Alert Mutineer Giri hit up my wall on Facebook*, and wrote a scorching screed about something he witnessed while watching last night’s Colbert Report.
Apparently, Hussein Ibish, the Executive Director of The Hala Foundation For Arab-American Leadership was a guest on the show; he was invited on to address the whole “Is Obama actually a Muslim?”-question, or, as Colbear facetiously put it, whether Obama is “a secret Muslim”. Ibish was ostensibly offended enough by Colbear’s jocular query to utter the following stupidity to his host, as if this would clear everything up:
“If someone says…that you…are a secret Hindu or perhaps a child molestor…are we to take that as…”
I beg your pardon? Sorry, Mr. Ibish, perhaps you should beg ours?
To his credit, Colbert forcefully replied, “I’ll take care of this one” to his loudly booing audience. He went on to proclaim:
“I find it offensive, that you are implying that all Hindus are child molestors. Your words, Sir. Your words.”
I find it offensive, too. What kind of “spokesperson” is so utterly reckless, or barring that, terrible at hiding their biases? Ibish went on what is arguably an influential television program and offered a dysphemistic metaphor, when he should have– for his sake, his cause’s sake, hell, everyone’s sake– been far more diplomatic. I know that there are people who will watch this clip and think that it’s not a big deal. Well, call me a saffron-balled, pseudo-secular friend of Moor Nam, but I was and am offended. If this situation weren’t egregious enough, this paragon of E.D.-ship didn’t seem concerned at all at how his remarks actually sounded, outside of his head. Ibish has decried hate against the Muslim community in the U.S., after 9/11. He of all people should understand the power of insinuation, as well as the need to combat ignorance, vs. stoking it. Shame on him.
::
*Might be a first, in terms of tip submission 😉
Lets see, I guess he will get away with it. Hindus are not that a big group in the USA. The decent thing would be to say sorry.
not all religions are baked equal in public discourse. hindus are likely numerous enough that they’ll get the de facto protection from ridicule which xtians, jews and muslims have after the appropriate censure (remember “the simpons” where they cut to apu with a stature of shiva and labeled his religion “Other” after he explained hindu and there were 800 billion of them?).
not to make this political, but i get a little tired of people like nicholas kristof saying it wouldn’t matter if someone was muslim. after all, they (liberals) regularly think that the religion of christian conservative politicians is something that is of note (or bush’s affiliation with evangelical christianity). criticizing the religious sentiments of presidential candidates is old hat, thomas jefferson got accused of being anti-christian during the 1800 election (ironic seeing that his opponent was a unitarian, john adams), and it was certainly true that he nothing but contempt for orthodox christianity most of his life (personal correspondence suggests he mellowed a bit during his last years). religion is off bounds only if it is hermetically sealed off from the implications in regards to public policy.
p.s. one thing that irritates me about ibish, who is an admitted agnostic whose secular credentials christopher hitchens has attested to, is that after 9/11 he regularly conflated islam with arabs. the majority of arab americans are still christian, and the majority of american muslims are still non-arab. these distinctions are ones which the public often forgets or is unaware of, and it’s irritating which identity activists consciously reinforce them for short term tactical purposes.
This porcine publicity hound has been blabbering his Bbs on the airwaves for a number of years. He gets a free pass for most of his idiotic statements because he’s apparently fighting against “Islamophobia”.
wow, talk about hidden stereotypes
I love you Anna 🙂
How exactly is it offensive? He said a secret Hindu OR when giving an example. How exactly is he tying Hindus and child molestors together?
This is really ridiculous, he never meant that, he just thought of a religion and a heinous act to make an example, so what if he picked Hindu by chance? Ann, you sound kinda like those radical Hindus that burn hearts on valentine’s day in India.
This guy is an agnostic Arab (major props), I doubt he was being cynical.
greg, i don’t think it is clear that it is an exclusive disjunction. it could be an inclusive disjunction, where one or more is true. i’m sure hussein ibish doesn’t harbor particular prejudices against hinduism, but
1) he’s a representative of an identity politics organization whose brief includes holding people to rather high standards of clarity on issues relating to defamation. substitute in other terms (e.g., “muslim or child molester”) and no doubt he’d be up in arms. so perhaps it behooves his conscious to be raised a bit?
2) my personal experience is that most non-americans perceive hinduism to be kind of a joke-religion. i’ll give you an example. since i look hindu my evangelical xtian friends in high school would make fun of hinduism after hearing about its pagan idolatry in church. one of them was talking about how ludicrous the whole idea of gods in human form was until i turned it around and pointed out the incarnation of jesus, at which point he got really mad at the analogy. i think, from an atheist perspective there’s plenty of jokes one can make about almost any religion, but in any given society there are boundaries drawn on which religions are fair game to critique. hindus aren’t quite within that circle yet, though muslims are coming close to being within it (partly because the abrahamic roots means that the semantics are easily to translate).
