything. But it's in their eyes."

Even before my flight from the Middle East had landed at Dulles airport, a columnist in the local Richmond Times, rejoicing in the name of A Barton Hinkle, condemned the university for inviting me to speak. As the US commemorates one of its saddest days, he wrote, Fisk was the "wrong choice" as a speaker and trotted out the usual lies: because Fisk suggests that US policy in the Middle East has created so much Arab hatred, he was "a terrorist excuser", "a terrorist enabler", "a terrorist apologist".

By breakfast time, the president of the university – chastened by Hinkle's slanderous remarks – was in heated conversation with the Provost, Peter Stearns, who vigorously defended the university's right to invite a journalist to speak about 11 September in a context outside that of the sorrow and grief which the university would be recognising the next day. And by the evening, 2,000 Americans – the majority without any Middle East origins but with Jewish and Arab Americans among them – turned up. I spoke about the international crimes against humanity of 11 September – as well as the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombers. I also talked about the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut 20 years ago, with its death toll well over half that of 11 September. Would those Palestinian victims be commemorated, I asked?

There was fierce criticism among the audience of their own media coverage of 11 September, its mawkishness, its refusal to ask questions about the motives of that terrible crime. I could sense eyes moving suspiciously over the faces of the Muslim students with whom I breakfasted this week. But I could also feel the same gaze on a Jewish friend who had lunch with me in New York. All, I suppose, were of "Middle Eastern appearance". Or was this my imagination? Wasn't it, in truth, a tribute to Americans – not to their government – that they could still treat innocent Arabs with respect, that they could encourage a foreign journalist to give a lecture about America's injustice in the Middle East just a day before the anniversary of 11 September?

I flew from Washington National to New York's La Guardia airport. In the pre-flight security check queue, an Egyptian was in front me. He was dark-skinned and his English was poor. The security staff could hear him speaking in Arabic. But they took his boarding card without a word and cheerfully wished him a good flight on this, the most terrible anniversary for anyone – let alone an Arab – to fly to New York. It was I with my distinctly European features, who received the random check; shoes off, computer examined, passport scrutinised.

There were almost 200 empty seats on the flight – the skies over New York must have been haunted by more than enough ghosts that morning – although it's still eery to find how, on the approach to La Guardia, you still instinctively look west over Manhattan and search for the twin towers.

On my way back to Washington, I took a cab for La Guardia driven by a Korean. He wanted to talk about 11 September and Arabs. "The Arabs here knew. You see, most of my fellow drivers are Arabs. But from 7 in the morning of 11 September, they were off the streets. They'd all been told not to work in Manhattan after 7am. I didn't see any Arab drivers after that time. Well, of course! They had been warned in advance."

First, the lie was against the Jews: American Jews had been told not to go to work at the World Trade Centre on 11 September, so this pernicious rumour went – they were behind the crimes. Now, as I bumped towards the East river, I was getting the flip side of this mendacious tale: the Arabs of New York were behind 11 September. Surely, I thought, the time must come when the Jews and Arabs of America unite to protect each other.