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MPAC - April 17, 2007
MPAC praises the firing of Don Imus
The Muslim Public Affairs Council commends major news networks for pulling the plug on Don Imus' radio show after his racist statements about the Rutgers Womens Basketball team. After referring to the women on the Rutgers basketball team as "nappy headed hos" MSNBC and its parent company, NBC Universal initially ordered a two week suspension on Imus but later cancelled his show. A day later, CBS followed suit and cancelled this show also.
Imus has had a 40 year history of bigoted, homophobic, and sexist comments over the span of his career. What finally led the networks from merely suspending the show to outright canceling Imus' hatred spewing from the radio waves? A national outcry. The pressure applied from activists such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and CBS/NBC affiliates such as Al Roker and Ron Allen got the attention of the networks. While the withdrawal of Imus's biggest advertisers, such as General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, and American Express removed any financial incentive for MSNBC to keep the show on the air, the power of coalitions and the protest from various communities around the country were the final push needed to pull the plug.
Imus clearly crossed the line of acceptable discourse. News organizations routinely allow journalists to cross the aforementioned line and the Muslim community has bore the brunt of such attacks by the likes of people such as Glenn Beck and Dennis Prager. This outcome is a victory for all communities who fight back against racism and misrepresentation by the media. This is a clear example on how communities can combat racism and bigotry from spewing into the radio waves. When communities and groups pool resources and work together, the major networks are forced to listen.
New York Times – April 14, 2007
Shock talk without apologies
ROBERT WRIGHT
There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down.
Maybe this particular boundary could have been clarified with less punishment, given how abjectly Don Imus has apologized. Still, there had to be a price, and, compared with the prices paid in some multiethnic societies (remember Yugoslavia?), this is a bargain.
But is America's machinery for stigmatizing bigotry really working coherently?
If social harmony is the goal, sanctions should be focused along the ethnic fault lines that are most precarious.
The black-white boundary is such a line, given both the history of oppression and ongoing economic disparities between blacks and whites. But what about the line between Muslim America and Judeo-Christian America?
Here, economics isn't the issue. American Muslims are better educated and wealthier than Muslims in Western Europe -- one reason homegrown terrorism has been a problem in Europe and not here. Still, given that jihadist leaders around the world would love to ignite American strife, and given how few radically aggrieved Americans it takes to commit terrorism, this ethnic boundary is dicey, and worth minding.
Which brings us to Ann Coulter. Full disclosure: Ms. Coulter once cited an Op-Ed essay I wrote for this newspaper about the Danish cartoon controversy as evidence that people like me had ''affection'' for terrorists. Thus ended any claim I might have to evaluate her work objectively. If you want a subject on which I report and you decide, today's not your day.
In a speech last year before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ms. Coulter used the word "raghead." This is a dual-use slur, applied to both Arabs and Muslims, but she was talking about an Iranian, so presumably she was focusing on the religious dimension (consistent with her post-9/11 advice that we ''invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.'') The word raghead -- whose only function is to denigrate -- seems as legitimately offensive to Muslims as Mr. Imus's utterance was to blacks. The difference is that Ms. Coulter didn't apologize.
Brace yourself for the seismic damage done to her career. The leaders of CPAC reassessed their relationship with her and invited her back to speak this year, an occasion she used to trot out the word ''faggot.'' And Ms. Coulter continued to be interviewed respectfully on CNN and (again and again) on Fox News -- treatment that presumably wouldn't be accorded a pundit who used the ''n-word'' without apology.
Why the Imus-Coulter disparity? Maybe part of it is that Ms. Coulter isn't as structurally susceptible to sanction as Mr. Imus. She doesn't have her own radio or TV show, so advertisers on CNN and Fox have two degrees of separation from bigotry. Still, there are pressure points big enough for an Al Sharpton to find. Ms. Coulter's column appears in newspapers with major advertisers.
Maybe the problem is that Muslims don't have an Al Sharpton. And, truthfully, I wouldn't wish one on them. But couldn't they at least have an NAACP?