(the process occurring with muslims, and going to occur with hindus i would think, isn’t new. catholicism was only mainstreamed in the decades after world war i, and judaism after world war ii. 19th century america was proudly and contemptuously protestant nation where trashy “exposes” of sexual debauchery in nunneries were bestsellers)
non-americans
speaking of logic. somehow the negation got in here. meant americans.
But if he were a Muslim he’d be double lucky.
We are really taking this religious “tolerance” thing too far. If Obama wants to be president, why can’t he change his name to something decent and respectable like Harry or George or John?
And even if we do want to be tolerant, it is one thing to be accepting of people of a book with Judeo-Christian antecedents as Ibish suggests. But clearly, as Ibish implies, pagans who find solace in strange gods with blue faces and 8 arms should have their names and photographs plastered all over the neighborhood so that people in the vicinity can ostracize or save them.
Paragon of E.D? Maybe my brain just went limp, but I can’t figure out what this means.
it is one thing to be accepting of people of a book with Judeo-Christian antecedents as Ibish suggests.
it is interesting when muslims, jews and christians assert “after all we all worship the same god” that the assertion of inclusion bounded by these parameters implicitly excludes those outside of the circle of the one-true-god. when you tunnel down to fine grained language analysis in an environment of pluralism you open a pandora’s box of deconstructionist possibilities 😉
Don’t worry, Manju, you might get lucky in the next 72 hours.
By child molester, did he mean “atheist”?
Yes, there is a problem here.
He was talking a “secret or perhaps, a child molester”. The context jocularly put forth by Colbert was that being a secret Muslim was bad. And his reply that a secret Hindu or perhaps something equally bad, like a child molester is clearly wrong. No matter how he finishes that sentence, the implication seemed to be that child molesters have a right to secrecy? Even if he didn’t imply that, he surely mentioned them together.
If he had said, ‘a secret Hindu or a secret atheist even, or something benign, its not a big deal.
I personally don’t find it offensive, but its surely wrong.
mebee he was stressed cuz of a sugar low? 😉
btw, re: religious test. of course the founding fathers put that in there specifically so that there wouldn’t be a bar based on religion for federal positions. those bars did exist at the state level and thanks to the force of personality of men like james madison a block was prevented from pushing that up to a higher governmental level (these bars were the norm in western culture at that point in history). but, that doesn’t mean that the religious views of elected officials weren’t of interest or off limits, as i note above. a lot of the talk during the romney campaign was pretty ahistorical, and drew upon the most unreflective aspects of the amerikan cult of tolerance. during the 1960 election kennedy was asked about his catholicism; today we see this as pure bigotry. but this was before vatican ii. for decades there had been battles within the church attempting to force it into a public reconciliation with modern liberal democracy (one faction were ‘americanists’ based in these shores, but there were also pro-republican french liberal catholics on the other side of the atlantic). this was the historical context of the time, and though bigotry was surely the primary reason for critiquing kennedy’s religion, but that paranoia was based on the true anti-liberal streak in the church hierarchy (that tendency of course derived from historically contingent conditions, such as the rise of anti-clericalism within liberal nationalist movements and the destruction of the temporal powers of the papacy under the direction of early liberals).
so to islam, i think it is important for muslim elected officials to make clear which side they are on in regards to the pluralism question within the muslim world. in many muslim nation-states there are still death penalties for conversion to other religions and apostasy (even if they are rarely enforced). a substantial minority of muslims in european nations like britain agree with these laws. i doubt any elected muslim official in the west would be on the side of the anti-pluralists, being religious minorities themselves, e.g., keith ellison. but i think airing these issues might do some good in tilting the balance toward the pluralists by putting prominent muslims on the record.
2 · razib said
According to Wikipedia, Ibish is not even an Arab, but a Kurd. This makes his conflation of Islam with Arab even more strange.
so to islam, i think it is important for muslim elected officials to make clear which side they are on in regards to the pluralism question within the muslim world.
So if you are a REAL American, we can safely assume that they are against the death penalty for converts. But if you’re a Muslim-American, no matter where you are born and where you grow up and what values you hold, your default position is “conversion = death penalty”?
a substantial minority of muslims in european nations like britain agree with these laws. Yeah, a substantial minority of white people in America believe all brown people should be shot or deported. Are we going to ask every white politician “And excuse me sir, are you pro-death for non-white people?”
21 · urooj said
Its generally agreed that Islam law states that apostates deserve death. If you describe yourself as a follower of Islam why shouldn’t people wonder if you happen to subscribe to this Islamic law?
