From The Chicago Tribune…
Islamophobia now competes with fearophobia
If we ban discussion of our secret fears, how can we bring light to bear on them?
By Ron Grossman
Like perhaps no other city, Paris is burdened by visitors’ expectations; images drawn from novels and movies are so freighted with emotion the reality can be disappointing.
And so it was for me during a month’s stay in the City of Lights. I didn’t see a single face-covering veil.
That wasn’t the reason for my visit, yet I was led to expect it. France, like other European countries, is rebounding from the open-arms welcome it once extended to Muslim immigrants. The French parliament recently outlawed the public wearing of the veil, though the ban has yet to go into effect.
Given the heated argument the legislation provoked, you’d might think it was addressed to a widespread phenomenon. Yet having walked the streets of Paris, from tonier neighborhoods to immigrant ghettos, I suggest that if you’re looking to see veiled women, Chicago’s Devon Avenue is the place to go.
In Paris, the only eyes I saw starring out of cloth-draped faces were in lithographs and paintings hanging in Paris’ museums. Nineteenth century French artists romanticized the mysterious East, just as contemporary France increasingly fears it.
It’s not that the French don’t have something to fear. On a newly released recording, Osama bin Laden threatened France with violence for its support of U.S. policy in the Middle East. When I left last Wednesday, heavily armed soldiers were patrolling tourist sites and the airport.
Yet if the problem is real, it’s hard to see how outlawing the veil is the solution. Theoretically, it could be — but wouldn’t there have to be veils to ban? To at least this visitor’s eyes, it seems like the French are opting for a psychological solution to an all-too-real danger. The Swiss took a similarly big step in the direction of irrationality, approving a referendum in December forbidding the building of minarets. Wars haven’t been won or lost by shooting down from urban towers since the feuds of the Medici and Borgia families in Renaissance Italy.
In the U.S., meanwhile, it’s not a distinctive dress or building form that’s under irrational attack, but fear itself. NPR fired a longtime on-air personality, Juan Williams, for having said that seeing Muslim attire on an airplane scares him. Now, I have no idea whether Williams is a fair-minded or narrow-minded person. But I ask you: Who among us hasn’t sometime felt something akin to that?
On leaving Paris, I had to take off my shoes at the airport. We didn’t used to have to do that and, I’d be willing to bet, every time we do, it’s a troubling reminder that the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we’ve been engaged in a two-front war: We’ve had to institute security procedures virtually unthinkable before this — and, at the same time, struggled to remind ourselves that not everyone who happens to share a religious conviction with the perpetrators of 9/11 is a terrorist.
That’s not an easy mental task. We weren’t able to make that distinction in World War II, and interned American citizens of Japanese descent. During World War I, anything German was verboten. Sauerkraut was rechristened Victory Cabbage.
We’ve been teetering on the brink of something similar lately. Islamophobia is alive in the land. Listen to talk radio, whose broadcasters and audience seem convinced there’s a terrorist in a turban or burqa hiding under their beds.
Yet the antidote for irrationality is not outlawing fear, or banning it from the airwaves, as NPR’s bosses seem to think. During World War II, it was said that Americans were fighting for freedom from fear. During the war on terror, we should be mindful of a parallel freedom: to be fearful, to have an emotional reaction to living with the threat of terrorist attack.
You don’t convince people that not all Muslims are violent by asking them to expunge their memory in the name of political correctness. The French tried that, which led to the current anti-veil backlash. Germany’s chancellor is now calling for an end to multiculturalism — a scarcely veiled attack on that country’s Turkish community.
If we want to keep that from happening here, we all — liberal, conservative and everything in between — need remind ourselves that the other person is entitled to his or her fears, however irrational they might seem. Or, to put it the other way around: Fearophobia is a surefire route to Islamophobia.
Ron Grossman is a Tribune reporter and former history professor.
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