What’s on my mind

The fight against racisim and prejudice is the only issue given the front page in US media, but one phobia is missing somehow. 

by Phyllis Chesler

How the subject du jour—race—has turned into an everyday, round-the-clock issue.

Will this focus turn into revolutionary, structural change or is this really an organized and funded Marxist class war masquerading as anti-racism?

Will working poor, impoverished, bourgeois, or super-wealthy black folk be better off when every single statue in the public square has been toppled; when every college classroom has been newly re-segregated; when small African-American businesses have been set on fire and forced to close down; and when a defunded and openly despised police force cannot rescue black people from black criminals?

Does this virtue-signaling racism include Muslim hatred towards and enslavement of black Africans and the historical role black Africans played in the international slave trade?

Does it include the historical and contemporary Muslim persecution and enslavement of white and dark-skinned Christians, of central Asian Buddhists—and of “brown” Hindus and Sikhs today?

Why has the American mass media, especially the New York Times, increasingly been publishing mainly photos and pieces about both ordinary and extraordinary African-Americans? And in every conceivable section: The news, Op-Eds, Obits, Arts, Books, Food, Sports (of course), and in the Sunday magazine, etc., day after day, week after week, month after month?

I was initially surprised, then pleased (all those years of mainly white faces, in their pages, right?, it’s only fair, right? ), but now I feel that this incessant display is rather heavy-handed propaganda, pure indoctrination into the false 1619 narrative, perhaps even meant as intimidation, another version of bullying mobs in the street.

I await a series of articles with photographs of Jews of color, both in Israel, but also in India, and all over Europe and North America.

True: Most people on Planet Earth are not Caucasian and are not living in the West. We white folk need to be educated about this, preferably in school, and early on. But in a newspaper? And one that increasingly resembles a computer screen, or Cliff Notes on everything from the Presidential election to Race.

The good news: Israel has, more or less, been knocked off the front pages—off all the pages—as scapegoats, targets, subjects of infamy.

The coverage of the historic El Al flight to the UAE, allowed to pass over Saudi air space for the first time, is not exactly buried, but it is part of a strange insert, does not appear on the front page (where Israel has so often been damned), but on page A9. In what might have been totally positive coverage, instead the article manages to bring in one of Israel’s alleged “crimes,” namely taking over Kiryat Gat, which was “partly built on the Arab village of Fallujah.” The article quotes Palestinian Authority spokesman, Muhammed Shtayyeh, who is greatly “pained” by the fact that this plane bears the name of Kiryat Gat.

There is much more to “deconstruct” here but I will leave it at this.

In so many book reviews, and in articles in Lancet, and especially in National Geographic, articles on Biblical archeology present Mahmoud Abbas’s “complaints” that “constant Israeli digging is part of a campaign to overwhelm 1,400 years of Muslim heritage.”

As for the subject of racism: I await a series of articles with photographs of Jews of color, both in Israel, but also in India, and all over Europe and North America.

I also await the inclusion of anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, in every Western textbook about racism.

How long do you think I’ll have to wait?

First published in Israel National News.