Ta-Nehisi Coates' The 'High-Tech Lynching' of Juan Williams (best line: Prejudice is not wrong because it is uncivil, impolite or unsympathetic. It is wrong because it is weak thinking.)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
NPR and Juan Williams
Juan Williams' losing his job, like the Cordoba House proposal, would be a non-story, except for the reaction it provoked. The right was outraged, and even the moderate consensus seemed to be that NPR shot itself in the foot by firing Williams. While I realize that the issue has pretty much lost its currency, I offer two comments which swim against the tide.
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I feel pretty conflicted about this-- on one hand Juan Williams is pretty dumb for being scared to fly with someone dressed in Muslim garb, because, as Jeffery Goldberg said:
'There are roughly 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Of these 1.3 billion Muslims, it is my belief that only several thousand, or at most, several tens of thousands, are directly involved in Islamist terrorism. Therefore, the chance that a Muslim in any given airport is a terrorist is very small. I also don't believe that al-Qaeda and like-minded groups and individuals are targeting air travel, because they did that already (this is one of the reasons I think the TSA represents a misapplication of government resources). I also don't believe that I would be able to identify a terrorist on my flight, or in the waiting area of an airport. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I had been seated next to Muhammad Atta on September 11th, 2001, I would have engaged him in conversation (because that is, alas, what I do) and, if he had responded, I would have spent the time before he cut my throat asking him about various restaurants in Cairo that I have enjoyed very much.
So, no, I don't worry about Muslims I see in airports. I do worry, like most people, about Islamist violence in this age of the super-empowered terrorist (and I do worry, as I have said before, about attacks on pre-security areas of airports), but I don't assume for a second that any individual Muslim on my radar screen is a terrorist.'
On the more abstract, princple level, I really don't like that it may prevent people from voicing widely-held fears. Why? Because without being able to talk about being afraid of Muslim garb, no one will be able to argue against them and disabuse them of their irrationality. I do accept that as a news analyst and not an opinion journalist, Williams is held to a different standard.
Also, really enjoyed Ross Douthat's column on this whole thing.
Is it just me or does the anti-Muslim rhetoric sound an awful lot like the same language of bigotry we’ve heard targeted at other groups. We even have people like Bill Maher who, after noting that Mohammed was the most popular baby name in the United Kingdom, made the following comments:
"Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that? Because I am. And it’s not because of the race; it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years? ... I should be alarmed, and I don't apologize for it."
These are lunatic, paranoid charges in my view. Maher didn’t mention that Muslims currently make up just 4.6 percent of the population of the U.K.
For some reason, people feel this need to pick out some purely evil group to blame their problems on. Remember, the insidious gay agenda? The Communist menace? As Glen Greenwald said in an article in Salon, “Nothing is easier, or more common, or more valuable, than inducing people to believe that one discrete minority group is filled with unique Evil, poses some serious menace to their Safety, and must be stopped at all costs.” He went on to say, “ ‘The Muslims’ are currently the premier, featured threat which serves that purpose, following in the footsteps of the American-Japanese, the Communists, the Welfare-Stealing Racial Minorities, the Gays, and the Illegal Immigrants.”
My problem is that there is a total disconnect between my own personal experience of Muslims and the rhetoric. I realize that anecdotal evidence is the weakest sort of evidence, but how does the Hitchens’ crowd account for the Muslim Pakistani physician who on his own initiative took a comprehensive look at Sue’s father’s medical care, and discovered that several of his most serious symptoms were being caused by drug interactions, all prescribed by specialists who had no idea what other drugs he was taking. Once his medication got straightened out, his condition improved considerably. Sue’s dad’s prior “Christian” physician never bothered to check.
And how does Harris account for the Muslim Imam from Morocco, who happened to be a client of mine and who also was as decent a fellow as anybody else I’ve ever known. He seemed genuinely pleased by my efforts to learn certain Arabic words and phrases (something I had to do for trial) and made clear to me his rejection of Salafism, which he saw as too narrow interpretation of Islam. And, by the way, seeing Kareem Abdul Jabbar as the co-pilot in the movie Airplane! did not fill me with fear and trepidation.
Mostly, it’s the ordinariness of Muslims I've known that I want to emphasize. They struck me as no more cause for alarm than Mr. Rogers.
It bothers me that smart people like Hitchens and Harris play on the current paranoia as a way to get their foot in the door to make a point about religion in general. Maybe they think that their cause is sufficiently righteous that the resulting abuse of and discrimination against a few Muslims is worth the cost. But, one thing is sure, when people start declaring 1.3 billion people as some uniquely evil group, you can pretty much ignore anything else they have to say.
