Juguemos con globos

Animal metaphor applied in particular to black people and Jews to depict them as racially closer to the animal in the scale of life. Use of the related degrading metaphor monkey has been applied to both black people and Jews, though also to Asians, and to white people by blacks.

White people’s degrading identification of black people as apes is nearly as old as Europe’s contact with black Africa. The racist association is not only with low intelligence and cultural development, but also with bestial sexuality. In America’s rural South, white racist thinking stigmatized black people as having subhuman control over their sex drives (Herbst 1997; see also ^{MUD PEOPLE}).

In the Jewish context, ape and monkey suggest such traits as unreason, lack of human dignity and morality, both infancy and senility (the ape is speechless, but its face wrinkled), and threat to order (see also JEW). Sax (2000, 52) notes also that Nazi Germans propagated antisemitic images of hairy Jewish men seducing or as-saulting “innocent Aryan girls.” Some Arabs have found all these traits embodied in Israeli Jews in particular, who occupy what Arabs argue is their land. For example, a Muslim on Palestinian television, in March 2001, averred that Allah’s army would come to liberate Palestine from Jewish defilement, pointing out that in “his book”

Allah had called Jews “monkeys,” “donkeys,” and “swine.”

The stigmatizing and scapegoating uses of a lowly animal metaphor blinds users to consideration of blacks and Jews as human, thus rendering them expendable.

See also ANIMAL;DOG;LAMB;MONSTER;PARASITE;PIG;SNAKE.

Ape

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Arab

Originally, one of the Semitic inhabitants of the peninsula of Southwest Asia called Arabia, which now includes such countries as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Yemen. Arab peoples, however, also make up most of the population of Iraq (some-times confused with Iran, which is a Muslim but not an Arab country), Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, the West Bank, countries on the southern shore of the Medi-terranean, and Sudan. Arab writers have used Arab to mean Bedouin—the nomadic desert dweller we still identify as the Arab of Middle Eastern romance (which pro-motes notions of “unsettled nomadic instincts” that some observers believe keep Arabs from enjoying stable nationhood [Shaheen 1997, 3]). In the European Middle Ages, Arabs were known as Saracens, designating Christians’ Muslim enemy (while many Arabs are Muslims, many are not, nor are most Muslims Arab).

Having changed in meaning several times throughout history, the term, in spite of the difficulty in arriving at a standard definition (Lewis 1993, 1–10), now com-monly refers to those persons whose primary language is Arabic. However, rarely would Arabic-speaking Jews be called Arab, while the term, depending on whom one asks, might apply to Arabic-speaking Christians.

We received the term Arab from the Greek stem word Arab-, but the earliest source is not clear. Speculations include derivation from an ancient Semitic word signifying “west,” as was used in Mesopotamia for people living west of the Euphrates Valley, and, perhaps more useful, according to Lewis (1993, 2–3), because of the link with nomadism, the Hebrew arava, meaning “steppe.”

Western misunderstandings of Arab peoples are pervasive, contributing to the building of a wall between the West and the Arab world. First, contrary to media impressions, Arabs do not constitute a race. Stereotypical depictions of Arabs with large hooked noses are racist distortions. (Some racial stereotypes of Arabs appar-ently derive from antisemitic stereotypes.) Nor are Arabs even one nationality, religion, or culture. The Arab world today is best understood in its diversity: twenty-one different states, a multitude of different religions, and different, though inter-related, cultures and pasts. Also, athough it is said to be the cultural unifier of the Arab world, there is no single Arabic language; Arabs speak seventeen different dialects. At the same time, however, at least in one Arab view nourished for some time, Arabs are only temporarily divided into different states. According to this phi-losophy, all are believed to comprise peoples of a single, proud Arab nation, even though this Arabism lacks a legal basis. Still, there are no “Arab nationals,” reported by some news media as having been detained in New York City after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Stereotyping of Arab peoples has had currency in the United States. Images include simple people riding camels, the “camel jammer” and “camel jockey” (dur-ing the 1991 Gulf War, bumper stickers and T-shirts appeared read(dur-ing “I’d fly a thousand miles to smoke a camel jockey), unbridled nomads (“free as an Arab”), or untamed savages (“wild as Arabs”). Looking at American fiction, Sabbagh (1990) found Arab men represented as filthy billionaires, sheiks (literally, “old man,” a term Arab

