Skeptic
19th January 2004, 03:02 PM
(NOTE TO MODERATOR AND OTHERS: this is an article by Bret Stephans of the Jerusalem Post. I post it here instead of a link because the link requires registration, so clicking on it won't actually get you to the article. Is there a forum policy about forbidding/allowing such links?)
There was a touching meditation in The Guardian the other day by Brian Whitaker, the paper's Middle East editor, on the subject of racism and stereotypes, racist Arab stereotypes in particular. "People happily write and say racist things about Arabs that they would not dream of saying about blacks and Jews," he says, "and usually they get away with it."
Exhibit A was a January 4 article in the Sunday Express by BBC talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk: "We owe the Arabs Nothing." The article – actually an accidental reprint of something published a year ago – prompted the BBC to suspend Kilroy-Silk's show and the Commission for Racial Equality to file a complaint with the police. Among the passages Whitaker found especially offensive were:
1. That Arabs are "suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors."
2. "Apart from oil – which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the west – what do they contribute? Anything really valuable? Something we really need, could not do without? No, nor can I."
3. "What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate their murders?"
This brings Whitaker to his larger theme, which is that while Kilroy has a right to free speech, "where racism is concerned," the right "has to be tempered by restraint."
"If the freedom-of-speech argument is taken to its logical conclusion," he says, "then all kinds of racial abuse become permissible.... That becomes a recipe for communal disaster."
I AGREE entirely. So now let's talk about Brian Whitaker's sense of restraint.
According to Whitaker, Israeli setters are best described as "thieves and brigands," who "live on stolen land and have been known to shoot Palestinian neighbors for quietly going about their own business picking olives." As for Palestinian attacks on settlers, these can be excused because settlements are "quasi-military targets."
According to Whitaker, Israeli security checks at Ben-Gurion airport are an exercise in gratuitous humiliation. He considers the question "Have you met any Arabs?" to be "fundamentally racist," akin to a traveler at London's Heathrow airport being asked, "Have you met anyone with an Irish accent?"
According to Whitaker, foreign correspondents face a tougher time with Israeli authorities than they do with Palestinian ones. The harassment, he reports, "is not confined to physical threats. It is psychological as well, and from both official and unofficial sources. At its worst, it has smacked of the tactics of the Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War."
According to Whitaker, the following poem, by Saudi ambassador to Britain Ghazi al-Gosalbi, is not necessarily about "praising suicide bombers"; its real message, Whitaker says, "is a matter of interpretation." Gosalbi writes:
When the call comes for Jihad
It is a time for the ink and paper,
For the books and the 'Learned men'
To be silent.
When the call comes for Jihad
There's no need for a referendum or a 'Fatwa'
The Day of Jihad is the Day of Blood.
According to Whitaker, "the hardship and inconvenience faced by Israelis" in the past three years "is, of course, pretty minor in comparison with what the Palestinians have to endure."
According to Whitaker "It is now clear that Mohammed [Dura] was shot by Israelis, probably deliberately." (Whitaker wrote this in October 2000. Exhaustive analysis by James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly demonstrates otherwise.)
According to Whitaker, "Israel professes to be a friend of Europe and yet, in its dealings with Europe, Israel has cheated and lied and abused the trust that was placed in its officials. It has done this cynically and systematically – and has been found out."
And so on. An archival search of the Guardian's Web site lists 711 of Whitaker's articles. I trolled through the first 240. I did not find a single article about suicide bombings against Israelis, except tangentially. Israeli victims of terror – the murdered, the bereaved, the maimed – escape his notice. There is hardly anything about everyday Israeli life beyond the conflict: not a word about our domestic politics, our high-tech industry, our cultural scene. He is astonished to discover that blacks serve in the Israeli army, having been apparently unaware of the existence of Ethiopian Jewry.
All in all, I did not read a single sentence of his that could be seen as remotely sympathetic to Israel or Israelis. Nor did I find anything from Whitaker that could be called seriously critical of the Palestinian Authority. Financial abuses, human-rights abuses, anti-Semitic incitement, collusion in terrorist acts – nothing. He takes pains to downplay the extent of Arab anti-Semitism. He expatiates on his theory that the Karine-A ship probably had nothing to do with the Palestinian Authority. He repeatedly calls into question the reliability of Israeli sources, such as the Memri translation service.
NONE OF this is necessarily objectionable. "Middle East editor" though he may be, Whitaker makes about as much pretense of being even-handed as I do. (Truthfulness, proportion and accuracy are something else.)
But since Whitaker makes such a big deal about the evils of stereotyping, how does he explain the line about settlers being "thieves and brigands"? Does Whitaker actually know any settlers? Has he entered their homes, been introduced to their children, sat down for a drink with them? Is he aware of the social and political differences within the settler community? Or are they all just one undifferentiated mass of gun-toting Jewish fascists?
