Muslim leader decries American 'bigotry' against Islam


By Bruce Nolan, Religion News Service (USA Today Feb 21, 2008)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-02-20-muslim-views_N.htm

American culture's view of American Muslims and Islam is steadily
deteriorating under an onslaught of "bigotry" on cable news shows,
newspaper op-ed pages and in the blogosphere, an Arab-American
activist told an audience at Tulane University here Tuesday.

That's a significant shift, said Hussein Ibish, founder of the
Foundation for Arab-American Leadership in Washington, D.C.

Decades before 9/11, Hollywood handed Americans the perceived wisdom
on Arabs as passionate, hyper-sexed, irrational and cruel. Movies such
as Rudolph Valentino's 1921 silent classic The Sheik and
turn-of-the-century thrillers such as The Rules of Engagement
portrayed Arabs only as terrorists, Ibish said.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, however,
Hollywood has backed off. In the meantime, Ibish said, commentators
and politicians on the right — and a few on the left — have replaced
film stereotypes with hours of air time devoted to misrepresenting
Islam and fueling suspicion about American Muslims.

Ibish, formally trained as a literature scholar at the University of
Massachusetts, works in public policy now. He described his foundation
as one that trains Arab-American leaders to describe their values to
the broader culture in easily understood American terms. He appeared
as part of a university symposium on relations between the U.S. and
Muslims.

Ibish is an occasional guest on cable talk shows, often recruited to
represent an Arab-American point of view in some cultural or civil
liberties conflict. He has had at least a couple of sharp exchanges
with the Fox News Network's Michelle Malkin. One, in May, turned on
whether the Kansas City International Airport was right to install a
faucet so Muslim cab drivers could wash their feet before prayer.

Since 9/11, he said, commentators such as Malkin, Ann Coulter, Charles
Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz have transferred old
anti-Arab stereotypes to Islam, in a stream of "incredibly bigoted
commentary" that would not have been tolerated before then.

"This is what explains the collapse of the good name of Islam," he said.

In this context, Ibish said, the West sees Islam as bent on its
destruction and American Muslims as suspected allies who cannot
credibly deny otherwise. Thus, ethnic profiling becomes reasonable and
forced internment or mandatory identification of Muslims becomes a
potential remedy, he said.

Moreover, any request for cultural accommodation, such as the water
faucet in the airport, may be linked back to the memory of 9/11.

Ibish said he did not want to sound alarmist. "This is still a great
country to live in," he said. But a growing climate of suspicion
toward Muslims — and the automatic dismissal of Muslim denials — make
the situation steadily worse, he added.

"There are people who want to make it impossible for the American
Muslim community to engage in dialogue," Ibish said.

While most of the anti-Islamic rhetoric comes from the right, it
occasionally comes from the left as well, he said.

Ibish noted that Eastern liberals, including Sen. Hillary Clinton,
D-N.Y., opposed Bush administration plans to let a Dubai company
operate a number of American ports, saying it was too great a security
risk.

Finally, a student of American popular culture would find that
anti-Islamic rhetoric sounds vaguely familiar, Ibish said.

He said that's because in tone and substance it almost exactly tracks
the anti-Semitic messages that filled American culture between the
world wars.

Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.