13 of reverence when restricted to a title for a Muslim leader), and sex maniacs. A

traditional female image has been the sensuous belly dancer or harem maiden, but the post 9-11 media focused on the burqa-shrouded, education-starved, oppressed Muslim woman (actually Afghani Muslims; however, Afghani women historically have not been repressed, but active laborers, doctors, and members of government [Skaine 2002], and many veiled Muslim women are educated and hold progressive views on gender [Armstrong 2000b, 172]). Arab has also found U.S. use for street hucksters; persons of mixed American Indian, white, and black descent; and Jews, Turks, and, probably because they wear a turban, Sikhs. Swarthy complexion and foreign background are usually connoted.

The term Arab itself has acquired pejorative connotations. Paul Findley writes of how an official of the Anti-Defamation League warned of the so-called Arab oil lobby making contributions to educational institutions that could compromise academic freedom in the United States. Findley says the official “used the word

‘Arab’ as a negative stereotype, a form of bigotry that would evoke cries of outrage if one were to substitute the words ‘Jewish’ or ‘Israeli’ for the word ‘Arab’” (They Dare to Speak Out, 1989, 322). In addition, the altered pronunciation AY-rab may, in some circumstances (as in the popular 1960s Ray Stevens song “A-hab the A-rab”), suggest a slur. (The term beur sometimes appears in American media; from French back slang, this term is used in France for a Muslim immigrant from North Africa; not pejorative, it may in fact be self-descriptive.)

Westerners ignorant of Arab cultures and Islam, knowing largely only carica-tures of these culcarica-tures, have also long perceived Arabs as being blindly committed to a medieval religion and barbaric in culture. Misperceptions worsened with the rise of the Arab-Israeli conflicts that followed the establishment of the state of Is-rael in 1948. Since the 1980s, international politics has cast the lengthening shadow of violence and terrorism over perceptions of Arab and other Muslim peoples. The media’s constant skewering of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as “Butcher of Baghdad,” close-ups of angry Arab men chanting “Death to America!” and a focus on Arab-linked terrorist incidents further drove home the image of extremism and sinister activity as supposedly typical of the nearly half a billion Arab people. In addition, even before September 11, State Department reports tended to focus on Arab or Mus-lim groups engaged in anti-U.S. attacks more than on Latin American groups, which in 1999 accounted for ninety-six of these attacks, compared to only eleven from the Middle East (Abunimah 2001). These views allow for scapegoating.

The related theory of “Arab rage” that arose in Washington strategy circles after September 11 portrayed modern Arabs trapped in a backward society seek-ing a way out through fundamentalist movements vehemently bent on destroy-ing their Jewish and Western enemies. Accorddestroy-ing to Pentagon strategist Larry Seaquist (2002), however, “to believe that Arabs are a breed of humans some-how too primitive or Muslim society too deformed to ‘catch up’ is to enlist in bigotry, not strategy.”

Contrary to these images, presumption of Arab guilt in cases of terrorism hasn’t always borne out. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was

Arab

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initially believed to be the work of “Third World type terrorists,” as the FBI put it—most likely Arabs. (As a result of this biased speculation, at least 220 attacks were committed against Muslims and Arab Americans in the United States [Paik 2002].) One special agent, however, put together an alternative psychological pro-file: “White male, acting alone, or with one other person. . . . He’ll be angry at the government for what happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco” (Michel and Herbeck 2002, 296). Oklahoma City terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were, in fact, white Americans, and former U.S. soldiers at that.