Then there's Whitaker's plea for "restraint." But where is the restraint in his reporting about Israel, or his effort to understand Israeli thinking? Might there be a reason why security at Ben-Gurion airport is somewhat tighter than it is at Heathrow? (I mean, some reason other than the joy Israeli airport personnel take in picking through Whitaker's underpants.) Does he consider that Israelis have cause to be alarmed by Arab anti-Semitism, even if, as he believes, the phenomenon is exaggerated? Does he have anything stern to say to Palestinians who cheer the murder of Israeli women and children (within the Green Line, that is)?
He does not. His characterization of Israelis is every bit as one-sided and caricatured as Kilroy-Silk's is of Arabs. Indeed, it is infinitely more so. Kilroy-Silk may have written crassly, but what he says is abundantly substantiated by the UN's 2002 Arab Human Development Report, written by a team of Arab scholars led by former Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister Rima Khalaf Hunaidi.
Thus, Kilroy-Silk says the Arab world produces absolutely nothing of value, except oil. Yet as the UN report notes, the combined economic output (minus oil) of all 22 Arab states combined is less than that of Spain. Kilroy-Silk calls Arabs "women repressors." Nowhere in the world are women so politically and socially disenfranchised as they are in Arab countries. Kilroy-Silk says Arabs are "limb amputators." According to the BBC, "most Egyptian mothers still say they want their daughters to be circumcised." Kilroy-Silk calls Arabs suicide bombers. As Thomas Friedman sagely observed, the people who flew into the World Trade Center weren't Norwegians.
Of course, the reality of the Arab world is complicated. There are bright patches, there are good people, and Arab culture holds its charms and riches. But if one looks at the broad statistical measures, they correspond with what Kilroy-Silk wrote. Whether he's a racist doesn't change that fact.
The charge of racism is particularly rich coming from Whitaker, who in other contexts complains that Jews are too quick to tag critics of Israel as anti-Semites. But if we're not going to be hypersensitive when it comes to writing nasty things about Israelis, why be hypersensitive about writing nasty things about Arabs? Maybe Kilroy-Silk should have cleared his throat with some kind of reference to the great contributions of Arab civilization. Then again, I don't see Whitaker leavening his prose with a few throwaway lines about Israel's strong democratic traditions or its humane Jewish values.
BUT WHY am I wasting so much time with Whitaker? I met him once: He struck me as a quiet and thoughtful man. In his writing, he is every bit the bigot he claims Kilroy-Silk to be. Or, to put it another way: Whitaker will happily write and say things about Israelis that he would not dream of saying about blacks or Arabs – and he usually gets away with it.
There was a touching meditation in The Guardian the other day by Brian Whitaker, the paper's Middle East editor, on the subject of racism and stereotypes, racist Arab stereotypes in particular. "People happily write and say racist things about Arabs that they would not dream of saying about blacks and Jews," he says, "and usually they get away with it."
Exhibit A was a January 4 article in the Sunday Express by BBC talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk: "We owe the Arabs Nothing." The article – actually an accidental reprint of something published a year ago – prompted the BBC to suspend Kilroy-Silk's show and the Commission for Racial Equality to file a complaint with the police. Among the passages Whitaker found especially offensive were:
1. That Arabs are "suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors."
2. "Apart from oil – which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the west – what do they contribute? Anything really valuable? Something we really need, could not do without? No, nor can I."
3. "What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate their murders?"
This brings Whitaker to his larger theme, which is that while Kilroy has a right to free speech, "where racism is concerned," the right "has to be tempered by restraint."
"If the freedom-of-speech argument is taken to its logical conclusion," he says, "then all kinds of racial abuse become permissible.... That becomes a recipe for communal disaster."
I AGREE entirely. So now let's talk about Brian Whitaker's sense of restraint.
According to Whitaker, Israeli setters are best described as "thieves and brigands," who "live on stolen land and have been known to shoot Palestinian neighbors for quietly going about their own business picking olives." As for Palestinian attacks on settlers, these can be excused because settlements are "quasi-military targets."
According to Whitaker, Israeli security checks at Ben-Gurion airport are an exercise in gratuitous humiliation. He considers the question "Have you met any Arabs?" to be "fundamentally racist," akin to a traveler at London's Heathrow airport being asked, "Have you met anyone with an Irish accent?"
According to Whitaker, foreign correspondents face a tougher time with Israeli authorities than they do with Palestinian ones. The harassment, he reports, "is not confined to physical threats. It is psychological as well, and from both official and unofficial sources. At its worst, it has smacked of the tactics of the Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War."
According to Whitaker, the following poem, by Saudi ambassador to Britain Ghazi al-Gosalbi, is not necessarily about "praising suicide bombers"; its real message, Whitaker says, "is a matter of interpretation." Gosalbi writes:
When the call comes for Jihad
It is a time for the ink and paper,
For the books and the 'Learned men'
To be silent.
