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worked at a British company in Jakarta right out of college. Once, during a water-cooler chat that somehow arrived at Daniel Day-Lewis'€™ Oscar-winning performance in the film, In The Name of the Father, an expat told me that while he was growing up in London, whenever a bomb went off, his Irish mother would pray that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was not behind it.

As the aforementioned movie perfectly showed, back in those confusing years any chaos in the UK could easily be attributed to the IRA, which just made life harder for any Irish folk in the vicinity.

A few years later in the US, while I was trying to build my career in good old '€œCorporate America'€, Osama bin Laden decided to strike the Twin Towers. All hell broke loose. Suddenly, my last name could mean longer questioning sessions by visa officers at certain embassies or separate check-ins at certain airports. Now, whenever a bomb goes off anywhere in the world, I find myself doing exactly what the expat'€™s mom did: silently praying that it wasn'€™t one of '€œus'€.

And I'€™m not alone in this. When bombs rocked Boston a few days ago, a Libyan woman commented on Twitter '€œPlease don'€™t [let it] be a Muslim.'€ That tweet was responded to by a Dubai-based journalist before being picked up by the Washington Post. And while the tweet was virally circling the globe and Obama carefully did not utter the word '€œterrorism'€ in his immediate statement, guess what was going on in Boston?

An injured spectator, fleeing the scene like everybody else, was overtaken by a bystander, handed over to police, who then proceeded to question him and search his apartment and have him checked out on major media sites '€” because he looked Arab and was found to be a Saudi national. Yabba, yabba do.

What kind of world has this become? I first thought that the Internet and the 24/7 news cycle would bring people closer together as dwellers of a global village, or at least keep us better informed.

It turns out, though, that we are not better acquainted with one another. From Indonesian scholars and jobless working-class Europeans to New York Police Department (NYPD) top brass, who ordered surveillance on all Arab and Muslim students last year, prejudice roams pretty far ad wide.

To be fair, prejudice, whether tinged with race or religion, not only flourishes from frequently listening to hate speeches. I'€™m guessing most prejudice or bigotry comes from witnessing violent acts or unfair situations that point to a certain group as a scapegoat.

Some have argued that as long as terrorists commit their acts while shouting Allahu Akbar, any Muslim, Christian or Jewish Arabs with Arabic-sounding names for that matter, unfairly bears that stigma. Understandable, to a certain point. But that'€™s a slippery slope, which can go on to include arguments such as, '€œbecause early Shia followers had disagreements with Sunnis, all 21st-century Shiites must be deemed heathens'€, or using Salem as a reference, '€œevery long-haired woman who can mix potions and owns a black cat must be a witch'€.

So, if our minds cannot be relied upon to be prejudice-free at all times, what is left but the law to prevent us from acting out based solely on our prejudices? However, is the law any better or more on our side?

Even as the country overwhelmingly elected their first African-American president, who had for some of his childhood been raised by his Indonesian Muslim stepfather, a Cambridge professor and Trayvon Martin still became victims of racial profiling just as all Muslim or Arab students were put under surveillance by law enforcement officers. Where was the law to protect the rights of the young Saudi student that day in Boston?

Or was it a case of the Patriot Act being put into action on that fateful Patriot Day, which turned him into a plausible suspect or so-called '€œperson of interest'€?

Let'€™s look closer to home. Even as our President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono solemnly uses his Twitter account to offer his condolences to President Barack Obama, hundreds of Shiites from Madura are forbidden by law enforcers from returning to their homes, and dozens of Ahmadi followers are sealed inside their mosque near Jakarta, again by law enforcers. Where is the law that is supposed to protect these minorities from prejudice and persecution?

I still remember the haunting words from Neal Hall'€™s award-winning book of poems, Nigger for Life, that '€œFor black Americans, 9/11 is 24/7'€. Hall, whose acquaintance I made at the Ubud Writers'€™ Festival last year, is an ophthalmologist who has found out the hard way that not even his Harvard education could always spare him from racial prejudice.

While receiving a journalism award from the Arab American Institute Foundation just two days after the Boston bombings, Christiane Amanpour, one of CNN'€™s most distinguished journalists, said bluntly, '€œ['€¦] it is understandable for Muslims to hope beyond hope that this doesn'€™t turn out to be what it might be'€. It pays to note that in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, countless organizations and communities in the US that are associated with the Middle East or Islam raced to issue their public condemnations '€” partly from compassion, but partly from the fear that they may be subjected to a fresh round of prejudicial suspicion.

When a bomb goes off in some part of the world, Muslims worldwide hold their breath, for it might be 9/11 all over again. Hate begets hate, and for a woman whose surname will remain '€œIbrahim'€, regardless of whom I marry, it'€™s an increasingly lawless world out there.

Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer and consultant, with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.