Usamah “Sam” Husseini

Sam Husseini^[1] 

One of the tricks of the West is to use or create images. They create images of a person who doesn’t go along with their views and they make certain that this image is  distasteful and that anything that person has to say from there on in is rejected and this is a policy that has been practiced pretty well by the West. It perhaps would have been practiced by others had they been in power, but during recent centuries, the West has been in power. They’ve created the images and they’ve used these images quite skillfully and quite successfully.--El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz^[2]

The American historian Richard Hofstader, in his essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, explains that “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” Hofstader stressed that  “In America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements.”^[3]

Whether mainstream was immune from such thinking before Hofstader wrote those words is a separate subject^[4], but the attitude of the US political system and media towards Islam and Arabs has shown striking similarity to the same sort of delusional thinking that Hofstader outlines: a belief in “demonic forces of almost transcendent power,” which must be confronted by “an all-out crusade.” What is at stake is “the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.”^[5] This would seem to be an apt description not only of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” thesis, which has largely replaced the Cold War paradigm, but of writings in the daily press that echo such theories.

The media system of the US is complex and generally does not act in a monolithic manner, though it comes close to that in instances like the Gulf War. Such periods provide valuable insight into the biases that perennially lurk beneath the surface, as do instances of “rushes to judgement” like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing or the 1996 crash of TWA 800.

“Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief threat against Americans, has not been working,” declared A. M. Rosenthal after the Oklahoma City bombing. After the TWA 800 crash, Rosenthal, finding that the plane was “apparently” the victim of a bombing, called on the Clinton administration to “retaliate militarily against the sponsors of terrorism.”

The media at times is so full of reports on the "Islamic threat" from "Islamic radical terrorist" groups plotting “Islamic fundamentalist violence” that one could excuse the average non‑Muslim American who might conclude that the “fundamentals” of Islam include a course in TNT training. When reporting on "Islamic violence" the media often identify a Muslims by their religion as in the AP headline “Muslims Convicted in WTC Case.”

Would a headline read “Jews Convicted” or would an anti-abortion activists engage in “Christian violence”? Does the fact that the offensiveness of such phrases only becomes apparent after drawing such analogies mean that the biases are even deeper? Violence from people of certain backgrounds is attributed to that background, while from others, it is merely viewed as the evil side of human nature generally.

“The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East.” reported John McWethy. After TWA 800, McWethy stressed a “piece of evidence [that] seems to point towards terrorists from the Middle East. ABC News has learned that a written warning was sent by a group calling itself the Movement for Islamic Change.” Officials – speaking on the record – later dismissed the vague message as the routine posturing of a domestic Saudi guerrilla group, but not before McWethy got away with a “scoop” that made the link between “explosion” and “terrorism” one the one hand and “Arab” and “Muslim” on the other that much stronger. McWethy’s colleague, Brian Ross, claimed that “it could not possibly be a simple fuel explosion.”^[6]

“Terrorism expert” Neil Livingstone “is convinced that a Middle Eastern group was behind the killings, and believes more outrages could follow. ‘Since the end of the Cold War, the biggest threat to the U.S. has come from the Middle East. I'm afraid what happened in Oklahoma has proved that.’”^[7]

After the Oklahoma City bombing Daniel Pipes, editor of Middle East Quarterly commented with eerie irony that “People need to understand that this is just the beginning. The fundamentalists are on the upsurge, and they make it very clear that they are targeting us. They are absolutely obsessed with us.”^[8]

Here’s pundit and syndicated columnist Christopher Matthews after the TWA 800 crash writing in Liberal Opinion:

Before this, we were coasting toward the millennium with the reasonable assurance that the century’s great menace – totalitarianism – had been slain. Now we sit, awaiting the next century, fully warned that it comes with a menace perhaps more frightening that its predecessor.

It’s name is terrorism instead of wars between nations, we will now face wars among peoples. Instead of the neat military competition between armies, flight 800 shows us vulnerable to something far messier: bloody assaults by a political or religious faction against an entire people.

Such attacks are not so easy to trace or to punish. A group in one land, financed by a second, may strike at a third. There are numerous candidates for the first of these two elements, with the USA playing its predictable, if passive, role as the third.^[9]

The US is bombing Iraq and Libya, placing sanctions against Iraq, Libya, Iran (and later, Sudan), destabilizing regimes in the region, generally calling the shots, but the US is still “passive.”After each incident, innocence is lost. All was well with world, but now, we are really in trouble and have to do something massive, since the pain that the US has inflicted on Arabs is forgotten.

