WASHINGTON, 14 September — This week was a bad week to be an Arab on the East Coast of America. It wasn’t, frankly, a great week to be an English journalist on the East Coast, with a message to a university audience on the eve of the Sept. 11 anniversary about the failings and injustice of US policy in the Middle East — especially when the 2,000 people who turned up to listen would include relatives of those so savagely slaughtered a year ago. George Mason University is in Fairfax, Virginia, just across the county line from Arlington, where a brace of Patriot missiles were now positioned to ensure America’s Arab attackers did not return for a second strike.
Hanan Ashrawi, among the sanest and least radical of any Palestinian, was in Virginia, lambasted in a coordinated campaign by pro-Israel lobby groups and Christian fundamentalists so virulent in their remarks that the Bush Administration gave her bodyguards for a lecture visit to Colorado.
“Never have I experienced language like this,” she told me. Her daughter Zena — a student at George Mason — says that in the days that followed the Sept. 11 attacks last year, she did not leave home for days.
Other Arab students admitted to me that they could not bring themselves to watch television for the past year. “The coverage is so anti-Muslim, so anti-Arab that it is disgusting for me to watch,” a young woman — who wore an head-scarf — announced. “You can see the effect of the television, the way people look at us. They don’t say anything. But it’s in their eyes.”
My own experience of all this began before my flight from the Middle East had touched down at Dulles Airport. A columnist in the local Richmond Times, rejoicing in the name of A. Barton Hinkle, condemned George Mason University for inviting me to speak. As the United States commemorates one of its saddest days, he wrote, Fisk was the ‘wrong choice’ as a speaker and trotted out the usual lies: because Fisk suggests that US policy in the Middle East has created so much Arab hatred, he was ‘a terrorist excuser’, ‘a terrorist enabler’, ‘a terrorist apologist’.
By breakfast time, the president of the university — chastened by Hinkle’s slanderous remarks — was in heated and fearful conversation with the Provost, Dr. John Stern, who vigorously defended the university’s right to invite a journalist to speak on a subject which placed the events of Sept. 11 in a context outside that of the sorrow and grief which the university would be recognizing the following day. And by the evening, 2,000 Americans — the majority without any Middle East origins but with Jewish and Arab-Americans among them — turned up to hear my talk.
I spoke about the international crimes against humanity of Sept. 11 — as well as the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombers. I also talked about the September Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in Beirut almost exactly 20 years ago, with its death toll well over half that of Sept. 11. Would those Palestinian victims be commemorated, I asked? It all provided further proof that Americans are not the fools we Europeans make them out to be. There was fierce criticism among the audience of their own media coverage of Sept. 11, its mawkishness, its refusal to ask serious questions about the motives of that terrible crime.
Several talked about the need for liberal Jews — in both Israel and America — to play a leading role in this discussion. In the audience was Adam Shapiro, the Jewish American Georgetown graduate who has just married a Palestinian girl from Ramallah.
But it proved something else; that although Arabs have faced discrimination and racial profiling and the most unjust terms of imprisonment without trial — and the most flagrant racist abuse in the media — Americans themselves have been remarkably restrained toward their own Muslims.
I could sense eyes moving suspiciously over the faces of the Muslim students with whom I breakfasted this week. But I could also feel the same gaze on a Jewish friend who had lunch with me in New York. All, I suppose, were of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’. Or was this my imagination? Wasn’t it, in truth, a tribute to Americans — not to their government — that they could still treat innocent Arabs with respect, that they could encourage a foreign journalist to give a lecture about America’s injustice in the Middle East just a day before the first anniversary of Sept. 11? I couldn’t help remembering, when I was talking at the university, that George Mason was one of the original framers of America’s Bill of Rights.
I took the shuttle from Washington National to New York’s La Guardia airport. In the pre-flight security check queue, an Egyptian was in front me. He was dark-skinned and his English was poor. The American security staff could hear him speaking in Arabic. But they took his boarding card without a word and cheerfully wished him a good flight on this, the most terrible anniversary for anyone — let alone an Arab — to fly to New York. It was Fisk, with his distinctly European features, who received the random special security check; shoes off, computer wires examined, passport scrutinized.
There were almost 200 empty seats on the flight — the skies over New York must have been haunted by more than enough ghosts that morning — although it’s still eerie to find how, on the approach to La Guardia, you still instinctively look west over Manhattan and search for the Twin Towers.
At the United Nations, they were issuing press passes to Arab and Westerner alike for George Bush’s Sept. 12 speech. But the morning papers in New York were already trying to wind up the great American public for war with Iraq.
Television reporting was revealing; the memories of the victims’ relatives were wounding, almost physically painful; but the reporters’ own reflections — morbidity mixed with venom against Iraq — were chilling. Early on the 11th, I had turned on the television; before dawn, I had seen the Twin Towers fall to the ground 18 times. The only false note in the UN came in its official medical advice for parents over the Sept. 11 anniversary. With their children, a UN doctor announced, parents should encourage ‘clinginess’. Why did I hate this so much? Because I loathe psycho-babble? Or because it so accurately summed up the relationship of American journalists toward their government?
On my way back to Washington, I picked up a cab for La Guardia driven by a Korean. He wanted to talk about Sept. 11 — and about Arabs. It went like this. “Now I tell you, the Arabs here knew. You see, most of my fellow drivers are Arabs. But from 7.00 in the morning of Sept. 11, they were off the streets. They’d all been told not to work in Manhattan after 7.00 a.m. I didn’t see any Arab drivers after that time.
Well, of course! They had been warned in advance.” First, the lie was against the Jews. American Jews had been told not to go to work at the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, so this pernicious rumor went. They were behind the crimes. Now, as I bumped toward the East River, I was getting the flip side of this mendacious tale: the Arabs of New York were behind Sept. 11. Surely, I thought, the time must come when the Jews and Arabs of America unite in a pact to protect each other. (The Independent)