When the call comes for Jihad
There's no need for a referendum or a 'Fatwa'
The Day of Jihad is the Day of Blood.
According to Whitaker, "the hardship and inconvenience faced by Israelis" in the past three years "is, of course, pretty minor in comparison with what the Palestinians have to endure."
According to Whitaker "It is now clear that Mohammed [Dura] was shot by Israelis, probably deliberately." (Whitaker wrote this in October 2000. Exhaustive analysis by James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly demonstrates otherwise.)
According to Whitaker, "Israel professes to be a friend of Europe and yet, in its dealings with Europe, Israel has cheated and lied and abused the trust that was placed in its officials. It has done this cynically and systematically – and has been found out."
And so on. An archival search of the Guardian's Web site lists 711 of Whitaker's articles. I trolled through the first 240. I did not find a single article about suicide bombings against Israelis, except tangentially. Israeli victims of terror – the murdered, the bereaved, the maimed – escape his notice. There is hardly anything about everyday Israeli life beyond the conflict: not a word about our domestic politics, our high-tech industry, our cultural scene. He is astonished to discover that blacks serve in the Israeli army, having been apparently unaware of the existence of Ethiopian Jewry.
All in all, I did not read a single sentence of his that could be seen as remotely sympathetic to Israel or Israelis. Nor did I find anything from Whitaker that could be called seriously critical of the Palestinian Authority. Financial abuses, human-rights abuses, anti-Semitic incitement, collusion in terrorist acts – nothing. He takes pains to downplay the extent of Arab anti-Semitism. He expatiates on his theory that the Karine-A ship probably had nothing to do with the Palestinian Authority. He repeatedly calls into question the reliability of Israeli sources, such as the Memri translation service.
NONE OF this is necessarily objectionable. "Middle East editor" though he may be, Whitaker makes about as much pretense of being even-handed as I do. (Truthfulness, proportion and accuracy are something else.)
But since Whitaker makes such a big deal about the evils of stereotyping, how does he explain the line about settlers being "thieves and brigands"? Does Whitaker actually know any settlers? Has he entered their homes, been introduced to their children, sat down for a drink with them? Is he aware of the social and political differences within the settler community? Or are they all just one undifferentiated mass of gun-toting Jewish fascists?
Then there's Whitaker's plea for "restraint." But where is the restraint in his reporting about Israel, or his effort to understand Israeli thinking? Might there be a reason why security at Ben-Gurion airport is somewhat tighter than it is at Heathrow? (I mean, some reason other than the joy Israeli airport personnel take in picking through Whitaker's underpants.) Does he consider that Israelis have cause to be alarmed by Arab anti-Semitism, even if, as he believes, the phenomenon is exaggerated? Does he have anything stern to say to Palestinians who cheer the murder of Israeli women and children (within the Green Line, that is)?
He does not. His characterization of Israelis is every bit as one-sided and caricatured as Kilroy-Silk's is of Arabs. Indeed, it is infinitely more so. Kilroy-Silk may have written crassly, but what he says is abundantly substantiated by the UN's 2002 Arab Human Development Report, written by a team of Arab scholars led by former Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister Rima Khalaf Hunaidi.
Thus, Kilroy-Silk says the Arab world produces absolutely nothing of value, except oil. Yet as the UN report notes, the combined economic output (minus oil) of all 22 Arab states combined is less than that of Spain. Kilroy-Silk calls Arabs "women repressors." Nowhere in the world are women so politically and socially disenfranchised as they are in Arab countries. Kilroy-Silk says Arabs are "limb amputators." According to the BBC, "most Egyptian mothers still say they want their daughters to be circumcised." Kilroy-Silk calls Arabs suicide bombers. As Thomas Friedman sagely observed, the people who flew into the World Trade Center weren't Norwegians.
Of course, the reality of the Arab world is complicated. There are bright patches, there are good people, and Arab culture holds its charms and riches. But if one looks at the broad statistical measures, they correspond with what Kilroy-Silk wrote. Whether he's a racist doesn't change that fact.
The charge of racism is particularly rich coming from Whitaker, who in other contexts complains that Jews are too quick to tag critics of Israel as anti-Semites. But if we're not going to be hypersensitive when it comes to writing nasty things about Israelis, why be hypersensitive about writing nasty things about Arabs? Maybe Kilroy-Silk should have cleared his throat with some kind of reference to the great contributions of Arab civilization. Then again, I don't see Whitaker leavening his prose with a few throwaway lines about Israel's strong democratic traditions or its humane Jewish values.
BUT WHY am I wasting so much time with Whitaker? I met him once: He struck me as a quiet and thoughtful man. In his writing, he is every bit the bigot he claims Kilroy-Silk to be. Or, to put it another way: Whitaker will happily write and say things about Israelis that he would not dream of saying about blacks or Arabs – and he usually gets away with it.