Now that the election is over, I want to apologize to my Muslim and Arab-American friends, colleagues, and fellow-citizens for not publicly expressing my outrage at the virulent Arab- and Muslim-bashing in which the Republicans were engaged. When The Times contacted me to ask if I would write a series of three “postcards” about how the election was progressing in my then-swing-stage, Michigan, my first thought was to drive to Dearborn to see how the visitors and staff at the new Arab-American National Museum might feel about the possibility of a man named Barack Hussein Obama becoming our next president.
I had been meaning to visit the museum anyway, and I wasn’t disappointed. The exhibits are welcoming and inclusive, the blue-tiled space peaceful and refreshing, with the whisper of a fountain murmuring in the background, ghostly voices describing their experiences at Ellis Island, and the beneficent visage of Danny Thomas smiling down on everyone.
Sadly, I had forgotten that we were still in the month of Ramadan, and the only Arab-American I could find to ask about the election was the beautiful sloe-eyed teen girl behind the front desk. Oh, she said, everyone was excited about Obama. It was just that people were afraid to say so.
Sure enough, when the museum closed and Marian and I got back in his Explorer and drove around Dearborn, we didn’t see a single Obama sign. The neighborhood, which sits almost literally in the shadow of the towers of River Rouge, used to be mostly Polish. Now, little girls in headscarves play on the tiny lawns of the well-kept cottages, and the names of the real estate brokers on the For Sale signs are as likely to imply Arab ancestry as to end in “ski.” But the neighborhood would have resembled any middle-class neighborhood in America … if not for the complete absence of signs expressing the political preferences of the people who lived there.
After parking beside a Dodge dealership with a giant sculpture of ram bursting through its walls like the bizarre idol of some pre-Mosaic sect, we walked to the Middle Eastern restaurant the girl behind the desk at the museum had recommended. We felt guilty to be ordering food from a waitress who hadn’t eaten a thing all day (she laughed and said she was so far beyond hunger that food didn’t even tempt her), but the lack of a crowd enabled us to ask the owner what he thought about the campaign.
Here’s what I originally wrote for my second op-ed piece in The Times, the one about the Banana Festival at that Polish church on the east side of Detroit. The editor needed to cut it for reasons of space, but I could have chosen to focus the entire piece about the Arab-American vote in Dearborn instead of the Polish-American vote in the suburbs.
“Most people also underestimate Obama’s support among the 400,000 Arab-American voters in the Detroit area. A few weeks ago, my friend Marian and I stopped to eat in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn. The owner, a short, slight man with a demeanor as sweet as baklava, took a break from preparing for the post-Ramadan rush to tell me that his community has lived in fear since 9/11, a fear that prevents them from putting posters in their windows or expressing their views to pollsters.
“‘Even if you do the right thing, it might be the wrong thing. If one of those guys running for office is even the slightest bit associated with the wrong group …’ He turned his thumb down and frowned. He was going to vote, though, wasn’t he? ‘Oh, yes!’ he said, pulling himself to full height. ‘I have lived in this country more than thirty years! I always, always vote!'”
Hearing what the restaurant owner said, I felt horrified and ashamed that I lived in a country where many of my fellow citizens felt too frightened to tell a reporter how they might vote in an upcoming election for fear of retaliation to themselves and retribution to their candidate. It was as if I were listening to a broadcast from a country so backward that the BBC reporter needed to disguise his subjects’ identities to protect them from their neighbors or government-sponsored thugs. And that was before Sarah Palin’s rallies started getting so out-of-hand, with angry, ugly mobs shouting about “dirty Arabs” on YouTube vidoes that made me understand how the fascists had gained their foothold in Nazi Germany.
Later, as the sun began to set and the restaurant filled up with women stopping by to pick up take-out for their families, or the families themselves, moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, babies, teenagers, uncles, aunts, and cousins, the television in the dining room was switched to an Arab-speaking station. I’m sure I could have found something to argue about with the patrons. But the truth is, I’ve never had an argument about Middle-Eastern politics with any of my Muslim or Arab-American students, colleagues, or friends in Ann Arbor.
Maybe we’re all just so polite we avoid revealing our true feelings on the subject. But most people I know think that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have at least some right on their side, if in differing proportions, and we agree that both sides often act against their own interests, or the interests of a lasting and equitable peace. I teach stories, novels, and essays that are written by Arabs, Arab Americans, American Jews, and Israelis in classes where the students are Arabs, Arab Americans, American Jews, and Israelis (mixed with plenty of other nationalities and ethnicities). Just last semester, I taught a seminar in which an Israeli-born poet put up for workshop an essay about the complexities of her Zionist past and a fiction writer of Palestinian descent wrote about everything her family had lost when Israel was created and the terrors her family had experienced in America when her brother got picked up and jailed and threatened with deportation over a stupid bureaucratic error.
