X, AS IN XENOPHOBIA

(This is an old entry, only slightly updated some time ago. Yet, it has by no means lost its currency, as the subject is increasingly turning itself into a runaway train.)

Is American society, which has always been so proud of its ethnic and racial diversity, becoming an actual Generation X, in the sense of developing a severe case of Xenophobia? “Congratulations” to the inciters of interracial hatred: they seem to have succeeded!... There is no more place for bearded Imams on board America’s glorious airliners… An Arab student at the UCLA, falling into the misfortune of walking into the University library without his ID, gets himself tazered… Then, there is a deadly shooting at a Sikh temple in the state of Wisconsin, where the killer may have mistaken her victims for Moslems, or, perhaps, didn’t even care who they were, as long as they did not look American… Et cetera, et cetera…

I am reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s Richard III, where the hapless Duke of Clarence finds himself being sent to the Tower “because his name is George!” Change his name to Abdullah, place him in today’s America at some public place, outside his “ghetto,” and the obscene similarity between these two situations is no longer ridiculous, but genuinely frightening, as an omen of things to come.

Incidentally, how would the different-looking Hasidic rabbis and their bearded flocks feel when a paranoid American public might fail to recognize and promptly acknowledge the difference between an Ultra-Orthodox Jew and a practicing Moslem and will start sending “the good guys” off the planes in handcuffs? And, which is not altogether too farfetched, what about America’s own version of Kristallnacht, as a result of mistaken identity?

Why don’t all those “arsonists of human firestorms” (quoting Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev) think about it? Especially with regard to a situation where the last-mentioned calamity should start targeting victims for their distinctive identity by no mistake at all?

The ongoing “war of civilizations” is already having a huge and morbid effect in two directions. One is domestic, as the level of violence inside America has reached unconscionable proportions, deadly shootings and mayhem becoming a virtually daily occurrence. I attribute this surge of senseless violence to the pervasive climate of permissible violence, as the public has become dangerously desensitized to the concept of war, and particularly of war of choice, as most of the international bloodshed of the last ten years, involving the military might of the United States on a continuous basis, has had little or nothing to do with the tragedy of 9/11 more than a decade ago, or with al Qaeda as such. The fact that the non-stop war has been devoid of all constructive meaning must be terribly demoralizing to the best and the brightest of the American Army, while encouraging the murderous instinct among its worst, which all comes back to American soil on troop rotation, and somehow infects the more susceptible exceptions among the civilian population.

On the other hand, the international situation does not get any better, but much worse, after all this effort, and after the terrible expenses of blood and treasure. With all those paranoidally high levels of xenophobia in American society of today, how can the nation at all develop even a semblance of what is essential to an operational foreign policy: sensitivity and understanding of what the world of those others--- such as a billion-plus Moslems, and yet another five billion of others, who are not “US”--- is all about?