Let me get personal for a moment.
I’m sickened by mainstream news and opinion media complicity in our anti-Muslim, anti-Arab anger and fear.
Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim fervor frightens me. Anxiety is bred in my bones as the grandson of immigrants, husband of a first-generation American and heir to our people’s history.
On whom will Americans turn next?
With the rare exceptions, too many mainstream news and opinion media disgrace themselves with supine responses if not outright enthusiasm.
And I’m appalled by the degree to which this recurrent bigotry meets such broad acceptance that GOP presidential candidates aren’t embarrassed by joining the clamor.
To its credit, the Enquirer is a calm exception, whether in the news columns or opinion pages.
That said, this isn’t going to be a “some of my best friends are Muslims” column.
But close.
In the early 1980s, a caller asked if I’d accept an award from the new, national American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee for my reporting on Arab-Americans in the Cincinnati area.
Yes, thank you, but why ask if I’d accept it? I was proud of that work.
The caller explained that other journalists whom AADC also wanted to recognize declined, saying, in effect, they feared being tarred as anti-Israel.
Huh? I knew some American Jews perceived anti-semitism in any criticism of Israel, but reporters refusing an award for reporting in the U.S. mainstream news media seemed to border on paranoia.
Granted, AADC founder James Abourezk, a U.S. senator from South Dakota, often was critical of Israel, and few Arabs or Arab-Americans shared Zionist enthusiasms, but my reporting and the award weren’t about Israel.
I’d interviewed Arab immigrants and Arab-Americans of all religious traditions and none. They represented various national and ethnic origins, and the women and men included students, lawyers, physicians, educators, engineers, corporate executives and business owners.
One family claimed the first identified Arab immigrant to Cincinnati, a Christian whose family continues to prosper here.
In short, the spectrum of American success.
With Enquirer support, I accepted the award at, I recall, AADC’s first national convention in Detroit.
My response was what today would be called politically incorrect. I said most of my interview subjects knew I was an American Jew who supported the existence of the State of Israel.
But as AADC’s award demonstrated, that didn’t prevent me from doing my job as a reporter or treating them fairly. I hoped my listeners would give reporters in their cities a chance to do as well or better. I urged them to take the risk.
Arab immigrants, Arab-Americans and non-Arab Muslims took a chance on my integrity and AADC’s award honored them, too.
If I’d stumbled or offended in my reporting and writing, no one told me.
Some of the people I contacted for my stories were warier than others. I drew on contacts I’d built over years in their communities as a religion reporter, not least at annual Arab-American dinners which my wife and I rarely missed.
Wonderful company and great food apart, it was part of my job; religion was a great beat.
These contacts ranged from high school and college students to Procter & Gamble execs recruited in the Middle East and South Asia. Leaders of a local mosque and Maronite Catholic parish were unfailingly gracious and helpful.
One downtown businessman walked into the newsroom and plunked down a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He thanked me for my reporting and left. I responded to colleagues’ stares, saying, “I’ll share.”
Not long before I wrote those stories, our family had spent six weeks in Israel and Egypt where I was on assignment for the Enquirer. Some of our time was spent with Coptic Christian Arabs linked to Grailville in Loveland, some of it with Palestinians whose religious commitments were unknown to me even though we knew them from Cincinnati.
A few years later, our daughter, a high school freshman, studied Arabic in UC’s Evening College with a Palestinian friend we’d met during those dinners. Teacher and student often veered from the lessons to joyfully discuss similarities between Hebrew and Arabic.
The night Americans attacked Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991, we walked up and sat with an observant Muslim friend in her family’s small campus-fringe restaurant. She was a Palestinian haji who’d spent years in Baghdad.
We didn’t want her to be alone as the American attack played triumphantly on every TV channel. Eventually, we became partners with her and her architect son in their restaurant.
Regular customers knew that if she wasn’t at the stove to welcome them, she was in her private space, observing the commandment to pray at those times. Everyone waited. None of us saw that as unusual; it was respectful and the kind of thing that happens in America.
Those links between our families were abhorrent to some of our daughter’s (non-Mormon) acquaintances when she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought they’d be pleased; instead, their bigotry created irreparable damage to developing friendships.
However, it reminded her how thin the veneer of tolerance can be, whether given or expected.
