Zogby: Double Standards Expose Prejudice
Ralph Nader has taken on the challenge of forcing open discussion about topics were previously considered “off-limits” by “mainstream media, legislative bodies or the electoral arena”.
His project Debating Taboos sponsors televised debates bringing controversial issues into the public arena.
I took part in one of the these on the topic “Is there a double standard in the response to anti-Semitism against Arab Americans compared with the response to anti-Semitism against Jewish Americans?”
Some invited to take part declined. They acknowledged that “anti-Arabism” and Islamophobia were a problem, but dismissed Nader’s formulation of the topic as “utterly misconceived”, “misleading” and “tendentious”.
They argued the word “anti-Semitism” can refer only to Jews.
In reality, however, Nader has a point since historically the animus that has inspired bigotry directed against Arabs and Muslims, on the one side, and Jews on the other has been cut out of the same cloth.
Both groups have suffered a history of vilification and dehumanisation, enduring persistent and systematic campaigns of intense violence.
Three decades ago I collaborated in a study of political cartoons and other forms of popular culture, comparing the depiction of Jews in Tsarist Russia and pre-Nazi Germany with those of Arabs in the US in the 1970s and 1980s.
In both content and form, the treatments given to each group were virtually identical.
Both were seen as alien and hostile. They were accused of not sharing Western values, being prone to violent conspiracies, being lecherous usurpers of wealth – and threats to Western civilisation.
It is sad but a fact that while it has become unacceptable to publicly express or manifest bigotry against Jews, anti-Semitism against Arabs – and increasingly, by extension, against Muslims – remains a part of popular culture and political discourse.
Hollywood, in particular, has an Arab and Muslim problem with negative stereotypes abounding. But America’s political culture is no better.
For more than a decade, some political leaders have been engaged in poisonous discourse targeting Arabs and Muslims – culminating in recent years in the mass movement to block the building of an Islamic community centre in lower Manhattan, a rash of referenda and legislation to block the imposition of Sharia law in more than two dozen states and declarations by presidential candidates insisting that Muslims would have to take special loyalty oaths before allowing them into public service.
It has been revealed that many in the US military and law enforcement agencies have received deeply flawed and biased training about Arabs and Muslims.
But the purveyors of this hate have received nary a slap on the wrist.
Racist books like Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind continued to be used to train our military through the end of the Iraq war.
Hate-mongers like Michael Savage and Ann Coulter remain on the air and retain cult-like followings.
Obsessed anti-Arab and anti-Muslim writers and bloggers are quoted by presidential candidates, law enforcement agencies and hate criminals. It is clear that there are double standards at work in all of this.
Ask yourself what the reaction would be if Arab Americans wrote books about Jews like those written by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spenser – what would we call them?
What would the reaction be if Herman Cain suggested that American Jews, Mormons or any other religious group be required to take a loyalty oath before serving in government?
And what if an Arab billionaire made and distributed millions of copies of movies charging that there was a massive and violent Jewish conspiracy to take over the West?
Would presidential candidates be lining their campaign coffers with his millions as they are with Sheldon Adelson?
The bottom line is that Nader is right to have encouraged this debate because there are shameful double standards and they must end.
And the sooner Americans address this problem and correct it, the better their country will be.
Dr. James Zogby