I might have said that in The Times, but I could already hear the sneering readers who would label me a goo-goo far-left idealist living in my PC college town. How could I be a real Jew, belonging as I do to a temple so reform it shares its premises with a church? I wanted to publish a conversation I’d had with my rabbi a few weeks earlier about the reasons an Obama presidency would be good for the Jews and Israel. (In Israel, he said, the two-state solution is the moderate, centrist view; only in America is advocacy of a Palestinian state a radical position.) But my rabbi is the kind of religious leader who has been known to dress up in a bathing suit and floaties to read the Megillah on Purim, and I was afraid that his opinions would carry less weight than the angry denunciations of all those taller, heftier, more portentous and pretentious suit-and-tie rabbis who profess to represent Jewish interests in America.
In truth, the people I tend to fight with in Ann Arbor aren’t Muslims or Arabs but Jews and Christians on the far left, who picket the conservative synagogue in our town (that’s right, Jews picketing other Jews as they go in to their house of worship to pray or celebrate a wedding or bar mitzvah) or who show up at rallies whose purpose is to protest the war in Iraq and wave signs that say WHAT HAS ISRAEL DONE FOR PEACE, a question that might not drive me crazy if it were accompanied by signs that asked: WHAT HAS RUSSIA DONE FOR PEACE, WHAT HAS NORTH KOREA DONE FOR PEACE, or WHAT HAS IRAN/SOMALIA/SYRIA/THE CONGO DONE FOR PEACE, and Jews on the far right, who can’t seem to accept that Palestinians have also gotten screwed by history and deserve to live normal lives in a state of their own governance.
My worst experience as regards the recent presidential campaign was receiving a call from an organization that purported to be conducting an objective poll and then gradually realizing that the “pollster” wasn’t interested in anything except insinuating poisonous lies about Barack Obama in my ear. My antennae should have gone up when the pollster asked if I identified myself as Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform (those antennae being lodged right beside the horns that a charming young man from Tennessee once asked if he could see, now that we’d progressed from a first date to a second). How did the caller even know that I was a Jew? And why did she care?
Still, I went on answering questions until the “pollster” asked if I would change my opinion of Barack Obama if I learned that he was affiliated with Hamas, if I knew that he had worked closely with terrorists in Chicago, and so on. I felt the way a person feels if she has been lured into talking to a caller whose intentions turn out to be obscene. At first, I assumed that conservative Christian Republicans were conducting these crude and offensive “push polls” to persuade naïve Jewish voters not to vote for Obama. But when I called Obama headquarters to report the tactic, I was told that these “push polls” were being conducted by a conservative Jewish group in New York. It was like finding out that the obscene phone call you’d just received had been placed by a member of your own family.
So why didn’t I write an op-ed piece in which I denounced the scare tactics of rightwing Jews and urged everyone to stop bashing Muslims and Arab-Americans? The safe answer is that the need to convince Jews and Christian moderates to vote for Obama became less urgent when McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, dooming the ticket with Jews who otherwise might have voted for McCain based solely on their (mis)perception that the Republicans were stronger in their support for Israel. My neighbors’ parents in the middle-class Jewish suburbs of Detroit told me that they were even more afraid of Palin than Obama, that her far-right fundamentalism would be “bad news” for the Jews. And the Episcopalian priest whose congregation shares the churchagogue with my temple assured me that even the Republican members of his congregation, many of whom admired John McCain, were “repelled” by Sarah Palin and her “harsh anti-gay and lesbian and anti-environmental stances” and by the “scapegoating of vulnerable minorities in the US or abroad,” most especially “Muslims Americans in Michigan and elsewhere.”
But I also allowed myself to be silenced by the voices in my head that kept whispering that even to raise the specter of Arab and Muslim support for Obama would be to create problems for his candidacy, or that if I wrote an op-ed piece supporting the rights of Arab and Muslim voters, I was sure to get mail from fellow Jews, demanding to know if I was really so naïve as to think that those same Arabs and Muslims would ever denounce the violence on the part of the Palestinians (which many of my friends and colleagues have done) or, if the positions were reversed, would speak up on our behalf (as if our speaking up for others doesn’t create a climate in which everyone speaks up for everyone else). Looking back, I can’t believe that I let those insidious voices in my head prevent me from standing up for my friends and fellow-citizens, and for that, I ask forgiveness.
One other apology, this one to my lesbian and gay relatives and friends. I didn’t pay enough attention to gay rights in this campaign. I kept thinking that gays and lesbians should hold their peace until after the election, not ask for too much (for now), just be happy that we might finally end up with a president who isn’t hateful toward homosexuals, who advocates same-sex civil unions. But asking people to wait to achieve their civil rights and be recognized as fully human is never fair. I remember the time a friend who’s disabled told me that many people think she should be happy to be alive and not agitate for the right to gain access to restaurants or hotels or to receive the medical and social support she might need to be able to bear and raise a child. I didn’t tell her that before I’d become her friend, I might have thought the same thing. In fact, none of us should be content unless everyone in the country has the right to go out to a restaurant for a meal, to marry the person he or she loves, to bear or adopt a child, to be covered by his or her partner’s insurance or to visit him or her in the hospital.
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