By then, our daughter found a lasting benefit from her Arabic classes. On a medical rotation in London, her mentor was an Egyptian physician. He was stunned and delighted when she repeated his name correctly when he introduced himself.
Leap ahead to the trauma of 9/11 and the killers’ Arab origins. Within days, a Canadian acquaintance sent me an email, sympathizing with our losses.
I thanked her but predicted that we’d need more than sympathy; frightened Americans would react in ways that debased much of the best of what our country stood for.
Too many Americans didn’t know whom to fear or hate more, Arabs or Muslims. Uncertain and led by political figures, Americans turned on both. Some even attacked Sikhs and other Asian immigrants.
Irrational hostility and our expanding national security state justify my worst fears.
And I’m not leaving the news media off the hook. In times of national trauma, too many mainstream editors, commentators and publishers “get on the team” and abdicate their obligation to challenge government and popular excesses.
Meanwhile, American news media all but ignore the horrific toll Sunni-Shia barbarities are taking on non-combatant Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and others.
Oh, we still get brief stories about suicide bombers in mosques and markets, ISIL beheadings and poison gas attacks by Alawite Syrian government forces, but American news media treat these atrocities with an implicit “What else do we expect from ‘those people?’ ”
That is nothing new. Nationalism, racism and religious/ethnic bias always are risks to informed, empathetic news judgment.
The recent massacre in Paris was different. For reporters and their editors, victims were people like us, going to clubs and cafes. Dead and wounded, they were far more newsworthy to journalists than atrocities in Raqqa, Damascus, Ramadi, Kabul, Karachi or any place in Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Somalia or Sudan.
Parisian deaths and injuries were caused by Europeans who identified with Islam and their immigrant parents’ or grandparents’ Muslim homelands.
Our shameful national response to them and ISIL — from Cincinnati’s mayor to the Obama administration to GOP presidential aspirants — reflects irrational, ugly fears echoed by talk radio, Fox News and too many other news and opinion media.
Curmudgeon notes:
• Here’s an idea: Instead of decrying cops killing people with toy guns, the Enquirer should refuse to carry full-color ads for these replica weapons.
Replica handguns and assault-style bb/pellet guns are made to appear realistic. They often accompany ads for real firearms they mimic.
Most of the ads are preprints provided by national sporting goods stores and stuffed into print editions.
Those preprints are an exception to my general rule: “I’ve never seen an ad I didn’t like.” For half a century, ads of all kinds supported the news media. They helped pay my salaries. Now, they help pay my Gannett pension.
Guardian US is tracking 2015 deaths at the hands of police — without judging whether the homicides are justifiable — and it reported that American cops killed at least 28 people this year who were holding BB/pellet guns.
Two are well-known in Ohio: John Crawford shot in a Walmart near Dayton carrying a pellet rifle he picked up from a display and Tamir Rice who was carrying a “toy” pistol.
As Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty said after a grand jury refused to indict Rice’s killer, “I want to call on the legislature and the manufacturers of toy guns not to make guns that look so much like the real thing.”
Last month, the Guardian said a new California law “bars the sale of BB guns unless the ‘entire exterior surface of the device is white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink, or bright purple, either singly or as the predominant color in combination with other colors in any pattern’ or it is transparent.”
If BB/pellet gun makers do that nationally, that’s enough for me. Bring back the full-color ads even if Good Ol’ Boys still try to sell pink rifles and pistols to girls and women.
• Why does Gannett offer “customer service” when it blows off an online complaint about a missed home delivery? It’s a sham.
Our post-Christmas Sunday Enquirer wasn’t delivered. Before 9 a.m., I requested “redelivery” in response to robotic prompts.
After 24 hours, we still had no replacement paper. I entered the Customer Service chat room where a “Cynthia” said she’d credited our account because redelivery was not an “option.”
Even a day later, the Enquirer has extra copies and people paid to deliver them to subscribers. They choose not to do it despite the telephone robot offering “redelivery.”
• The latest one-source exposè to blow up suggested that Peyton Manning used a banned performance-enhancing drug. Within days, pharmacist Charlie Sly, the sole source for the Al Jazeera America accusation, recanted.
Here’s part of what Al Jazeera initially posted on its website: “Sly has disavowed his statements to (reporter Liam) Collins that were caught on hidden camera.”
