Tuning in tolerance
Thursday, July 10, 2008
PUBLIC RELATIONS INITIATIVES in US foreign policy rarely get high grades in this column. But I learn that the reputedly culture-loving American Ambassador in London, Robert Holmes Tuttle, pulled off a notable coup for the Fourth of July. It went under-acknowledged in his homeland's media, however.
How under-acknowledged? Exactly zero US press outlets reported that the enterprising envoy hosted in his opulent Regents Park residence a well-attended performance by the engaging Kareem Salama, who’s a Muslim American - and a country singer.
Indeed Salama (pictured far left) who was born in Oklahoma to Egyptian immigrants and now lives in Texas, is probably America’s first, and certainly its leading Muslim country-and-western entertainer.
He grew up adhering to Islam, as he still does, but he was also exposed - by open-minded parents, it seems - to bluegrass music, local cowboy rodeos and the Grand Ole Opry (Salama at a tenderfoot age, pictured center).
As a Muslim with what he himself calls “family values”, he claims to sense no contradiction with what many see as the redneck ethos to be found in much country music. But he did take notable, public exception to his fellow-Okie Toby Keith’s offensive post-9/11 war-cry Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue (with its infantile line “we'll put a boot in your ass - it's the American way”). And he’s a huge fan of The Dixie Chicks, whose anti-Iraq War stance (- as documented in THE MEDIA BEAT) provoked so much apoplectic fury in the right-leaning country music establishment.
But he’s definitely more a poet than an activist. He says his earliest steps toward musicianship came when he was trying in his teens to memorize the metaphysical poet John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. As a mnemonic he employed a device common to classical Arabic poetry, fitting the words to a recurring melody. He did the same with other favorite English poems like Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, and soon he was writing music and lyrics of his own. The compositions came out - because of his upbringing, he says - “with a twang”. You can perhaps sample his diverse creative influences in a video-ed song (the images are not his, but a fan's).
For a US diplomat to showcase Salama’s work and message was a welcome official expression of many Americans’ capacity for openness and of the nation’s overall multi-ethnic, multi-faith make-up. It was praised in Britain, not least on the BBC. It carried an extra piquancy in that country by taking place so close to the July anniversary of the London subway and bus bombings of 2005 (abbreviated by the British media as 7/7 in what’s now as grimly formulaic a date-stamp as 9/11).
It’s a date which the national Channel Four TV network chose to mark this year with a bold documentary taking to task British intolerance toward Islam, with the graceless title It Shouldn't Happen to A Muslim. A public opinion survey accompanying the broadcast, carried out by The Guardian newspaper’s favored polling company, ICM, found that 51 percent of Britons blame the religion of Islam to some degree for those attacks. And meanwhile eight out of ten British Muslims said they now feel more prejudice against their faith.
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THE CHANNEL FOUR DOCUMENTARY, LIKE MANY DOCUMENTARIES, employed microcosmic examples to make its case. It debunked some Islamophobic urban myths like the story of nurses who supposedly ignore a hospital’s general population while they move Muslim patients's beds to face East for prayer. It re-told several confirmed accounts, isolated though they may be, of despicable acts like pigs' trotters being left at the front door of a Muslim home … or obscene graffiti drawn at a community center predominantly used by Muslims … or three Englishmen jailed for tying a Muslim colleague to railings and force-feeding him bacon.
These items prompted in me a deadening sense of “plus ca change”. My friend the British author and journalist Bel Mooney sent me, at a time when anti-Islamic feeling was appreciably beginning to mount, a yellowing old clipping of mine - along with her comment that it had been “prescient”. Writing in the BBC’s print magazine The Listener way back in 1980, I had cited … “a severed pig’s head dumped in a mosque in Batley, Yorkshire … Muslim children pelted with stones while they prayed in Newcastle … the Ku Klux Klan’s initials daubed on a mosque door in Wolverhampton".
We were working only anecdotally in those days, but today's public opinion researchers are confirming that attitudes have only hardened this decade.
OF COURSE SUCH DEEP PREJUDICE DOES NOT, mercifully, represent a predominant national outlook … still less any formal official policy.
However, just before any American can feel complacent about such benighted attitudes in “old Europe”, I should say that some colleagues and I are currently working on a TV documentary about Mark Stroman, who's on Death Row in Texas for killing two men from the Indian subcontinent whom he thought were Muslims, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And there are, regrettably, many more such instances of viciousness.
I should also recall just where blind, bigoted thinking has overflowed into the actions of officialdom.
My BBC article from 28 years ago leaned heavily on reasoned observations from Dr Zaki Badawi (pictured right) then Director of Britain’s Islamic Cultural Centre, whom I knew as a doughty campaigner for inter-faith and inter-communal harmony. His stature as a conciliator only grew greater in the years that followed, even through the tense atmosphere after 7/7, until he died in 2006. (The prestigious Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture is now given annually at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace.)
Six months before he died this deeply principled peacemaker was, to his outrage, refused entry to the United States - by officials of the same US Administration that appointed its open-minded, cultured London Ambassador.
Dr Badawi was stopped by Homeland Security representatives at JFK airport and, according to the Department’s press spokesperson, found not to be “in alignment” with the background check done on him. True to the tone of what seemed at the time like a zealous and almost gleeful publicity drive to show how George W Bush’s security apparatus was dealing vigorously with terrorist threats, the DHS spokesperson said of Dr Badawi that “after a thorough interview he was deemed inadmissible”. He returned home in disgust.
No reason for his exclusion was ever given, though he did later receive an apology from the Ambassador.
Not a good episode for US public relations (and more typical of the Bush years than last week’s London concert).
Clearly, one redneck’s bigotry is another official’s baseless dictat.
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DISTURBING UPDATES TO MY REFLECTIONS last week in THE MEDIA BEAT on Africa coverage.
News came filtering out yesterday from the arid north of Sudan's Darfur region that the under-reported - and appallingly overstretched and poorly equipped - joint force from the United Nations and African Union had encountered a (probably inevitable) calamity.
Some 200 paramilitary fighters, some on horseback, others in armed vehicles, overwhelmed a detachment of peacekeepers, killing seven of them and injuring 22.
In the face of the militia's superior firepower - mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and even anti-aircraft guns - the 60 or so UN/AU soldiers were vastly outmatched. Perhaps now the media will pay attention to the force's thankless, hopeless task.
Much further south, In Zimbabwe, the mother of an injured child featured in the New York Times admitted she had misprepresented his injuries in order to obtain help for him. The paper had believed, and published - along with an agonizing photograph - her story that he had been injured by Robert Mugabe supporters as part of their intimidatory campaign of violence during the country's tragic farce of a "presidential election".
The Times yesterday printed a correction of the record (first publicly questioned, incidentally, by the Sunday Times of London) in the form of an "Editors' Note". Already Mugabe and his goons are using this misreporting as evidence of the western "conspiracy" that's trying to oust him, with the help of lying local "traitors".
It counts as one of those awful, maddening and saddening false steps in journalism. The view of the noted and powerful chronicler of Zimbabwe's woes, Peter Godwin - with whom I earnestly concur - is that the NY Times should have accompanied its correction with a photo-spread of absolutely verified atrocities committed against the country's voters. There are enough of them, after all.