Actually, they have something like that: the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But CAIR is tarred by such people as Daniel Pipes for alleged sympathy to terrorists. I don't personally trust Mr. Pipes's judgment in Muslim-related matters, but I haven't done the dissertation it would take to get to the bottom of his indictment. What I do know is that if Muslims never achieve the kind of political organization that gets mainstream respect, and indeed feel that all attempts at political organization draw special scrutiny because Muslims are viewed with special suspicion ---- well, that won't help matters….
[Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.]
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/opinion/14wright.html
Arab News - 14, April, 2007
Where was the anger when
Imus insulted Arabs, Muslims?
Ray Hanania
While the controversy surrounding racist radio and TV talk show host Don Imus continues to push the African-American community to review how similarly racist comments are used in black rap lyrics, that his career is coming to a screeching halt has Arabs and Muslims in America cheering.
Imus, and his co-hosts and writers including Sid “Vicious” Rosenberg, are among the most vicious, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim haters on American broadcast TV. But, they are not alone. Still, Arab and Muslim Americans are celebrating the demise of Imus who every morning for years on the prestigious MSNBC Cable News Talk channel, and through his New York-based radio syndication promoted hatred against Arabs and Muslims.
For African-Americans, the debate is simple. Why is it wrong for Imus to use the disgustingly vernacular phrase “nappy-haired hos” when referring to black female basketball players on the Rutgers team, but not equally disgusting when black rappers and singers and standup comedians use the same terms in their lyrics and on stage?
But for Arab and Muslim Americans, the debate is wider. Why is it that no Americans cared when Imus and his bigoted sidekicks on radio and TV trashed, slandered and demeaned Arabs and Muslims daily, and only seem to care when the victims of his hatred are black?
The controversy began during a typical morning radio program when Imus referred to eight African-American women who play for the Rutgers women's basketball team as “nappy-haired hos” who have tattoos. Immediately, powerful African-American leaders like Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, denounced Imus and demanded that he be fired.
At first, hoping to head-off a career-ending result, Imus issued an immediate apology saying he crossed the line. He went on numerous media shows to emphasize his “sorrow,” and his white colleagues in the media came to his defense.
But African-American outrage would not let up. MSNBC and his CBS radio syndication, Westwood One, announced after watching the crisis increase for three days, that they would suspend Imus for a two-week period.
And to soften the blow, they said that the suspension would not start for an entire week, so Imus could discuss the controversy on his radio and TV show for the week before the suspension to try and offset the criticism and calls for his firing with his endless and, honestly, whining and insincere apologies. But African-Americans quickly turned their anger against the major advertisers who sponsor Imus' programs.
Suddenly calling Imus a “shock jock,” a term never used to describe the man that nearly every presidential candidate has sat down with to discuss political issues, American Express and General Motors joined Staples, Proctor and Gamble and Bigelow Tea in a growing list of sponsors who withdrew their advertising money.
In America, money talks more loudly than principle.
The issue involving Imus was never about principle, morality or the ethical limits of American “free speech.” It was never about race of skin color. It is all about one color, green, the color of the American dollar.
Imus has one of the nation's top rated radio and TV shows. His audiences number in the many millions.
Most galling to me as an Arab American is that Imus is no different than an endless slew of other powerful radio and TV talk show hosts. The list of Imus' hatred is endless but here are a few samples:
On Nov. 12, 2004, Imus and one of his radio sidekicks started to make comments during the funeral procession for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
Imus said that Palestinians eat dirt, referred to Arafat's wife as “that fat pig of a wife,” and then when his sidekicked called them “stinking animals, animals, just animals” as Imus nodded in agreement.
Imus slandered Presidential candidate Barack Obama saying that he has a “Jew-hating name” and said he agreed with politicians who called for the dropping of nuclear bombs on Makkah.
No one listened when Arab and Muslim Americans complained.
Welcome to America. Where some ethnic and racial and religious groups are fair game for hatred, and others are safe only because they have the voices to pressure the bigots to apologize.