As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon pointed out in their nationally syndicated column following the Oklahoma City bombing:

What is haunting about the performance of these mainstream, “quality” news outlets is that they exhibited the paranoia and xenophobia ‑‑ albeit in milder doses ‑‑ that one hears from right‑wing militia groups: fear of foreigners, belief in dark conspiracies beyond our nation’s control.^[10]

The New York Times speculated in its first day of reporting on why terrorists would have struck in Oklahoma City: “Some Middle Eastern groups have held meetings there, and the city is home to at least three mosques.” The Times also covered up for the most reactionary, bigoted and violent elements of talk radio. After Bob Grant on WABC, the largest radio station in the country engaged in a hatefest against Muslims -- including threatened a caller who warned against of jumping to conclusions the day after the Oklahoma City bombing -- the Times featured an excerpted of Grant having a nice chat with a Muslim caller -- without noting that the nice chat took place well after Timothy McVeigh was arrested.^[11]

Ted Koppel, doing a strong show on Islam shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing noted that “President Clinton, to his everlasting credit, sounded a voice of reason.” It’s noteworthy that Clinton did so only because he was asked to by Helen Thomas of UPI, one of the few Arab Americans in the press corps.  When Clinton delivered his “problem of race” speech in San Diego, in the summer of 1997, he referred to events after the Oklahoma City bombing as a great, shining example of what the US should be like, as hatred against Arabs and Muslims goes down the memory hole.^[12]  

Irrationality

The New York Times ran an editorial dealing with the fact that domestic agents, not foreigners were most likely responsible for the Oklahoma City blast, the paper couldn’t help betraying bias once again.  It seems, wrote the Times that “this was a domestic act of terrorism against the Government, perhaps in retaliation for government raids on fringe groups or individuals. The early theory that the bombing might be the work of terrorists from abroad, possibly Islamic radicals bent on punishing or frightening the Great Satan, is fading.”^[13] Note how the Times explains the motivation of the “domestic” terrorists ‑‑ but any gripe that Arabs may have with the US is mocked as “punishing or frightening the Great Satan.”

The aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing caused media outlets to reconsider the government's action in Waco, as in Ted Koppel announcing that Nightline would have “another look at the Waco tragedy, which is widely believed to have motivated the Oklahoma City bombers.”^[14] In contrast, the World Trade Center bombing was not viewed as an appropriate time to reconsider U.S. government policy towards the Mideast. Rather, Judith Miller of announced on CNN that the “Muslim community ought to be worried about distancing itself and denouncing such acts of terrorism.”^[15]

In spite of such hysterical reactions by the Western media, a common refrain in the US press is the irrationality of Arab culture. As the US was preparing for the Gulf War, a US Information official told the New York Times that “Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it can resonate deeply in other parts of the world.” He continued, “The key is predisposition to believe, not the crudity of the charge.”^[16]

Richard Butler the executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq, was quoted as saying he is fascinated by “the wide variation there can be between cultures on what constitutes telling the truth.” Mr. Butler also says that he comes “from a Western intellectual and literary tradition that says truth is something rather objective,” and he suspects that “truth in some other cultures is kind of what you can get away with saying, and what you can get the crowd to believe”^[17]  Henry Kissinger’s comment that “you really can’t believe anything an Arab says” summarized the view of many in the West.^[18] 

“The Arab Mind”

When the US bombed Iraq in the fall of 1996, ABC News brought on Judith Kipper to inform us that “Infringing on Iraq’s sovereignty is a very sensitive issue for the Arab world because in the Arab world land, patrimony, the land of the Bedouin, of the sheep herder – the land is the single most important question for national honor.” Apparently in countries without Bedouins sovereignty is no big deal.  Just before the Gulf War, Kipper remarked to US News & World Report.“We go in a straight line; they zig-zag” Kipper continued, “They can say one thing in the morning, another thing at night and really mean a third thing.”^[19] This was part of an effort to prevent the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the Gulf Crisis, replayed in some ways in late 1997 as the US threatened to bomb Iraq. Another common sentiment on such occasions is that Arab leaders are critically of US policy publicly but privately agree that we must “get Saddam,” as Edward Djerejian told CNN “we may have more private support [from Arab states] than is apparent publicly.”^[20]  One tends to think that maneuvers such would be the case for politicians the world over.

Indeed, things that should be beyond debate are often put in the mouths of Arabs, as if to question them. Linda Gradstein -- Palestinians thrown out ...

