When Anya Cordell heard the first report of a backlash against Muslims and other groups just days after the shocking attacks on September 11, 2001, memories of another violent assault came flooding back. Two years earlier on July 2, Cordell’s African American neighbor Ricky Byrdsong was walking with his children when he was shot outside Cordell’s front door. His murderer was an angry white supremacist named Benjamin Smith on a mission to kill anyone who didn’t look like him.

Cordell had her own mission. As a Jewish girl who read The Diary of Anne Frank, questioning whether she would have shown the courage to hide Frank’s family, she grew up preoccupied with how specific groups become designated as "Other", and so often are targeted on the basis of appearance. She frequently gave presentations and lectures on “appearance-ism,” her term for judging on looks alone. For months after Byrdsong’s murder, she invited neighbors to gather where he was shot and walk together each night to try to heal their community.

Byrdsong’s murder still haunting her, Cordell tuned her antennae after 9/11 to the accounts of hate crimes. “I sat down at my computer to search the news and didn’t get up for a year,” she recalls. Racially and religiously motivated harassment, assault and arson increased 1,700 percent, according to the organization Human Rights Watch. Still, few in the public knew that a dozen or more Americans were killed in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. “Innocent Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, South Asians and others, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were victims of self-avowed ‘patriots’ who, unable to kill Osama bin Laden, settled for the guy behind the counter at their local gas station,” Cordell says.

She felt compelled to keep a list of the murdered, and then to contact their families. The first person she called was Alka Patel, whose husband, Vasudev, was killed in his gas station in Mesquite, TX by Mark Stroman, a Dallas stonecutter on a shooting spree to avenge America. “I could hear her dealing with customers buying gas or cigarettes. In between, she cried and spoke to me for almost an hour. I really didn’t say more than ‘I’m so sorry,’ over and over. What else could I possibly say?”

Not long afterward, Cordell learned the Sikh community in Mesa, AZ was holding a memorial for Balbir Singh Sodhi, murdered on September 15, 2001, because he wore a turban. Cordell asked whether other victims could be honored. With the finances they had available, local Sikhs brought Alka Patel and her two children to Arizona, where Cordell met them in person.

“The brother of the Sikh victim, Rana, offered to host me and my family. I felt terrible for imposing at the anniversary of this tragedy,” Cordell says. “Then our flight was delayed and we pulled into his driveway at midnight. Rana and his two young boys ran out and within five minutes we felt we were in the home of long-lost relatives.”

The Sodhis spoke without bitterness or vengeance as they sat in the living room beneath a portrait of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. “I realized how enlightening and vital it is to actually get into one another’s living rooms and lives, rather than walking down the street, seeing someone in a turban and thinking, ‘Why can’t we all get along?’ Or worse, ‘who is this guy, and what’s he doing in my community?’”

Weeks later, on the first anniversary of Vasudev Patel’s death, Cordell stood with Alka Patel in the gas station where he died, listening to customers’ extraordinary stories about him. “Who would think in this country you could drive into a station without a credit card or money, and the owner would give you gas on personal credit? It was a terrible irony. Not only were these victims innocent of any relationship to terrorism, they were also truly kind, generous members of their communities, more so than many.”

The families left behind faced horrendous challenges. Alka Patel worked 15-hour days running the gas station. Duri Hasan’s husband, Waqar, had been preparing for his U.S. citizenship and to sponsor his family when he became Mark Stroman’s first victim. Now the American government threatened to deport Duri and her children. None of the victims were officially categorized as September 11th-related deaths, nor did their families qualify for any of the $10 billion raised between private charities and the government.

Inspired to try to help, in February 2002 Cordell launched the Campaign for Collateral Compassion. After two years, the response from charities and politicians ranged from indifferent to hostile. Their attitude, Cordell remembers, was not unlike that of Sue Myrick, the North Carolina Republican representative who, while discussing national security breaches, was quoted as saying, "Look who runs all the convenience stores." Or the Louisiana Republican representative John Cooksey, who suggested pulling over and checking anyone who wore “a diaper on his head."

In 2004, the House of Representatives passed a rare private relief bill to address the needs of a single family, granting Duri Hasan and her children permanent residence. The charities Cordell importuned to help the victims’ families were less generous. “Shortly before he was murdered, Balbir Singh Sodhi had emptied the contents of his wallet, $75, into a jar for the Red Cross 9/11 Relief Fund,” Cordell says. “After he died because of 9/11 inspired hate, the Red Cross gave his family nothing.”

Cordell now reassessed what she could do as a private citizen. Realizing she had a personal story to tell, she started on a path of shattering stereotypes, using her own journey as a way of exploring larger issues. “The media tells us what we should look like to be considered attractive and acceptable, and conveys the popular attitudes of the day. Sometimes that isn’t harmful, but other times it’s quite destructive if it leads to starving oneself or taking steroids. When you take the power of the media to its extreme, it can contribute to racism and even genocide.”

During her workshops at churches, schools and civic groups, Cordell projects images of hate in the media. A road-side billboard that advertises the “Safest Restaurant On Earth. No Muslims Inside.” A cartoon that ran in 2007 in the Columbus Dispatch, depicting Iran on a map as a sewer grate with cockroaches pouring out of it. “An entire country portrayed as cockroaches,” Cordell says. “The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches in radio broadcasts in the months leading up to the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi people. The Nazis referred to the Jews they exterminated as vermin.”

At some point in her talk, Cordell wraps a scarf around her head and asks her audience whether anyone would have responded differently if she had worn it when she came through the door. “Mark Stroman thought it was patriotic to go after Arabs, not knowing he instead killed a Pakistani, an Indian who was Hindu, and shot a man from Bangladesh in one eye. Where is that blind hate coming from? What feeds it? And how does it get so under people’s skin that someone like Stroman or Benjamin Smith goes ahead and acts on it?”

Cordell realizes her work is cut out for her – and for the entire country. “After I spoke at one school, a boy came up to me and said, ‘Thank you so much for your presentation. I’m Muslim, but nobody here knows.’”

Visit: www.anyacordell.com