It took a week for MSNBC to finally drop Imus and it may be days before Westwood One drops Imus, too.
But even if Imus is gone — and I say good riddance — the hate speech he has come to symbolize is alive and well in America.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=94974&d=14&m=4&y=2007
April 13, 2007
Wikinomics and the Firing of Don Imus
by Eric Chabrow
In the end, Don Imus' racist and sexist words got him fired. But very few people would have been aware that the long-time radio-show host and shock jock uttered those nasty words if it weren't for a blogger.
Ryan Chiachiere, a researcher for the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America, was up at 6:14 a.m. on April 4 and heard Imus refer to the Rutgers University women's basketball team players as "nappy-headed ho's," according to a Page One story in Friday'sWall Street Journal [subscription required]. Later that day, Chiachiere posted a 775-word blog about Imus' comments along with a video of his utterance on the Media Matters website. A week and a day later, Imus was out of a job.
Imus' firing, in one respect, was Wikinomics in action: the American community collaborating together, using the latest information and communications technologies, determined the employment of an individual. Chiachiere's blog got the ball rolling. Imus' firing was a multimedia affair. E-mails quickly followed, then the print and broadcast media picked up the story. The news coverage spurred events: staged protests against Imus. Imus' invective became the topic de jour for online chats, watercooler conversations and late-night pillow-talk. Advertisers pulled adds from Imus In the Morning, produced by CBS Radio, and simulcasted on cable TV by MSNBC. As all the media interacted, and a consensus grew that Imus must go, the pressure mounted for the networks to act.
We've seen it before. Remember Dan Rather? After a four-decade career at CBS News, the former Evening News anchor was forced out after bloggers, conservative and liberal, questioned the authenticity of documents he based a September 2004 60 Minutes report that President Bush, as a Texas Air National Guard officer decades earlier, was found unfit for flight status after he failed to submit to a physical exam. Other media quickly picked up on the bloggers' postings.
No doubt economics played a major part in the departure from the airwaves of Rather and Imus. Rather's Evening News ratings were a distant third to his competitors at ABC and NBC. In the end, he just wasn't generating the kind of ad revenue CBS expected from its star reporter. Imus, if he continued to broadcast, would have lost millions of dollars in commercial ads for the two networks as advertisers pulled their spots from his program.
What makes Imus' dismissal different from Rather's departure from the airwaves is speed. Today, the tumult created by various media working in unintentional harmony can results in quick actions as the community comes to a rapid consensus. About 20 months passed from the ill-fated 60 Minutes report to the time Rather last walked out the doors on West 57th Street. Imus was silenced in eight days.
In a somewhat related incident, my colleague Ed Cone, in his story Beware of Bloggers with Baggage, relates how the blogosphere helped lead to the resignations of two aides to presidential hopeful John Edwards because of past comments they posted on their blogs that some people interpreted as anti-Catholic screeds. In their case, as well as that of Don Imus, they found themselves quickly out of a job because of the speed generated by the blogosphere.
http://blog.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/blogs/wikinomics_and_the_firing_of_don_imus.html?kc=CMCIOEMLP041707CMS3
April 24, 2007
Why is Anti-Muslim Bigotry Tolerated?
By REMI KANAZI
For all his chauvinistic, misogynistic and racist drivel, old man Imus finally got the boot. I can't say I feel particularly bad, considering his confederate- style punditry and his perpetuation of negative imagery of the non-white males our society, but I still think people are missing the point. Racism, bigotry and sexism are alive and well, and generally accepted in this great country-well it depends on who you're talking about.
Unsurprisingly, one important question has not been asked since Imus' downward spiral: what if those "nappy headed hos" were Arab or Muslim? Regrettably, we have a plethora of examples to point to post-911, but we don't need to rehash all of it, one can just watch a nightly episode of Fox News's Bill O'Reilly or CNN's Glenn Beck. Yet, my bone to pick is not with the establishment neocons, Fox News, or Ms. Malnourished herself, Ann Coulter, but rather those "peaceful" and "all-accepting liberals" who complain so frequently about Imus and those like him.