Arabs call settlements illegal

Arab Muslims bear the brunt of anti-Muslim sentiments. Time magazine, noting that Hanan Mikhali-Ashrawi is a Christian, wrote that, “This woman looks civilized, unthreatening...She has a good ear for saying the right thing the right way, says a member of the peace delegation--not talking, as Palestinians are wont to do, out of two sides of her mouth.”^[21] Similarly, a Fortune article “Indonesia on the Move,” noting that it is the most populous predomently Muslim country, stated that most Indonesians “claim to be Muslim, but they exhibit none of the fanaticism of Islamic fundamentalists in the Mideast.”^[22] Media commonly refer to Turks, Kurds and Persians as Arabs and implicitly assume that all Arabs are Muslims.

Arabs apparently worship the idea of war. A Washington Post editorial entitled “The Next Terrorist” posits that Libya and Iran “have made and ideology out of their defiance of international norms.”^[23]  Martin Kramer in The New Republic argued that the Lebanese group Hazzbola's “attacks against Israel's security zone constituted a jihad against the very idea of peace.”^[24]  Kramer not only accepts Israel's Orwellian term “security zone” for its illegal occupation of southern Lebanon, he turns the situation on its head, as Israel has just conducted a terrorist attack against Hazzbola, killing its major cleric and his family.

Pop culture

In American popular culture, Muslim Arabs are commonly depicted as savages, terrorist, ridiculously rich or over-sexed. Arab Americans, Christian Arabs and non-Arab Muslims are largely invisible.

Perhaps the company that has inflict the most egregious harm on Arabs is Disney. Through out the mid-90's, the movie studio’s vision of diversity seems to be that characters of various ethnicities and both genders get to slam Arabs. In 1997, Disney brought out “G.I. Jane” killing Libyans with his Navy SEAL comrades and Jackie Chan in “Operation Condor” slugging out Arabs. In 1996, “Kazaam” with Shaquille O’Neal had numerous Arab stereotypes; 1995 saw “Father of the Bride, Part II” with Steve Martin dealing with a grotesque Arab character throwing cash around and in 1994, “In the Army Now” showed G.I.’s clobbering desert Arabs, encouraging the Air Force to “blow the hell out of them.”

Commonly depicted in popular culture as smelly, dirty, dimwitted. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Andrew Dice Clay thrilled crowds with: “You know, I’m cool with black dudes. I grew up with them, I can relate. We can hand out, play some basketball. But what about these people who aren’t black, they’re not while -- they’re just sorta urine-colored. What am I going to say. ‘Hey mom, I’m going to shoot some hoops with Ach-med?’” Clay’s audience shouts in unison, “Look if you don’t know the language, get the fuck out of the country.”^[25]

Through out the mid 1990’s one of David Letterman’s favorite themes has been “smelly cab drivers.” His infamous  “Top Ten” list once features the names that New York City cab drivers have for their passengers. Among the entries were “Americans” and “Soapaholics.”

The Fox TV series Married with Children^[26] once featured this exchange between the main characters:

Husband: A Pakistani dirt vendor make more money than I do.

Wife: Yeah, but he probably smells better.

These latent popular prejudices are then used by elites to further particular political ends. They make dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims rather easy in times of political turbulence.

But this view of smarmy Muslims is not confined to crude popular culture. The February 1996 issue of the American Spectator had an article: “A Week in Ayatollahland” which has an almost unrelenting tone of condescension about the writer's recent visit to Iran: “In the doorways and lobby lounged the secret policemen; knots of seedy men with hard eyes. you could feel them watching as you walked through the lobby of waited for the elevator. They wore stained suits and collarless shirts buttoned up at the neck. They all needed a shave. They gave off an air of cruelty and stupidity.”

The American Spectator continued, “Tehran is an ugly city of at least 6.5 million people.” And “we sat down to a hearty lunch of rice, grilled chicken, vegetables, and some homemade wine. It was vinegary, but I pretended otherwise.” It's not at all surprising that such a piece would appear in the American Spectator. What might surprise some is that the writer of the piece is Richard Carlson -- the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. PBS has developed a fondness for travel video diaries of a Westerner, typically a Brit, traveling through “exotic” Muslim countries.

The paranoids that Hofstader was concerned with lumped together Freemasons, Catholics and Mormons as anti-American, despite the fact that these groups often disliked each other. “Yet their detractors did not hesitate to couple staunch foes.” Hofstader notes, “The ecumenicism of hatred is a great breaker-down of precise intellectual discriminations.”^[27] After TWA 800, Jeffrey Hart of the Washington Times argued that the correct response is an “immediate” and “devastating attack” against a Mideastern country. “There is no reason not to treat Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya as a single entity.”

