Remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? The media's automatic response in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was to look for bomb residue beneath every turban or, as Detroit's Eyewitness News anchorman put it, to keep in mind that the explosion "had the Middle East written all over it." (Detroit at the time had 280,000 Arabs.)
Or how about the opening paragraph of a piece called "Living with Islam" in the Economist a year later? "Think of Islam," the piece went, "and bombs and bigots may come to western minds. Nowadays the word conjures up (un)holy warriors who regard westerners as fair game--French monks in Algeria, Greek tourists in Egypt, American servicemen in Saudi Arabia. When an American airliner blew up over the Atlantic last week, with the loss of 230 lives, thoughts automatically turned to the Islamic Middle East. It was simple to assume--despite Bill Clinton's call for caution--that this too was part of some ghastly blood feud with the West."
Convenience of Familiar Prejudices
It's a perverse mixture of convenience and safety mechanisms, as if a familiar prejudice were, in its own twisted way, a reassurance against something worse: the unknown, or a whiter, more American shade of evil, which most Americans assume could not possibly exist, least of all in league with the Arab kind of terrorism.
Anton Shammas, the Palestinian novelist, put it clearly in a New York Times Op-Ed days after the Oklahoma bombing: "One can't help but think... that all parties concerned would have been better off if it had been a Middle Eastern terrorist act. All the self-appointed experts on 'Islamic militants' would have recycled their arguments, reminding Americans that Muslims are the world's only fanatic extremists and their true post-cold war enemies." Some people still want to believe in the slanderous convenience.
What Obama’s Name Means
So imagine what it must be like for a man like Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the 2008 presidency, to walk around with a pair of Arab names and 9% of his life having been lived in the world's most populous Muslim nation (Indonesia).
His first name can mean many things: lightning in Hebrew, blessing in Arabic, something martial in English, if you were to add an r. His middle name, Hussein, means the good, handsome one. His Kenyan father christened him, or rather, merely named him: Obama's father is not a believer.
Limits of American Tolerance
The name is a gift to those who relish demolishing him, not just as part of the usual political gamesmanship that happens with every election, but as a signpost to the limits of American tolerance. It used to be that all things non-white, non-male and non-Christian were unacceptable in the higher reaches of public service. We thankfully dispensed with that, to some degree. These days, it's all things Arab or Islamic that must be knocked down a few pegs. Barack Obama is, apparently, the man to be made an example of.Again and again, the "rumors" about his childhood in Indonesia keep surfacing on a darkish cloud of presumed guilt.
Rupert Murdoch's media unleashed the story last January when Fox News in the United States and the London Times picked up a slander from Insight magazine that Obama had attended a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. You don’t have to go much further than that to damage a man's reputation in the United States. Say the word, madrasa, and it's like calling someone un-American in the spirit of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It's McCarthyism with a Middle Eastern twist.
Never mind that "madrasa" simply means school in Arabic, never mind that even the religious, Islamic madrasas are apolitical, and of course never mind the truth: Obama never went to one. He attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, then attended a public school that happened to be, because it's Indonesia, predominantly Muslim. No one taught him to make bombs, although somewhere along the line perhaps someone taught him to build mental flack jackets.
”Muslim,” the Resurgent Slur
The slur was dealt with back then, but it reemerged last week in the Washington Post: "Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a 'Muslim plant' in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in [in 2007]." Why is the Post contributing to the rumor mill?As Frank Rich put it in the Times, "The repeated attempts to fan 'rumors' that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim ... are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era."
So let's not add to the festival of smears. Better return the matter to its substance: the 2008 election, the man's qualities and faults (he has both aplenty, as any ambitious politician would), how he compares to his rivals. Most of all, where he stands on the Middle East, and why it's so tricky for him to take stands, whatever they are. Think "Hussein."
