Washington Watch
Last week I spoke at a conference on anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism hosted by the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and co-sponsored by the Arab American Institute (AAI) and a few national American Jewish organizations. Because both communities have been victimized by negative stereotyping and hate crimes, I believed that the conversation was both timely and necessary.
For me, this topic is deeply personal. I grew up learning about anti-Semitism. When I was quite young, my mother read me excerpts from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She also read me letters from my godfather, a World War II infantryman, describing his experiences entering concentration camps liberated by Allied forces at war’s end.
And one of my most striking memories of my mother was of her crying at the news reports of Ethel Rosenberg’s execution. When I asked why she was executed, my mother said that while the government said Mrs. Rosenberg had spied for the Soviet Union, she felt in her heart that it was because she was Jewish. Mom also told me what prompted her tears was that the Rosenbergs left two children– who were the ages of my brother and me.
Being sensitized at an early age to the vulnerability of the Jewish people, as I grew to adulthood, I was angered by the use of anti-Semitic tropes like “the Jews own the banks, control the media, or run the country.” Or accusations made against individuals based on their being Jewish, as if there were something inherently evil or untrustworthy or dishonest in members of that community.
Anti-Semitism was a problem then and continues to be one now, with Jewish people and institutions subjected to defamation, negative stereotyping, threats of violence, and actual violence.
When it came to addressing anti-Arab bigotry, I noted the problems of defamation of Arabs in media and popular culture and the pain it has brought to my community– especially to our children. The hate and violence we have experienced over the decades and the traumatic backlash we faced when terrorists struck at home or abroad (whether or not the perpetrators were Arab, the latter being the case during the Iranian hostage crisis and the Oklahoma City bombing).
I also chose to use this opportunity to address what I believe is the way anti-Arab bigotry was combined with a false definition of anti-Semitism and used against Arab Americans.
Growing up in a diverse immigrant community, I did not experience anti-Arab sentiment, per se, until my graduate school days at Temple University in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Ironically, the source of this discrimination came largely from members of the Jewish community. My life was threatened by the Jewish Defense League. I was fired from a teaching job because some Jewish parents were concerned that their children were being taught by an Arab. Interviewing for my first full-time college teaching position I was told that I would be limited to courses in Religion, because it would be “too controversial” for someone of my ethnicity to teach about the Middle East. And on too many occasions I was forced to defend my right to work in political coalitions or even to attend some meetings because some Jewish organizations had objected to my presence.
What was especially troubling about each of these instances (and many more I could cite) was that I was called anti-Semitic– simply because I had called out the injustices done to Palestinians by Israel.
Over the next several decades, I founded and ran several organizations: the Palestine Human Rights Campaign which (like Amnesty International) adopted individual cases of Palestinian victims of torture, detention without charges, expulsion, and home demolitions; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee which documented and combated defamation and disinformation in media and popular culture and discrimination against Arab Americans; and the AAI which organizes Arab Americans in American politics and advocates for their concerns.
In every one of these efforts, we faced the problems of exclusion and defamation led by major American Jewish groups who routinely conflated being pro-Palestinian or opposed to Israeli policies with being anti-Semitic— with consequences that have been hurtful to my community and damaging to our ability to fully participate in the political process.
Coalitions were pressured to reject our involvement. Candidates were pressured to return or reject our contributions or endorsements. And members of our community were denied employment or political appointments. And, in too many instances, the persistent defamation of Arab Americans who criticized Israel by calling us anti-Semitic or supporters of terrorism fueled hate crimes in the form of death threats or actual violence.
The good news is that we have become sufficiently empowered to protect ourselves against these damaging charges. And we are now being defended by law enforcement, civil rights groups, and a host of progressive Jewish organizations. But with other major Jewish groups pressing legislators to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and intensifying their attacks on public figures who speak out against Israeli behavior, we realize that more must be done.
That is why I welcomed the opportunity to speak at the conference and to make the point that anti-Semitism must be condemned and opposed, but also clearly defined and never weaponized to silence legitimate criticism of Israel or to defame individuals who do so.
