For filmmaker Assia Boundaoui’s mostly-Arab American neighborhood in Bridgeview, Illinois, her feature-length 2017 documentary “The Feeling of Being Watched” was proof, after years of FBI surveillance of their community, that they were not simply paranoid.
“For as long as I can remember, everyone in my neighborhood has always felt that we were under government surveillance,” Boundaoui recalls. “As a journalist, I wanted to investigate and find out what happened.” Her reporting uncovered a secret FBI investigation code-named Operation Vulgar Betrayal, targeting the largely immigrant Arab and Muslim American communities just outside Chicago throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
It was the FBI’s largest domestic terrorism investigation in the U.S. before the Sept. 11 attacks. “And it was focused on my neighborhood,” Boundaoui says.
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