To see how anti-Arab/anti-Muslim bigotry is accepted and applauded in America, one has to look no further than HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, hosted by "left-wing" comedian and political commentator Bill Maher. "Liberal" pundits like Maher pass off their anti-Arab/anti-
Muslim rhetoric as an innocent invocation of Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations. " Yet, Maher's vitriolic diatribes are no different than one saying, "black people are ruthless, welfare
grubbing criminals." Nonetheless, to a "liberal," the previous comment is racist and wrong, because black people, unlike the days of slavery, are now "like us," meaning white Anglo-American society, whereas Arabs and Muslims (as if they are a unitary, monolithic people), can still be labeled wholly as "backwards, ruthless, Jew-hating animals."
In Maher's program, he regularly brings on guests that espouse anti-Arab/anti-Muslim views, some of them being supposed "self-critical" Muslims. These guests, however, principally serve to support Maher's own bias against Muslims and Arabs, bolstering his pro-Israel feelings. These guests include conservative Israeli politician, and former Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Lebanese-born neocon and political hack Fouad Ajami, putative introspective Muslim moderate Irshad Manji, and former Muslim, now professed atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among many others.
Showcasing the "tolerance of liberalism," Maher brought on his claimed "hero," Ayaan Hirsi Ali, of the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, to help him explain to HBO viewers just what was wrong with Islam. Like a fat kid in a candy store, Maher looked to Hirsi Ali on his panel this season and stated, "[I] s Islam a religion of peace? You are one of the brave people who say it's not really a religion of peace." More than happy to respond, Hirsi Ali proclaimed, "It's not a religion of peace. Immediately after 9/11 they should have said, it's not a religion of peace, we're up against Islam."
That's right because Pat Robertson speaks for all Christians and the list of disgruntled students that have gunned down their schoolmates since Columbine speak for all people under the age of 25. What if Hirsi Ali said, "Immediately after the black thug robbed the liquor
store, they should have said, black people are criminals, we're up against black people." After her enlightening comments, while she went on to trash Saudi Arabia for a moment, Hirsi Ali received a huge applause from the audience. Even Steven Weber, an actor who stars on TVs Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, had to jump in and beg the question of whether it was right to characterize a whole religion and the beliefs of 1.3 billion people this way. Apparently it is because Maher, educating the naive Weber (who was talking of moderate Islam), asserted that "no, [religions are] not all alikeno [Islam] was extremist to begin with. Mohammed was a warrior." Maher's lesson on the malady of Islam followed up on his earlier comments in which he said that the West is not only better, but "superior" to the rest of world. Huh, I wonder why they don't like us.
Bias against Arabs and Islam-and bashing them as a monolithic entity-is accepted across the news media, whether it is in reporting or punditry. This makes it even more important, especially in this "gloves off" age of comedy, to make a clear distinction between comedy and news. It is equally, if not more important, to condemn bigotry that is masked as humor. We should make fun of ourselves, our ethnicities, religions, and races, but when it is done in a vindictive nature or when a seemingly comedic joke or informative political comment is enveloped with racist, sexist, or bigoted undertones, it should be rejected by all peoples. That is not the "thought police" taking over, it's common sense. Unfortunately, Don Imus was used by reactionaries across the board, both condemners and defenders, when people should have been talking about the issue of
racism and sexism long before his comments. Tragically, a couple of days ago, 33 people, mostly kids, were massacred by a student at Virginia Tech. The Imus case, like its predecessor the Anna Nicole Smith drama, has run its course in the mainstream media. Sadly, racism and sexism now seem to be out of the minds of Americans until the next big gaffe. The only question left is how big of a gaffe is necessary for Americans to come to the defense of Arabs and Muslims?
Remi Kanazi is the co-founder of the political website www.PoeticInjustice.net. He is the editor of the forthcoming book of poetry, Poets for Palestine, for more information visit Poetic Injustice. He can reached via email at remroum@gmail. com.
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