Dave Kersting: Popular Anti-Arab Racism- it's so commonplace, few even think of it as hate

someone wrote:
> The US
> has a long history in recent years of vilifying and demonizing Islam,
> particularly Arab culture, in ways that have nothing to do with Israel
> or its interests.


Dave Kersting replies:

It is inconceivable that US prejudice against Arabs and Muslims can be distinguished from the Zionist anti-Arab hate speech, political-cartoon caricatures, and movie stereotypes that have flooded our society for the past thirty years at least. If this has become more generalized lately, it is only a sign of Zionist success and progressive/US-Palestinian lethargy. I have never found a negative image of Arabs - in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, or '90s that was NOT directly related to Zionist propaganda and stereotypes. That racism was unique in America, and it was just one sign of Zionist subversion of progressive or liberal thought in the US. It was inevitable that such long-simmering racism - just as open and obvious as the wrong of a "Jewish" state forced into Palestine - would bloom into full-fledged ethnic-profiling and other "Patriot Act" regressions. What we see today is just the result of decades of gradual conditioning toward anti-Arab racism. For example, when I arrived on the UC Berkeley campus in 1980 I was appalled to discover openly racist statements about "Arabs," "the Arabs," "the Arab nations," and "the Arab world" on the information-tables of The Jewish Student Board and Hillel Students. I came from Wisconsin, which just happens to have a state law against negative racist stereotyping - clearly defined and described. So racist wordings are avoided by one and all. But California has no such law, and pamphlets and leaflets which would be illegal in Wisconsin were (and probably still are) quite common in Berkeley. Naturally, no individual or group has had the sense to exploit the massive public-relations windfall this offers against Zionism. The American Zionist Association and the World Zionist Organization apparently understand this, because their openly racist works have been all over the Jewish tables in Berkeley, though they were never seen in Wisconsin (not while I was there anyway).

Most interesting was the fact that no one seemed to notice or care. The Zionists had fully succeeded in making it seem as though racism against "the Arabs" was somehow not the same as identical racism against "the Asians" or "the Latinos," or "the whites," or "the blacks," or (of course) "the Jews." When I first saw that stuff I thought it was great to see that the Zionists were sticking their necks so deep into the noose - making their racism so obvious - but I soon discovered that no one, certainly not the leftists or the Palestinians, had any idea what a windfall of political advantage this offered. All were mainly determined to deny that anyone could notice anything significant that they themselves had overlooked.

I collected a thick folder of this stuff, and finally I took it to the Student Association (which funds those student groups and provides table-space), and I asked if they did not have some rule against funding openly racist organizations or literature. They said they certainly did. I asked how they define racist speech, and they said they don't know. (Here is where having a state law helps with the wording.) Another question or two produced the reply "We know it when we see it." I asked "WHO knows it? Who is the person who makes such rulings?" They said I should talk to the budget director - the one who writes the checks. Fine. Pass the buck to him. So I went and read my stuff to him - but first I told him that I did not want to carry this too far, right away, so I would not reveal the target ethnicity: I would just substitute words for random ethnicities. After I had read about three or four of the anti-Arab comments (as anti-black, anti-Chinese, anti-white), the guy told me that this could not possibly be found on the Berkeley campus: it was openly racist, and would not be allowed, so what was my point? I had at least a hundred similar comments about "Arabs." I presented all this information to various leftist student groups and the General Union of Palestinian Students, and all I got was a lot of blather. No one could comprehend anything with "victory" in it. I even took a survey course in the Sociology Department, and I did my final "survey project" on this issue. Students in Sproul Plaza were asked to rate the degree of racism in various comments, in which the ethnicity would be random and incidental. The survey showed that comments which named "Arabs," would be rated as far less racist than identical comments naming other ethnicities. It simply fit the pattern.

I could go on and on with evidence. The fact is that Zionism has placed a huge and fatal hole in the progress we all thought we were making on the issue of racism in general. It is utterly no surprise at all that, when ethnic profiling made its big comeback, the first target ethnicity is Middle Eastern types. Our taxes have been freely murdering "the Arabs" without protest from anyone (except a few very lonely individuals), all our lives. When, in all our egalitarianism, we are taught to make an exception for one particular ethnicity, we are being taught a most insidious kind of racism - racism in the guise of egalitarianism, albeit with one "natural" exception. The whole concept of equality is negated, even as the word is held in sacred esteem.

There is no way that any "current" anti-Arab or anti-Muslim prejudice can be NOT deeply infused with that long-standing Zionist-led racism against "the Arabs."