Not only is Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment rather indescrimenent, but it flows, in varying amounts, in various ways from virtually every quarter. Sometimes, “Shiite” as synonym for “extremist,” as when progressive columnist Molly Ivins lauds one Republican legislator who “does not side with Shiite Republicans” and chastises another who is a “Shiite Republican” for being “mean, nasty and ideological.”^[28]

The “Other” Minorities “Us” vs. “Them”

Arabs and Muslims have developed as the most likely target for “the other” they are the “them.” Media critic James Ledbetter noted that  “On April 20, the [Daily] News frontpage headline blared, ‘they blew up the babies,’ and the top of each inside page carried the banner ‘they killed the kids.’”  But following day, noted Ledbetter, when the suspects were being described as “white males,” “they” disappeared as the headline subject.^[29]  Rush Limbaugh had similar intonations of “you people.”

The uncertainty over the cause of the TWA 800 disaster did not stop some from not only speculating as to the cause and culprits, but prescribing bloody-minded remedies: “It’s a war!” Charles Grodin declared on CNBC, vowing that “people will pay a price if they want to come after us.” Nor should we waste any time investigating the matter: “Unless we move quickly on these people, we let them think they can get away with this and move more quickly on us.”^[30]

When the suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing were found to be non-Arabs and non-Muslims, there was some recognition that the media had done something wrong, but some went on to do other things wrong. The sub-head of Jonathan Alter’s column in Newsweek stated “‘John Doe’ is one of us.” It still had not dawned on many that Arabs and Muslims are part of America -- “they” are “us.”^[31]

Invisible Populations

Dan Rather calls “Jerusalem of Gold” one of his “favorite poems.” This work proclaims that prior to the 1967 war, “no one goes down to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho,” treating Arabs as non-entities.

The sentiment expressed by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz^[32], Rush Limbaugh^[33], William Safire^[34] and others that the 1996 Israeli election was not really close, since Netanyahu got a substantial majority of the Jewish vote. This is akin to a KKK member arguing that George Bush really won the 1992 US election, since he got a majority of votes from white males.

The Invisible Bigotry

Dan Rather (1/16/91) interviewed FBI chief William Sessions: “If you’re an American mother who happens to be of Jewish heritage…do you send your child to school?” Rather asked earnestly. “What should our attitude toward Americans of Arab heritage be?” he asked. Sessions was reassuring: The children were safe, and Arab-Americans “all support the president’s policy.” It was a sentiment Arab-Americans ignored at their peril. The ADC found nearly 100 criminal acts against Arabs including a bomb found in a San Diego mosque and an Arab restaurant burned down in Detroit.^[35]

Buckly: “So we are going to have to take explicit notice of the incompatibility of our own culture and that of the fundamentalist Muhammadan, and we need to organize our immigration laws with some reference to this problem. The idea of welcoming the alien doesn’t call for inviting him to blow up Ellis Island en route to citizenship.”

Venom against Arabs by the Nation of Islam, for example, only half of Khalid Abdul Muhammed’s assertion that “Who is sucking our blood in the black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew.” receives substantial note.^[36]  While “anti-Semitism” has meant only “anti-Jewish,” excluding Arabs who are Semites, often two wrongs make a right when major media outlets label the Nation of Islam as “anti-Semitic.”

Pat Robertson

Abraham Foxman of the ADL wrote that “While Mr. Robertson’s conspiratorial flights are indeed troubling, important distinctions between Mr. Robertson and Mr. Farrakhan can and should be drawn. Mr. Farrakhan’s preachings derive from racial hatred; clearly, Mr. Robertson’s do not…. Mr. Robertson has never expressed bigotry of this sort.”^[37] Such statements can be made only because there is a pecking order of bigotry and the anti-Arab,  anti-Muslim and fervently anti-Hindu bigotry that Robertson has expressed is not viewed as seriously as his relatively mild, coded anti-Jewish sentiments.

A former business associate of Pat Robertson says he once “banged his fist on the table and said: ‘You can never trust the Arabs. Those sand niggers are worse than the Jews, you just can’t trust them with money.’”^[38] It should be noted that Pat Robertson denies making that statement, but he also denied saying that Muslims and Hindus shouldn’t be trusted with public office. Then, according to Vanity Fair, People for the American Way produced a video tape of him saying it. So the Reverend changed his story. “When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm,” Robertson wrote in his book The New World Order. In fact, there is barely a mention about this fact in any major American newspaper. Robertson explained:

If anybody understood what Hindus really believe, there would be no doubt that they have no business administering government polices in a country that favors freedom and equality…. Can you imagine having the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of health, education and welfare? ^[39]