Hollywood hasn’t done justice to the Arab, either. Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Ar-abs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People documents the production in some nine hun-dred films of the image of a dangerous, turbaned Arab hijacking airplanes and bombing buildings. According to Jad Melki (2001), the movie Rules of Engagement

“portrays Arabs as barbaric fanatic terrorists who want to kill Americans but also concludes it [is] morally permissible and even patriotic to kill Arabs—even chil-dren.” Arnaud de Borchgrave (2001) argues that the contempt for Arabs shown by Hollywood has only fueled Arabs’ fear and disdain for what is seen as America’s anti-Muslim attitudes.

After the terrorist calamities of September 2001, another set of victims—besides those who had lost their lives in the attacks on New York and Washington—

emerged in the United States. It was frequently claimed that feelings of collective identity after September 11 led to a rise in interethnic tolerance; indeed, there was a recorded rise of tolerance and even some currents of support for Arabs (and those who resembled them) who were experiencing discrimination. Attacks against Ar-abs were officially discouraged, and there was no rounding up of people of Arab descent for internment, as there was of Japanese Americans in 1941 after the Japa-nese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, in many instances, the tolerance extended to Arab Americans (the majority of whom are in fact Christian) and U.S. Mus-lims was anything but generous. The tide of intolerance was easy for them to fore-see. According to one Arab-American college student, on that tragic day, “The first thing I thought was ‘God, please don’t let them [the terrorists] be Arab.’ Once pic-tures of the suspects started to emerge, I cringed” (tolerance.org 2002).

Much as they had during the 1991 Gulf War, Arabs and Muslims suffered an outbreak of xenophobia in the form of verbal and physical assaults, harassment, and discrimination. Muslim institutions were firebombed and picketed, and the deni-grating epithet sand niggers was scribbled on walls. Those who disapproved of dis-playing sympathy for Arabs used the censuring “Arab lover” and the command

“Arabs go home!” was shouted in the streets (ironically, as some antiracist com-mentators put it, by people who couldn’t name or locate more than one Arab home-land). Racial profiling targeted Arab people—“Flying while Arab” emerged as the counterpart to “Driving while black.” Suspicion of anyone who even looked Arab also inspired murder in different American cities. Ibrahim Hooper, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “I know a Muslim man who has a Bosnian wife, and he’s sending his family back to Bosnia for safety. That should tell you some-thing” (The Nonviolent Activist 2001, 7).

Arab

15 Stereotyping, prejudice, and hostile behavior, of course, do not account for all

the problems that people of Arab descent or nationality face; some scholars and political observers prefer to locate the problems, including the alleged proclivity to violence, inside Arab countries. Granted that religious extremism and associ-ated violence are found among many other people—including Euro-Americans—

Arab extremism and Arab-inspired terrorism have seen a significant resurgence in the past couple of decades. There are different ways to attribute this, however.

Gerges (2001, 9), for example, has argued that many Arabs, caught up in an en-trenched hatred of America, however legitimate some of it may seem, have failed to take responsibility for their predicament, fostering a sense of victimization that provides ammunition to terrorist groups. On the other hand, historian Lawrence Davidson (personal communication, October 29, 2002) argues that Arab reaction is not about passing the buck: the vast majority of Arab intellectuals and activists focus foremost on their own authoritarian governments. However, because these governments are often armed and subsidized by Western powers, Arabs come to view these powers as synonymous with their governments. Still, the West tends to see in some quarters of the Arab world a people taking cover behind their suffer-ing and anger.

Many Arabs are aware of their bad image in the West. The Cairo-based Arab League held a conference after the 9-11 attacks to discuss what to do about this image. While seeking to improve relations with the outside world, they also argued that Westerners’ hatred of a whole people will cause them to lose the contribution that the Arab world can make to world civilization (Gauch 2001). Some commen-tators would say, however, that this Arab response to Western images is more de-fensive and apologetic than helpful in dispensing with Western stereotypes. See also

AYATOLLAH;BARBARIAN;BUTCHER;CRUSADE;ENEMY;FANATIC;FUNDAMENTALIST;INFIDEL;

MEDIEVAL; M^USLIM;^RAGHEAD;SUICIDE TERRORISM;^TERRORISM; T^URK.