Hatred of Arabs Is So Commonplace, It Usually Goes Unnoticed

http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=285

(YellowTimes.org) – He wasn't in the mood for dialogue. I
understood this even before opening his message, whose
subject line couldn't have been clearer: "Burn in hell, fucker," the same line he used
to close the diatribe contained therein. I realize I shouldn't have even opened the
message, but by now I am used to violent responses to my essays; in some
perverse, probably egotistical way, I enjoy reading furious letters sent by Zionist
taskmasters.

Having published columns in major American newspapers with my email address in
the tagline, I receive a steady outpouring of invective, most of it directed at my
unsuspecting parents. One hard drive and much less naiveté later, I learned never
to open attachments. (The casual reader might be shocked to know how many
viruses reach the inboxes of pro-justice - i.e., pro-Palestinian - columnists.) Yet I
cannot resist the temptation to read the messages.

Perhaps I read them because they reaffirm my sense of values and my decision to
dedicate my life to activity on behalf of Palestine. Out of curiosity, I replied to the
fellow cited above, thanking him for taking the time to write and explaining that
there is no need for such vitriol. "Even the most ill-mannered among Palestine's
supporters would never write such things," I noted. "I hope all the Palestinians
die," he responded.

There is something magnificent in this type of brutal clarity. Reading it brings
knowledge that, indeed, anti-colonialists - i.e., anti-Sharonists - are dealing not
with a complex political quandary involving two peoples with competing moral
claims, but rather with a trenchant example of ethnic cleansing replete with the
particular sort of hatred that colonization induces.

Thus the reaffirmation that activists sometimes seek: We know, when we are told
to burn in hell by people who couldn't identify us in a crowd of five, that the
speaker is doomed to the dogmatism of his ignorance and invokes violence as a
defense mechanism that shields him from confronting his complicity in unspeakable
horror.

We know that desegregationists were told the same thing. We know that
suffragettes were told the same thing. We know that abolitionists were told the
same thing. More important, we know that anybody in the world engaged in any
form of decolonization - be it sexual, psychological, geographic, economic,
environmental - is told the same thing.

And, of course, there is a wonderful irony here: If the religious dogmatism guiding
these sentiments turns out to be true, then its adherents are the ones who will
burn in hell.

But at play is also something disquieting and heartbreaking. Yes, there is
something reaffirming, even comforting, about learning firsthand how colonialism
transforms humans into hateful and defensive vanguards of ethnic cleansing,
people who embrace extremism as epistemology and refuse to - nay, cannot -
accept anything outside their narrowly defined ideology. Walter Rodney suggested
years ago that colonialism damages the colonial society more than the colonized.
Anybody who has dealt with dedicated American Zionists knows Rodney was right.

Yet the extremism about which I speak isn't actually extreme, at least not in the
customary definition of the word. The man who wishes all Palestinians would die is
better embraced by American analysts than those who argue in favor of
international law (i.e., against Israel's occupation and in support of the right to
return). With minor variations, decorated commentators George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, William Safire, and scores of others say the same thing. They are, in
short, odious folk who both applaud and support the dispossession and
destruction of an indigenous people.

Inscribed in their sort of consciousness is a sense of duty larger than the individual
or the society itself: a religious duty to fulfill scripture, a social duty to undertake a
civilizing mission, a personal duty to transform liturgy to sociology. Historically, as
Zionists illustrate, leaders have turned to God when support for the colonial
mission is outside the possibility of political narratives. Underlying that strategy is a
reliance on biblical achievement to couch or excuse brutal behavior. The biblical
aspect of settler colonialism generally is considered to be a function of society's
extremist elements. Although the sentiments expressed by, say, Cal Thomas and
his ilk certainly can be attributed to religious extremism, I would like to suggest
that they are integral to the colonial errand, and that the colonial errand would fail
miserably without them.

That is to say, the relegation of religious extremism to the margin underestimates
the extent to which the colonial regime - whether or not it purports to be secular -
relies on its existence, to say nothing of its underpinnings. Even while Americanism
and Zionism ascribe themselves with modern ideals of democratic enlightenment,
they draw tacitly from and encourage the articulation of biblical ideals. Ethnic
cleansing is not an appropriate human activity unless a deity sanctions such an act.
Ethnic cleansing, in other words, cannot be undertaken successfully without
extremism, for democracy and enlightenment are the opposite of imperialism and
ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is allowed to occur from within a democratic and
enlightened rubric only when democracy and enlightenment are endowed with
extremist features that displace the meaning of the terms and inject them with
ordinances supposedly outside of human control.

Extremism, then, in the sense that something "extreme" is outside the parameters
of any group's shared ethos, is little more than an oxymoronic PR ploy in Zionism.
In colonial situations, the center defines the extreme in order that the center's own
extremist positions can be concealed behind diplomacy and thus validated under
the guise of progress or rationality. Its underlying ethics are articulated by those it
comes to define as extreme.

What does all this mean? It means that those who write me and wish death on my
parents should not be considered maniacs on the fringe of respectable society;
they are in fact the clearest manifestation of respectable society. They are 500
years of American genocide laid bare in my inbox. They are 400 years of slavery
condensed to four sentences. They are Israeli ethnic cleansing transposed into
crude statements, and one cannot help but to compare the viral attachments with
settlers.

This is why it is important to abandon the conventions of public discourse that so
often leave us ineffectual. We need do little more than seek the truth and speak
the truth. To hell with the experts who bristle at our lack of objectivity. And to hell
with the academics who deride our intellectual sophistry. Only when they give of
themselves to Palestine are they worth hearing. We have no reason to allow
anybody to enfeeble us and circumscribe our stories. That has happened for too
long. Our truths are all we have, so let us speak them.

If I am to travel to Palestine and collect stories to share with Americans, then it is
precisely those stories that I need to tell, rather than transforming them into weak
discourse superimposed with American fantasies. I am not interested in speaking in
a way that leaves American comfort unchallenged, which is exactly what
"objectivity" has often come to mean, as has, no less, much of the American
Academy.

And if, in the process, Zionists get angry? So what? Let them. It is not we who
dispossessed millions, destroyed homes, bulldozed orchards, shot infants,
imprisoned children, occupied civilians, stole billions, and then denied it all. It is not
we who installed checkpoints and watchtowers to protect squatting bigots, and
then cast ourselves in the role of victim. It is not we who need to justify. We have
things other than anger.

Yes, let them get angry, and let them write to us in fits of hate. That anger and
hate only reaffirm the potency of our truths and stories. Our marginality is our most
important asset, for only in entering the mainstream will we be become our enemy,
the extremist.

[Steven Salaita is completing an English doctorate at the University of Oklahoma, with
emphasis on Native, Palestinian, and Arab American literatures. A West Virginian with
Palestinian and Jordanian parents, he splits his time between the United States and
the Middle East.]

Steven Salaita encourages your comments: ssalaita [at] YellowTimes.org

http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=285