Dr. James Zogby

In the News

Are Arab Americans People Like Us?

By James Zogby
Foreign Service Journal
Posted on Sunday April 30, 2000

Despite recent positive changes in the way Americans view some Arab countries and U.S. policy toward the Middle East, most Americans still do not understand Arabs as people. This lack of understanding is not merely a set of attitudes that exists in popular culture. Nor is it solely a matter of ignorance. And it is not a new development born of the current Middle East conflict. Rather it is a deep-rooted problem, with historic and religious roots.

In several ways, the western animus of anti-Semitism was directed against both Jews and Arabs. Both forms of anti-Semitism emerged as by-products of the largely Western Christian struggle against the two Semitic civilizations. One the West found living within its midst and which it saw as an internal threat. The other the West confronted as an external military and political challenge it similarly defined as a threat to its survival (click here for a map of Semitic peoples).

From the Middle Ages on, both Jews and Arab Muslims were perceived as a hostile presence. Their organizations, their wealth, and even their corporate identities were seen as posing a danger to the West. The results were devastating to both peoples. Both groups suffered a history of vilification and both endured campaigns of systematic violence that have continued up to the present time.

Several years ago I did a study of political cartoons and other forms of popular culture-comparing the depiction of Jews in Czarist Russia and pre-Nazi Germany with those of Arabs in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

In content and form, the treatments were identical. The two most prevalent German and Russian depictions of Jews paralleled the images of Arabs projected in U.S. cartoons. The fat, grotesque Jewish banker or merchant found its contemporary counterpart in the obese oil sheik, and the images of the Arab and Jewish terrorists differed only in their attire.

Both groups were uniformly treated as alien and hostile. Both were accused of not sharing Western values and being prone to conspiracy. And both were seen as usurpers of Western wealth and as threats to Western civilization.

Jews were associated with capitalist greed and anarchist violence and communism. Arab avarice was held responsible for runaway inflation and Arabs were seen as the main agents responsible for international terrorism.

In the wake of repeated pogroms and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism against Jews is now recognized for what it is-hateful prejudice. We have yet to learn this lesson when it comes to Arabs and Islam. Despite the fact that during the past 150 years the Arab region was brutally invaded, dismembered and colonized, and many Arab economies and societies were plundered and laid waste, there is no western acknowledgement of Arab suffering.

To the contrary, scant attention is given to the formative role that imperial conquest and colonialism in the Maghreb (North Africa) and Mashraq (the Levant plus Iraq) have played in shaping contemporary Arab realities or Arab popular resentment of the West (click here to see maps). And the fact that some Islamic movements have taken the form of nativist revivals is all too often mistakenly ascribed as evidence of the religion’s innate militancy and not as a reaction against the traumas of political, economic and social dislocation these societies have endured in the recent past.

The failure to understand the Arab experience and contemporary reality is often compounded by some of those in government, media and academia who pass as “experts” on the region. Too few of these experts are Arab or Muslim. All too often, they are ideologues engaged in a campaign to portray Islam as a “green scare” replacing communism as the new national threat. They depict Islam as something foreign and diametrically opposed to “our” values.

Popular culture and what passes for educational material only reinforce the negative images. Surveys of the textbooks most frequently used by U.S. high school students continue to demonstrate little appreciation for Arab history and civilization and provide all too often a one-sided view of the contemporary Middle East. And in films, books and television, as in the political cartoons, the portrayals of Arabs and Muslims are almost uniformly hostile.

Some years ago, I did a study of the treatment of Arabs by the three major television networks. I surveyed entertainment programs aired during a five-year period and found that, like the political cartoons, the only presentation of Arab or Muslim characters were either as terrorists or oil sheiks. There was not one single positive Arab or Muslim character to be found.

When I submitted my study to the major TV networks, some initially countered my findings saying that they had also portrayed Italians as gangsters and American Jews as criminals. I responded that alongside these negative images were many positive portrayals that could, in the public mind, balance the view of Italians or American Jews as communities that include some bad but mostly good people. There were no similar countervailing images of “good” Arabs. After a meeting with executives and producers from one of the “majors,” they acknowledged a problem and agreed to make an effort to insert a “positive” Arab character in one of their programs. A few weeks later I was sent a script for review. The show was a popular series that took place in a hospital. In the opening scene, the Arab character made his entrance. In the script, a limousine drove up to the hospital’s front door and out stepped a visiting Saudi doctor in traditional Arabian robes. He entered the hospital and went directly to the gift shop to browse. There he found a copy of Playboy and while leering at the centerfold said “I like this. We do not have this in my country.”

