When Ambrose Bierce, in his book "The Devil’s Dictionary" (1906), identified racial prejudice as a "vagrant opinion without visible means of support," he did not have Arabs but his own society in mind.
Arabs at the time were themselves victimized by British and French imperial overlords who were wont to dismiss their colonial subjects as "wogs" and "bicots," a people "not ready for independence" and "could not govern themselves." And, I say, really, old chap, they’re a lower species of men, too, aren’t they now?
Over the last three weeks or so, the media in the Euro-American world has taken to berating the Arab world, this time not for terrorism, fundamentalism and traditionalism but a more sinister ism — racism, or more accurately anti-Semitism.
The brouhaha is over a 41-part soap opera called "Horseman Without a Horse." But this is not just another soap opera. This one has ignited heated debate, including a scathing editorial in the Washington Post, an angry letter from 46 members of Congress to President Mubarak of Egypt (where the broadcast originates and is diffused to 20 other television stations across the Arab world) and a statement by a State Department spokesman that the program "appears to give legitimacy to something so odious, so insulting, and so thoroughly discredited."
That something is anti-Semitism, a posture that traditionally identifies Jews as power-hungry, conniving, aggressive and dishonest, with these negative traits seen not as a response to past victimization or discrimination but traits that are inherent in the Jewish people’s character, a product of an innate malevolence toward others, especially non-Jews.
It would be egregious for any individual, at any time, in any place, for any reason, to embrace such notions; and for a society to use them collectively as a conceptual baseline from which to analyze, in this case, Jewish-Arab relations, is a stain on that society.
What is troubling about the series is that it is based "only in part," according to the producers, on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vituperative document from late 19th century Russia long since shown to be a fake, that tells the story of how a cabal of Jewish elders got together to hatch a plot aimed at enabling Jews to rule the world. Or whatever.
The lead actor and executive producer of "Horseman Without a Horse" told the press that his soap opera is a mere "political comedy" and, heck, "only 1 percent of the show is based on The Protocols."
Oh, puleeze! That’s 1 percent too many.
For now, I submit only one reason as to why we cannot and should not sanction the promotion of racism in our culture — be it anti-Semitism or any other — and seducing the viewing public in our part of the world to get a cheap thrill out of demonizing a whole race of people: Our faith. Especially as we observe it during the blessed month of Ramadan, when compassion, and charities of the imagination and the human spirit define our state of mind.
When Islam set out more than 1,400 years ago to build a commonwealth of nations, it set out to do just that — to build a commonwealth made up of white, black and brown peoples, of Africans, Indians and Orientals, a multicultural, multiracial, multilinguistic and multinational polity where, predating the American Declaration of Independence by several centuries, all men were considered to be created equal.
We have a problem with the Israelis. There is no question about that. And we are entitled to fight them in order to gain our human rights to dignity and freedom, and fight them, if need be, till the end of time, till the sun dies. But we are not fighting them because they are Jews. Would we not have fought them with the same tenacity had they been, say, Dutch Catholic?
The "Arab Human Rights Development Report 2002," sponsored by The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, released last June, showed how our world is afflicted with a great many social, economic and educational problems that the it urged us to attend to before we could hope to move forward.
It would be sad if we add to all that an additional one — the psychological problem of a breakdown in the moral, political and cultural sanctions in society that ideally should be in place to guard against the facile acceptance of anti-Semitic views among growing sectors of the population.
Were that to happen, it would represent a new phenomenon in Arab culture. Anti-Semitism was never practiced in the Islamic commonwealth, for the simple reason that neither the basic tenets of Islam nor the nature of Arab society were ever anti-Semitic. (Note how the Arab world, throughout its history, never produced a body of anti-Semitic literature of its own, as Europe had done, and when those lost souls in it saw fit to wax anti-Semitic, they borrowed that from outside. Nothing along the fantastical lines of The Protocols was ever composed by Arabs.) That is so because the racial theory is not only alien to the Arab and Islamic sensibility, it is diametrically opposed to it.
In short, Arab philosophy (and consider Ibn Khaldoun’s seminal work, Mukaddamah, in this regard), and Islamic theology, enshrined in the Qur’an, propound the thesis that it is not race, but faith, productive skills and cultural values (a community’s social capital) that are key to understanding human worth, and the advancement of peoples, countries and civilizations. Beyond that, we are told to tell others, "You have your religion, and I have mine."
To say that anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab media is, well, Gosh, a function of Arab anger at Israel, no more, does not cut it. Anti-Semitism is a morally bankrupt practice. What is needed is for us to declare it so. ([email protected])
Arab News article dated 21 November 2002
