The Home Front: Walking a Tightrope

For Americans of Arab descent, the war brings despair, anger, threats and fear for loved ones in the line of fire

For the Bakal brothers, Eddie and Jake, the road to the American dream runs dead center through one of the most lethal neighborhoods in Detroit. The brothers, who moved there from Iraq in the mid-1970s, own a convenience store at the intersection of Seven Mile and Van Dyke roads, an easy rifle shot from streets lined with abandoned houses and open-air drug markets. To look at their tidy store, swaddled in bulletproof glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras and equipped with a small arsenal in back, one would think they too were in the middle of a war.

These are crushing days...

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