Needless to say, the show with the Arab character never aired. In the absence of any positive portrayals of Arabs in the mainstream media, Western audiences did not see the community as multifaceted with many positive characteristics. They only saw one-dimensional stereotypical images and, because of the media’s obsession with isolated violent acts, the image of Arabs came to be defined by the terrorist. In the popular culture, the terrorist was not seen as the exception to the Arab culture or the religion of Islam, but the rule.

A few years ago, the cover of Newsweek magazine featured a photo of David Koresh, the Waco cult leader, on one side and, on the other, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Now to those who know Arabs and Islam, it was clear that the Sheikh was about as representative of the Muslim faith as Koresh was of the Christian faith. I was not certain that most Americans who saw that cover shared that understanding. This problem of negative stereotyping and misrepresentation is not only a function of this historical and political conflict. It also has more recent political roots, since for more than 70 years now, one side has shaped the American understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For many Americans, the Arab-Israeli dispute was reduced to a single equation, best expressed by Zionist leader Chaim Wiezmann who, in 1936, depicted the Middle East as the scene of a struggle between “the forces of civilization, and the forces of the desert.”

While there were many variations on this theme, this message was driven into the American consciousness during a sustained half-century campaign. Leon Uris brilliantly captured it in the book Exodus and the movie later made from it. Seen by tens of millions of Americans, this film cleverly transferred the American cultural mythology of courageous, brave pioneers and cowboys confronted by hostile savage Indians, to the Middle East conflict. Israelis were portrayed as “people like us,” bright and energetic visionaries. They were people with hopes and dreams of a better life confronting heartless and soulless Arabs, who only wanted to kill them and their dreams.

Even after the founding of Israel, this propaganda campaign continued as Israelis and their U.S. supporters described the new nation as “making the desert bloom.” Supporters celebrated Israel’s creativity and humanity and spoke of values it shared with the United States, while describing the neighboring Arab states as a backwards menace, or as terrorists. The fact that Arabs, especially Palestinians, rejected the Zionist enterprise, for reasons as legitimate as the Native American rejection of their displacement, was ignored. The Israeli version of history and the broader Israeli view of Middle East realities came to be accepted in the West.

The Arabs, never understanding the need to aggressively engage and counter this campaign, in the end, saw themselves defined by the Israeli view.

While Israelis and Jews came to be known as complex human beings “just like us,” Arabs were objectified as a “problem.” When they were presented or discussed, it was in caricature or as a collective. They were “terrorists” (objects of contempt), or “refugees” (objects of pity). When they were bombed in Lebanon they were “targets” (objects of invisibility). In all cases they were faceless objects.

Faceless Victims

In 1981, after the Israeli bombing of the Fakhani neighborhood in Beirut, there were 383 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians known to be dead. On the same day, there were six Israeli casualties, one dead and five wounded. The American network coverage from Israel was vivid and deeply moving. Weeping and frightened parents were interviewed. Ambulances screamed, while wounded Israelis were carried out on stretchers and police ordered onlookers to move away.

From Beirut, we were shown only rubble: a desolate, destroyed street. Casualty figures were announced and reporters told their stories well. But without victims, and without the families of victims, the numbers were just a faceless mass.

Later, I met one of the network cameramen who covered the bombing from Beirut. I asked him why his network’s coverage of Lebanon had been so sanitized. He responded that that had not been his intention. He had arrived on the scene, he told me, shortly after the bombing, and had seen bodies being pulled out of the rubble, ambulances, and the anguished faces of victims and survivors. There was, he told me, so much disarray that they felt it better to wait until the street was cleared and the scene of devastation could be shown. And so, while Americans were given a lengthy treatment of the anguish of Israel’s six casualties, the hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian victims remained invisible.

The media’s treatment of the horrific massacres in 1982 in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut revealed the same problem. Through it all, the Lebanese and Palestinian victims remained a “faceless” collective, once again “objects of pity”, without personality or individuality. No names were given. No personal stories were told. As a result, the deaths of so many were never understood as personal tragedies of “people like us.” It was a bitter irony that even in this instance the media and, therefore, the public mind became focused on Israeli humanity. After hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to call for an end to the war in Lebanon, Sabra and Shatilla was transformed by the press into a test of Israeli democracy and Jewish humanity. In the days following the massacre the Washington Post never sought to speak to family members of Lebanese and Palestinian victims residing in the Washington area, or to identify and humanize the victims themselves. Instead they carried a full page of comments by Washington area Jews on how badly they felt about the massacre.

