Nagla Al-Imam, an Egyptian lawyer, recently gave vent on Al-Arabiya TV to the idea that one form of "resistance" for Arabs to pursue against Israelis is sexual harassment:

Most Arab countries... With the exception of three or four Arab countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair game as well.

[...]

Sexual harassment... In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won't rape you. These two things are equal.

You can watch the video of the charming Ms. Al-Imam here.

Affirmative Action: or reverse discrimination?Home Center, an Israeli home wares chain, has been offering  a secret discount to Arabs. When customer Eli Chai discovered and reported this last week, a Home Center spokesperson explained, “Home Center offers a wide range of attractive discounts throughout the year. As part of a plan to target specific communities, the chain offers different discounts for different sectors from time to time.”

The situation does seem pretty odd, but not altogether uncalled for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabs do more than 70% of the construction in Israel, and thus end up spending the most money at those sorts of stores. Why wouldn’t Home Center capitalize on that customer base by offering a good deal?

Of course, that’s not how it’s being framed in Israel. Chai is quoted as saying, “I didn't expect to get a discount, but I was appalled when I realized that had I been Arab I would have received one. I tried to think what would happen if it was a discount only for Jews, or Sephardim, or Ashkenazim.”

There's plenty of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and Chai isn’t bothered by that. But when Arabs are favored, it’s a grave in justice!  It may feel inappropriate to offer a discount based on ethnicity, but it’s hardly shocking in a society that’s so clearly divided along those lines.

Unless you are a fan of Tex-Mex, truck with balls, scorching heat, and museums commemorating George W. Bush, there are very few reasons to spend the summer in southeast Texas. But I happen to be here visiting someone, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to sit in on his Texas A&M University class on contemporary world literature, where the focus is literature and terrorism.

For today, we read Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007). Khadra (his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former Algerian army officer turned novelist, and this novel, despite its unsophisticated writing style, does a pretty good job of getting college students to think and talk about terrorism in an unfiltered way. The only problem is that the book is so severely biased against Israelis and Jews that one wonders how unfiltered the discussion can truly be.

The storyline goes something like this: Arab-Israeli surgeon is called to the hospital where he learns his wife has been killed in a restaurant bombing. He later finds out that his wife was in fact the suicide bomber. The rest of the book, with all of its undeveloped plot threads, is about his attempts to uncover her secret life and come to grips with what he sees as her betrayal of him. The important thing to note is that it’s not that he needs to come to grips with what his wife has done to innocent men, women, and children in a crowded restaurant, but with what he sees as her personal betrayal of him.How to Spot a Jew: Is this the lesson Khadra wants to teach?

A bit self-absorbed, no?

It’s not that the novel doesn’t tell a good story or address timely issues. It definitely kept me reading, but perhaps that was also because of the all but latent anti-Semitism that kept jumping out at me. Like many people, I tend to like to stare at things that repulse me. Although I run the risk of sounding like an anti-Semitic ambulance chaser, it is difficult not to read between the lines when nearly every time Khadra’s narrator introduces a new Jewish character, he refers to his “unattractive nostrils” or depicts him looking down his “nose” at the narrator. Or, in the absence of the description of a character’s unflattering nose, he depicts them as fat, selfish, and always gobbling things up.

Those nasty Jews—always gobbling things up and looking down their unattractive noses at everyone else. I’m not quite sure how the reviewers who suggested this book depicts both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict missed this aspect of the book. But I’m sure it’s not the author’s main point.

The main point, actually, seems to be one long, whining “what about me?” Once you sift through the rambling prose, the narrator seems to say little more than: “Why didn’t my wife think about the trouble her suicide bombing would cause me? Why do Israeli Jews stop me at checkpoints because of the way I look? Why do the Jews keep talking about their problems when it’s really the Arabs who’ve suffered?”

The narrator visits an old Israeli Jew who goes on and on and on about surviving the Holocaust, only to say, finally, “I talk too much . . . I’ll never understand why the survivors of a tragedy feel compelled to make people believe they’re more to be pitied than the ones who didn’t make it.”

Take that, you blabbering large-nosed Jewish survivor. It’s MY turn to suffer, the narrator seems to say. Everybody wants to talk about their suffering.

The point the author makes seems to be the question of why Jews are still talking about the Holocaust when Palestinians are being subjected to the same kind of evils in Israel. But the problem isn’t that the author draws attention (justifiably) to Palestinian pain. The problem is in the comparison.

Suffering is suffering. It does no good to compare one group of people’s suffering to another, or to minimize one in favor of another. I cannot blame the Palestinian boy who sees his family home bulldozed by Israeli soldiers and vows to take revenge any less than I blame the Holocaust survivor for finding it impossible to stop talking about his experience.The Prosthetic Pregnancy: A must-have for all female suicide bombers.

They have both earned the right to hate. And we are all responsible for acknowledging both perspectives. But even the right to such hate does not justify a lashing out that takes innocent lives, though this novel seems to suggest otherwise in its villainization of Israeli Jews.