In a follow-up email, Sly told Al Jazeera that when he spoke with Collins he “was in no state of mind to be making any coherent statements as I was grieving the death of my fiancée.”
Manning already had denied any cheating.
• Based on repeated news stories, too many Missourians miss the vital point about driving in a flood: don’t. Many if not most of the reported fatalities blamed on the recent floods involved people in vehicles swept off roads by moving water.
It’s rare, but the same thing happens to unwary Tristate residents, especially on rural two-lane roads.
If you see water moving across the road and don’t know how deep it is, don’t drive in. Once the water flowing across the road rises to the middle of your wheels, you’re in deadly danger of being swept away.
And don’t wade into the water to see how deep it is. Once it rises toward your knees, you’re in deadly danger. Just turn around and find another route.
• Donald Trump has no compunctions about dumping on someone he dislikes.
Facing the nation’s first real primary, he called the New Hampshire Union Leader — previously the infamous Manchester Union Leader — “a very dishonest paper… It’s also a failing paper. It’s going down the tubes.”
In the Bad Old Days, the Union Leader could be a reactionary but influential statewide vehicle for its late publisher William Loeb. He and his editors never distinguished between Loeb’s loathings and what should have been news columns.
Trump was piqued by the paper’s endorsement of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and its page one editorial criticizing Trump’s often wrong and/or outrageous statements.
The renamed New Hampshire Union Leader is not the vicious rag it once was, but it’s still a dominant statewide medium. If its response to Trump costs him the primary, the headline, “Trump Loses,” won’t go unnoticed elsewhere.
On the other hand, the Union Leader might not matter to Trump supporters who seem unfazed by his feud with the GOP’s Fox News.
• Veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk’s columns in the liberal London Independent command respect if not agreement. A recent column began, “The news from Afghanistan is very bad. No one says that of course. … We don’t do ‘bad news’ from Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s like a movie, replayed over and over again each Christmas.”
As a contrast, Fisk recalls Churchill in 1940 who told Britons the truth about Germans “swarming into France.” Churchill said “The news from France is very bad.”
Fisk added, “We are not permitted to use this same expression, ‘very bad.’ ” Instead, Fisk quoted Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, British generals and various Afghan and Iraqi officials on how well things are going.
How well? Americans and Brits are dying in efforts to recapture cities they died to capture before Taliban/ISIS took them again.
“You only have to read Afghan journalists’ reports from the country to know that even the old Churchillian
‘very bad’ is a bit on the optimistic side,” Fisk added.
How bad? An armed Taliban assault freed the surviving captives after ISIS in Afghanistan kidnapped 30 Shia Muslim bus passengers.
“Yes,” Fisk wrote, “the bad guys suddenly turned into the good guys” and “are now fighting the even-more horrid bad guys. If this wasn’t tragic, it would be farce.”
As if to underline his disgust, he quoted Obama saying everyone should “press the Taliban… to do their part in the pursuit of the peace the Afghans deserve.”
Fisk closed as he started, “So the horrid Taliban can become the good, brave Taliban again. Truly, the news from Afghanistan must be very bad.”
• China forced French journalist Ursula Gauthier to leave after she refused to apologize for an article in a widely read French news magazine that officials said “hurt the Chinese people.”
According to france24.com, “Chinese authorities said they believed Gauthier’s article offered justification for violence in the region that the government labels as ‘terrorism.’ ”
Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said “the article criticized China’s counter-terrorism efforts, and denigrated and slandered Chinese policies. It provoked the strong indignation of the Chinese public.”
France24 said Gauthier’s “article in L’Obs triggered condemnation from Beijing and a virulent campaign in the state-run Global Times and China Daily. And the intimidation hasn’t come only from the government. Gauthier has received thousands of insults and threats, including death threats, through comments on the People’s Daily website, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Her photo was published online.
“Gauthier’s essay, published on November 18 and entitled ‘After the attacks (on Paris), Chinese solidarity is not without ulterior motives,’ spoke of China’s anti-terrorism policies in the country’s western region of Xinjiang, homeland of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority — many of whom complain of discrimination and controls on their culture and religion.”
Gauthier told FRANCE 24, “In fact there is some terrorism (in Xinjiang), but there is also a situation where this minority is being subjected to discrimination and ethnic violence.”
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jan 6-13, 2016.