Is it reasonable to fear Muslims in the United States? No, I don't think so. As I've previously said, the odds of encountering a radicalized Muslim is slim, much lower than being in a car accident or being bit by a snake.
Is it reasonable to fear the types of things written in the Koran? Yes, I think so. I think it's uncontroversial to be very wary of some of its commands (and this goes for the Bible and Torah as well). I'm not going to respect a book, no matter how ancient, no matter how widely believed and venerated, which contains instructions to kill or convert unbelievers. Or insists that women are a lower class of person. These are not, and will never be, stances that I agree with or respect.
Now, does that mean I consider all Muslims to be literalists about the Koran? Of course not. Does this suddenly make all 1.3 billion Muslims villainous? Of course not. As you've said, it'd be the height of ignorance to paint 1.3 billion people with so broad a brush. This is a distinction that Hitchens consistently makes-- often in the other direction, lamenting the fact that Westerners tend consider as representative of Islam the opinions of conservative Muslim clerics and diplomats, rather than those of Islamic poets or authors or dissidents.
In fact, as is often pointed out, those most oppressed and terrorized globally by Muslim extremists are not Westerners, but other Muslims. Hitchens has, in the past, called for the intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia when right-wing Orthodox Christians and Catholics were "ethnically cleansing" entire swaths of Serbia. ("Ethnic cleansing," along "collateral damage", takes the cake for biggest distance between the pleasant-sounding euphemism and its actual gruesome meaning). He has advocated on behalf of Muslim Iranians who took part in the Green Revolution, and for Lebanese Muslims who fear the influence of Hezbollah. He agitates now on behalf of Muslim poets and journalists threatened with death by Iran's reactionary mullahs. These few examples are just off the top of my head.
That's why Hitchens has very similar anecdotes about amazing Muslim friends and intellectuals he's met in his travels, because it's not a contradiction respect the person, but not his or her religious beliefs.
Maher made this distinction too: religious affiliation is not the same thing as ethnicity-- it is a set of ideas. It is an ideology like any other that purports to have the truth about the way the world works and, as such, should be open to the same sorts of criticisms that are levelled at other ideologies-- communism, fascism, Marxism, free-market capitalism, etc. It's often taboo to criticize religion in this way, but it shouldn't be.
Being gay, or black, or Japanese, or female, or Mexican on the other hand, are not choices. They are not ideas or ideologies. To criticize someone for an immutable characteristic is bigotry and racism. To criticize someone's beliefs is not.
Now, whether or not you feel the amount of criticism levelled at religion is fair is another matter (in Maher's case, he's been on record bashing all religions)- but I don't really feel it's comparable in quite the same way to the historical moral/racial panics you cited.
For the record, I do agree with you that it's quite a bit over the top to fear Sharia law replacing the Constitution.
"As I've previously said, the odds of encountering a radicalized Muslim is slim, much lower than being in a car accident or being bit by a snake. "
Now you're picking on another misunderstood group, namely snakes. We are not a meal for a venomous snake. A snake bites a person only as a means of self-defense against a suspected predator. And so, most snake bites are people's own damn fault. Approximately 40 percent of all snakebites occur in people who are handling or playing with snakes, and 40 percent of all people bitten had a blood alcohol level of greater than 0.1 percent. Sixty-five percent of snakebites occur on the hand or fingers. Sankes will mostly do what they can to avoid you.
Even so, in the United States, only about 12 people a year die from snakebites. The estimated chances of dying from a snakebite in the outdoors is approximately 1:10 million.
I don't know which is greater: the risk of dying at the hands of a radicalized Muslim or from a venomous snake. Both are pretty slim.
According to the The McClatchy News Blog: Nukes and Spooks: "There were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide (in 2009). ... undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." And, by the way, in the same year, well over half of all victims of terrorism were Muslim.
just think how incredibly great the security of U.S. citizens would be if we had spent all the Iraq and Afghanistan war money, as well as that spent on snake bite research, on traffic safety.
I chose a very confusing comparison. The odds of dying from a bite is low, but the odds of being bitten are comparatively pretty high, at least according to UF Department of Wildlife:
"The chances of being bitten by a venomous snake in the United States are very low, and the chance of death is virtually nonexistent, particularly given the availability and quality of medical care in the U.S. Approximately one out of 37,500 people are bitten by venomous snakes in the U.S. each year (7-8,000 bites per year) and only one out of 50 million people will die from snakebite. (5-6 fatalities a year)
So, it seems that the odds of being killed by a Muslim radical (based on 2009 numbers) falls somewhere in between "dying from a snakebite" and "being bit by a snake". This is what happens when I play fast and loose with my statistical analogies.
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