Much the same occurred in February 1994 after a Jewish terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 39 Muslim worshipers at the Al Ibrahimi Mosque in El-Khalil. For days after the massacre, the U.S. press gave extensive coverage to Goldstein’s life and trials. How, they asked, could this young Jewish doctor do something so evil? Readers of major U.S. newspapers came to know all the details of the young doctor’s life. But through it all, the Arab victims remained nameless and faceless.

As an Arab American who has for three decades been active in fighting not only for better understanding of the Arab experience, but for Arab American rights as well, I can testify to the fact that this negative stereotyping has also had a domestic impact. For many years, Arab Americans who defended Palestinian rights were denounced as supporters of terrorism. Arab American children were afraid to acknowledge their ethnicity. Those who organized, and became active as Arab Americans, were on many occasions excluded from U.S. politics. Candidates rejected their endorsements and returned their contributions. And Arab Americans were subjected to hate crimes and acts of violence.

More troubling still has been the more recent extension of negative stereotypes into public policy. There was the traumatizing “rush to judgment” after the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City and the tragic crash of TWA 800. And the problem of airport profiling, which we are still working to resolve, has caught too many Arab Americans in a web of suspicion where rights were violated and entire families were left in shock.

But this story does not end here, on a negative note. Despite this history of stereotyping and the resultant dehumanization and discrimination, some recent positive changes have occurred in public attitudes.

Partners in Peace

From Camp David onward, there have been some small but significant breakthroughs for Arabs in U.S. opinion. The Israeli assaults on Lebanon, the Palestinian Intifada, the Gulf War, the Madrid peace process and several positive actions by the Clinton Administration have contributed to this change.

Arabs have been identified as peacemakers, “partners in peace,” and allies. Palestinians have broken through and been heard (rather remarkably, as in the case of Hanan Ashrawi) and recognized (as in the President’s historic visit to Gaza and repeated White House ceremonies).

And Arab Americans have been given unprecedented recognition and respect in recent years by both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. President Clinton and Vice President Gore were the first President and Vice President to address Arab American audiences, and the Eids, Islamic holy days, are now regularly recognized and celebrated by the White House and State Department.

The Middle East peace process provided some extraordinary opportunities for Arab Americans as well. Our meetings with the leadership of the Clinton administration became more frequent, as did our inclusion in official and unofficial peace related activities.

In 1993 Vice President Al Gore launched Builders for Peace, a private sector initiative to promote the peace effort. He asked former Congressman Mel Levine and myself to serve as co-chairs. More than 100 Arab Americans and American Jews were invited to serve on the group’s initial board of directors.

Even with the fits and starts of the peace process’s many tracks, and some renewed strains in relations between Arab Americans and American Jews, the peace process and BFP helped to produce lasting, positive change in the political acceptance of Arab Americans.

But even with these gains, problems remain in the culture, in policy and in the public’s understanding of Arabs. Overall, U.S. policy toward the Middle East remains characterized by what many Arabs view as a double standard. As Americans, we still do not see Arabs, as “people like us,” individual human beings who feel the same hurts, react to the same pressures and aspire to the same goals as we do.

Americans understand the pain of Israelis who live with a sense of insecurity and loss, but we still find it difficult to attribute the same sense of insecurity and loss to the Palestinians and Lebanese who see their homes demolished and are burdened by a dehumanizing occupation that violates their most fundamental human rights. As Americans, we are alternatively puzzled by or troubled by Jewish or Christian fundamentalism with their demonization of other faiths, their treatment of women and their dangerous lapses into violence, but we do not judge them in the same harsh way we judge their Muslim counterparts. It is with an eye toward ending these hurtful stereotypes and the “double standard” that Arab Americans have become organized and in the past few decades have become a part of the national discourse on these and other critical issues.

As Arab Americans, we have seen ourselves as a bridge community. We can help create greater understanding between the culture and countries of our origin and our home, America.

The road before us, has not always been an easy one, but we have fought to be included as full participants in our American society. Arab Americans have confronted the makers of popular culture and the writers of textbooks and demanded fairer treatment. While we have not made the radical transformation required, we have succeeded in gaining Hollywood’s ear and the media’s attention.

Arab Americans have worked to end our exclusion from U.S. politics. No longer are our contributions returned and our endorsements rejected as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

We have worked to advance our community’s interest, and while there are still too few Arab Americans in policy making roles or as shapers of the public discourse or Arab-related issues, there is growing recognition that this is a gap that must be filled.

A long and difficult road remains before us, but today, at least, Arab Americans are a part of the American process. Our inclusion is helping to close the gap in understanding that has existed for so long. As we proceed, the beneficiaries will not only be the Arabs and our ethnic community. America, as a whole, will also be better, because it will be better able to lead and to project its values and protect its interests and develop relationships based on understanding and mutual respect.