Pride and Shame in American Politics

BOSTON -- I am writing this column Tuesday morning as Americans vote in their presidential election. Wednesday morning we should know who wins, and Americans can be proud of another quite spectacular exercise in electoral democracy. 

Nowhere else in the world does a national leadership achieve incumbency by going through such intense, sustained -- and at times silly -- scrutiny by the media, local political and social institutions, and -- most importantly of all -- daily, direct contact with the voting public. Yet, there is a dark side to American political culture that we experience alongside its wondrous aspects, which the electoral campaign exposed in all its ugliness. 

In America today, Arabs and Muslims are the last group of people that can be insulted and denigrated at will. Racism is the weak underbelly of American culture and life, the skeleton in the closet that keeps reappearing now and then in isolated incidents and occasional larger waves that roll across an embarrassed land. For all the great things we witnessed in the election, we also saw a cruel and evil slice of Americana that was manifested in attacks against Barack Obama that pointed out his real or imagined associations with Islam and Arabs.

Insinuating that Obama should be rejected because his middle name is Hussein, or because he is secretly Muslim or Arab, or because he has Arab friends like the Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi is bad enough. The worst part of this vicious and disgraceful side of American life is that very, very few people spoke up in public to say that being Arab or Muslim is not in itself an evil or a crime.

Gen. Colin Powell was the most prominent American who publicly said that being a Muslim and being an American are not contradictory. He should be commended for doing so, despite his legacy of political complicity and personal cowardice in being a useful and supporting prop for George W. Bush's wasteful and destructive war in Iraq. 

Colin Powell found his political courage late in life, but he found it, which cannot be said for most other American public figures.

When John McCain heard a supporter's concern that maybe Obama was an Arab, his sinister reply was to quickly defend Obama as a good and decent man -- not to say that being an Arab is perfectly ok and does not in itself signify anything pernicious or dangerous. McCain may have been a courageous American in war; he has proven to be a pitiful and spiteful American in politics.

His accusations against Obama's association with Rashid Khalidi are the low point of his own campaign and perhaps of modern American politics. Anyone who knows Rashid Khalidi knows him to be a respected scholar, an American citizen who has been associated with two of the very best American universities -- Chicago and Columbia -- and a tireless advocate of a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli peace that gives both peoples equal rights in adjacent states.

Rashid Khalidi's crime, it seems, is simply to have been born a Palestinian Arab, and to dare to know an American presidential candidate. Obama's crime, it seems, according to the McCain-Palin worldview, is simply to speak to Palestinians.

The deeper hurtful reality this election campaign has revealed is that Arabs and Muslims are the new Jews and Blacks in America, because they are treated today in the same way that Jews and Blacks (then called Negroes) were treated throughout the early- and mid-20th Century. 

Legal action, political agitation, and civic activism brought an end to the public vilification of Jews and Negroes in the United States -- though racism and anti-Semitism continue to operate quietly in the hearts and minds of some Americans who refuse to see all their brothers and sisters as equal before God and the law.

It is neither legally possible nor politically acceptable today to treat Jews and Blacks in a racist, condescending manner in the United States, and that is now a considerable source of pride for Americans as a whole. 

It is possible and permissible, though, to slander Arabs and Muslims in public -- even by candidates for president and vice president. The reasons for this are complex, many, and evolving (the 9/11 attacks and oil dependency, for example, added a new dimension to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, but did not create the problem).

The new president will inherit this world where racism against Arabs and Muslims is the last permissible form of wholesale slander and denigration. This must be addressed through spirited collective activism in law, politics and society, so that Arabs and Muslims, like Jews and Blacks, can live like human beings in America, not like animals that can be caricatured, hounded, herded and hunted at will. The presidential campaign confirms much that Americans can be proud of today, along with some things that still cause them real shame.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.