NYDailyNews

Taking Fairness Over the Top

Following President Bush's Thursday night speech to Congress, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) made an unprecedented, televised "joint reaction" of national unity. Naturally, every network broadcast it.

Every one, that is, except ABC.

Instead, Peter Jennings interviewed some observers, starting with Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain of Georgetown University. Jennings asked whether Bush had been sufficiently emphatic in warning Americans not to pick on innocent Muslims and Arabs. Predictably, Hendi said no.

Paul Friedman, ABC News executive vice president, claims that broadcasting the imam instead of the heads of Congress was just an editorial decision.

On the night that the President has just declared war on Islamic radicalism and at least 6,000 bodies lay dead, it takes a special kind of editorial judgment to put the concerns of the Muslim-American community at the top of the agenda. It is the kind of judgment that winds up, in a kind of political judo, flipping the Osama Bin Laden attack on America into an American outrage against its innocent citizens.

Jennings is not alone in presenting things that way. It is also the point of view of National Public Radio. On the Saturday following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I happened to tune into NPR four times, and on every occasion I heard a discussion of the outrages being perpetrated against American Muslims. During the week, I went back to NPR again and again. More often than not, the topic was the mood in Arab communities.

Such concern would be commendable if it weren't so disproportionate. The U.S. was attacked, after all, not the Arabs. The national economy is a mess, the lower part of New York in ruins and senior American officials warn that more attacks may come, possibly with weapons of mass destruction. This threat ought to be at least as troubling to NPR as the mood on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn or in a Jersey City mosque.

That would be true even if there were some great American pogrom taking place. But there is nothing of the kind. According to Hussein Ibish, spokesman of the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 251 suspected violent hate crimes were committed in the U.S. between Sept. 11 and the night of the President's speech. Obviously, even one violent crime is one too many, but a cursory inspection reveals that America is undergoing nothing like a horrific civic crisis.

Ibish says that slightly more than half the 251 crimes were fistfights; no one, as far as he knew when we spoke on Friday, was hospitalized. The rest of the cases were mostly petty vandalism or verbal threats. He said there had been numerous shooting incidents, but he couldn't actually say how many, and he only mentioned one — an apparent stickup in which no one was hurt. Three idiots drove their cars into mosques, but the only known casualty among them was a drunk who, Ibish told me with grim satisfaction, broke his own neck.

Most importantly, Ibish said that in the 10 days following the attack, there were two anti-Islamic murders in the U.S. One was committed by a racist sociopath in Arizona who went on a spree and killed a non-Muslim Indian. In the other case, a non-Muslim Egyptian shopkeeper in Dallas was shot. The committee suspects it was ethnically motivated, but there is no proof that it was.

I am happy to report that New York, which might logically have been a cauldron of animus, has been especially free of serious hate crimes. "The incidents in New York were minor, nothing severe," says Ibish. "In most cosmopolitan centers in America, there hasn't been a great problem." I wish the same could be said about ABC News and National Public Radio.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001

Answers

To explain New York in part, one must realize that if people went around killing arabs there wouldn't be any taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.

Just kidding! LOL

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001