The narrator says, “All too aware of the stereotypes that mark me out in the public square, I strive to overcome them, one by one, by doing the best I can do and putting up with the incivilities of my Jewish comrades.” Words of wisdom from the narrator who can’t stop himself from seeing Jews only through negative stereotypes. (Then again, note above my own heinous Texas stereotyping.)

But the person teaching the literature class tells me that while the narrator is indeed despicable when it comes to Jewish stereotyping, we are also supposed to see in him a critique of male Arab culture. The narrator’s preoccupation with his male ego and his anger over his wife’s betrayal of him on a personal level may reveal (from the author’s point of view) some of the problems of Arab male-female relationships. Indeed, at one point he goes nuts thinking that his wife may have cheated on him with another man, and suggests that such an act is worse than the suicide bombing.

The narrator, my friend suggests, cannot escape from the stereotypical Arab masculinity that forces him to see Jews with big noses and gluttonous appetites, and to see women as his private property. But sometimes he has a breakthrough: “Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish.”

It’s unclear what we’re supposed to think in regard to this character. I find him to be pathetic, self-absorbed, and downright despicable. But students in the class tended to be more sympathetic toward him. And I guess that is the danger of this novel—if the author meant to critique Arab culture’s own biases, it’s not altogether clear. My fear is that this novel does more to reinforce negative stereotypes than critique them.

The video below is making the rounds, with all manner of collar-loosening guilt expressed at the American Prospect about our nation's celluloid Orientalism. Hollywood, see, never depicts the cool Arab i-banker who fronts a Guster cover band. It's reel-to-reel swarthy leches, self-immolating nincompoops, and genie-pilfering megalomaniacs, isn't it?

Leave aside the fact that the following was sent to Steve Clemons by an Al Jazeera journalist, whose employers's rendering of Middle Eastern Jewry is always cool and collected. Ross Douthat has already pointed out that the most recent films depicted herein are at least fifteen years old. I'd add that despite what the 200 pounds of bad veal calling itself a narrator in this documentary will tell you, Aladdin and True Lies are not quite as culturally paradigmatic as all that. If Jafar merits a Saidian dissertation, then perhaps I can enjoin a Caribbean scholar of stereotypes to explain the Rasta rock lobster who told Ariel how to land her man in The Little Mermaid?

Also, the only suicide-bomber I spot below played the greasy right-hand-man to a Colombian drug lord in Crocodile Dundee II, and thank you, I didn't need Al Jazeera to tell me that brown skin is still eminently fungible in American popular culture.

Douthat's also right to say that since 9/11, the only movies to come out depicting Arabs in a negative light were The Kingdom (and really, it was more the Wahhabists what done it, as Stephen Schwartz argued in these pages), and United 93, which, you'll admit, at least aimed at verisimilitude.

It's long been a cause of minor consternation among my British friends that American filmmakers cannot make a schlocky science-fiction epic without casting the sons and daughters of Albion as imperial assholes. Check out the accents on the Death Star personnel sometime.

I don't mean to sound like a white Stanley Crouch (well, okay, maybe a little), but as for the narrator's claim that we got over vilifying blacks in cinema a long time ago, so why can't we do the same for Arabs, he clearly has yet to take in the latest Ice Cube/Tracy Morgan vehicle.

A welcome JTA article on the peaceful coexistence of Zionist Jews and Palestine-supporting Arabs in Panama:

Inside the stores here -- wholesale distribution centers for Asian goods seeking Latin American importers -- businesses run by Orthodox Jews and Arab Muslims operate side by side with nary a hint of conflict. In some cases, businesses are co-owned by Jews and Arabs.

Nightclubs are packed with young Jews and Arabs more concerned about partying the night away than the faith of their fellow partygoers.

Both religions are thriving in this small Caribbean country. Disregard the "ever-growing flocks" condescension of making these people sound like sheep:

With three Jewish congregations -- two Orthodox and one Reform -- and thousands of kosher and Sabbath-observant Jews, Panama stands out in Latin America as having one of the most devout and practicing Jewish populations. Muslims are as practicing as their Jewish counterparts here; synagogues and mosques are under construction to attend to the ever-growing flocks.

The New York Sun reports on a conference of Arab lesbians that was held in Haifa yesterday:

Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. Israel's Jewish majority is generally tolerant of homosexuality

"This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country," said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.

Driven deep underground for the most part, only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended the conference, organizers said. Most blended in with Israeli lesbians and heterosexual Arab female supporters without making their presence known.

"We'd like all women to come out of the closet — that's our role. We work for them," said Samira, 31, a conference organizer who came with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend. Samira agreed to be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisals.

[...]Homosexuality, which is strictly forbidden by Islam, is considered taboo among most of Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the country's population.

Most enchanting Arabophilic YouTube of the day.

The moneyquote, to be filed under "Alarming Compliments":

I can spot an Arab from like ten miles away! And I'm like, GAWWWD, look, an ARAB! I swear to God, I can spot an Arab like...like that!

Israeli liberal activists have been known to carry placards announcing "Yes! I fuck an Arab!" Now we understand.

Hat tip KABOBfest!