‘Racism is man’s gravest threat to man — the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason”, wrote the late Abraham Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian of the 20th century.
I was reminded of that observation — its cogency so telling in today’s populist America — as more and more progressive Jews and Muslims in the United States have, while momentarily setting aside their differences over the Israel-Palestine issue, increasingly banded together to confront what may “come next”. Indeed, a harbinger of what may come next is already evident in the spate of hate crimes against Muslim Americans, as it is equally evident in US President-elect Donald Trump’s ominous threats, not only to make good on his promise to bar Muslims from entering the country, but to order those already there as American citizens to “register”.
Last Sunday, a group that met at Drew University in New Jersey, calling itself the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, with 50 chapters in more than 20 US states, brought together 500 Muslim and Jewish women, many wearing hijabs and skullcaps, to share stories about hate crimes — from bricks thrown in through the windows of Muslim homes to swastikas scrawled on synagogues.
“Ignorance is one of the key triggers of hate”, the New York Times quoted Sheryl Olitzky, the group’s executive director, as saying in her opening remarks. “We need to show the world that we are Americans. We are here because we love each other and we are overcoming hate.” And the Jewish members pledged that if Muslims were made to register, then they all would register. Even Jonathan Greenblat, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, had said in a recent interview that “Jews know what it means to be identified and tagged, to be registered”.
Earlier, at his organisation’s conference in Manhattan in November, Greenblat received a standing ovation when he declared that if Muslims were ever forced to register, “that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim”.
The threat of discrimination and hate crimes against Muslim Americans is all too real, but it also was made all too mundane, not only by Trump’s rhetoric during the presidential campaign, but also by people like Michael T. Flynn, the president-elect’s choice for national security adviser — a man destined to play one of the most powerful roles in shaping American domestic and foreign policy, who considers Islam a “cult” and a “malignant cancer” whose ‘law’ is already spreading far and wide in the US.
With that kind of demonisation as a backdrop, hate crimes against Muslims need only be triggered, if not directly then subliminally. Last Monday, a day after the Sisterhood conference, a man shoved a female New York City Transit Authority worker, who wore a hijab, down a staircase in Manhattan, screaming that she was a “terrorist”, while two days earlier another man threatened an off-duty policewoman, who also was wearing a hijab, with his pit bull, telling her and her son to “go back to your country”. It is unclear where the two women, who were born in the US, were exactly expected to go had they followed the instructions.
In today’s America, anti-Semitism is rejected by clear majorities of Americans, who have long since come to recognise the Jewish community’s enormous contribution to American culture, in literature, theatre, cinematic art, media, music and the sciences. But Jewish Americans, certainly those in touch with their history, also recall how the roughly two million Jewish immigrants who had arrived in the US from eastern Europe between 1900 and 1924 — many of them fleeing pogroms — had suffered blatant discrimination up till the end of the first half of the 20th century, in employment, enrolment in colleges, social advancement and even admission to social clubs.
Just as, in short, Muslim immigration began to swell in the 1960s, prompting all manner of nativist responses, so had Jewish immigration triggered the development of an image of the Jew as ‘the other’ — conspirator, radical, anarchist — imbued with a penchant for “financial exploitation”.
The Devil, with whom Trump and his cohorts have made a pact to spread Islamophobic and other forms of racism in American society, will be lurking around the corner at noon on January 20, when Trump occupies the White House as the 45th President of America, asking for his fee to be paid.
Yes, we’re ready for what will come next. America, in and at its core, is stronger than Trumpism and the populist wave that has brought him to power. And yes, it is also true that America has always discriminated against newly-arrived immigrants. What Irish American, for example, will forget how his or her ancestors, who arrived in the New World to escape the potato famine in their nation around the 1840s, were so reviled that signs warning that “No Irish Need Apply” did not begin to get pulled down till the turn of the century?
What Catholic American — whether Italian, German or Polish — will forget the excesses of the odious Know Nothing Party, around the same time, agitating to bar Catholics from entering the country? What Japanese American will forget the prison camps where their families were interned during the Second War World? And, on another level, what intellectual will forget how many writers, filmmakers, theoreticians and journalists had their careers destroyed in the 1950s at the hands of the bullies from the House Un-American Activities Committee?
But America always rebounds. America always ends up having its day and the bigots their eclipse. The polity is more resilient, given the inherent strengths built into its constitutional system, than those who will occupy the White House in less than two months from now.
And, no, progressive Americans, disheartened by the recent turn of events in their country, will not emigrate, as you have heard many of them tell you mock-seriously, to Canada — a country always welcoming of angry deracines. We’re Americans and we will deal, along with other like-minded fellow Americans, with the challenges of what will come next.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