Yes, Jewish law states that the punishment for breaking the Sabbath is death by stoning. So should we ask all Orthodox Jews if they believe we should stone people who break the Sabbath? No, because we don’t treat Judaism or Jews as a monolith, and we don’t assume to know their texts, their practices better then they do. Yet somehow, it’s okay to treat Islam that way? Islam is a religion with over a billion followers, spanning dozens, if not hundreds, of cultures and countries, do you really think it means the same thing for everyone? Islam is not a monolith, Muslims are not a monolith. Islamic law has thousands of intricacies and complexities that cannot be reduced to something as simple as “all Muslims believe apostates should be killed.” To do so is incredibly orientalist, and privileges a Western discourse which reduces an incredibly diverse and complex system of thought into something black and white.
And why should a Muslim born, raised, and running for office in Michigan have to answer to what some Muslims in Saudi are doing? What ties does she have to them? Just because they are both Muslims, they must think the same, act the same, be the same? Again, this is an incredibly problematic and Orientalist assumption, and smacks of “Prove to me that you’re not a terrorist” talk.
11 · Rahul said
I like Spiro.
23 · urooj said
That’s a misinterpretation. If you read it in the original hebrew its clear that the law states if you get stoned you might break the Sabbath. I think its in the Book of Munchies.
But if you’re a Muslim-American, no matter where you are born and where you grow up and what values you hold, your default position is “conversion = death penalty”?
uh. no. islam doesn’t encourage repackaging the words of kufars to make one’s rhetorical position easier, does it? it isn’t the default position, but it’s the majority position of muslims today.
Yeah, a substantial minority of white people in America believe all brown people should be shot or deported. Are we going to ask every white politician “And excuse me sir, are you pro-death for non-white people?”
look, here are the numbers for britain: A poll of more than 1,000 British Muslims, conducted by the Policy Exchange think-tank this year, found that 36 per cent of Muslims aged between 16 and 24 believe those who convert to another faith should be punished by death.
i really doubt you’d get such common sentiments re: shooting or deporting “brown people” (hey, you know that not all muslims are brown, and not all brown people are muslim, but here’s a situation where conflating really muddies the issue more appropriately for argumentation).
muslims regularly talk about stuff like the ummah and brotherhood and all that. i’m really tired of muslims objecting to generalizations of muslims as a whole when they have no problems with asserting identification in other contexts (e.g., “our muslim brothers in palestine….”). if you’re not your brother’s keeper in any way stop talking about brotherhood.
the cultural conflict between co-religionists is not limited to islam. note the disagreement re: homosexuality within the anglican communion. some of the “liberals” in the anglican episcopate like john shelby spong have let pretty strongly implied that the rhetoric of african bishops toward homosexuals is just plain primitive and un-christian (i think the world he used was “animist”), and it looks like schism might occur over this issue.
this sort of general problem of identification is one we’ve gone over on SM and opinions differ. i’ve stated that if you claim to be a “proud X” you better own up to the negative baggage that comes with “X.” i.e., if i’m a proud american i better be ashamed about jim crow because that’s part of america too. well, if you are a identifying as a muslim, well there’s a lot of awesome culture to go along with that, but the islamic world also has a lot of stuff f*ked up with it.
if mitt romney was going to be nominated as president someone better have asked him about his stance during the period when his church basically assumed that black africans were lesser humans (since they were excluded from the priesthood they had no shot at the highest heaven). that doesn’t mean that mormons believe that now, or that mitt romney believed that then, but if he is proud of his church well that’s part of the history of his church.
That could be fun and informative 🙂
Manju….. 🙂
Islamic law has thousands of intricacies and complexities that cannot be reduced to something as simple as “all Muslims believe apostates should be killed.” To do so is incredibly orientalist, and privileges a Western discourse which reduces an incredibly diverse and complex system of thought into something black and white.
? look. this stuff about discourse and orientalism is all well and good, but i never said “all Muslims believe apostates should be killed.” you even put quotes there as if i’d said it. LOL. look at it this way, if was in gujarat in early 2002 the fact that i’m an atheist wouldn’t matter to the thugs who were killing muslims. i would be a muslim to them, just as i am to a minority of SM readers who accuse me of mocking hinduism because i’m a secret muslim (i do think the hindu religion is pretty ridiculous, but i think that of every religion…). that doesn’t mean i think all hindus are like that, they aren’t, but there’s a situation for everything (though most hindus i meet, even ABDs who aren’t religious, have a hard time breaking out of the idea you are born into a religion just like jews do, though xtians, especially evangelical christians, generally “get” that i’m not a muslim pretty quickly). similarly, if i mocked islam in public and declared my apostasy in most of the muslim world i’d be in trouble. i might start a riot and a lawyer might have to declare me mentally ill so as to placate public sentiment. this doesn’t mean that all muslims go insane when their religion is mocked or people declare their apostasy, but a huge number do go nuts so that people need to modify their behavior appropriately.
so yeah, i would be curious as to the thought of a muslim elected official on these issues in the west because the majority of muslims do not live in the west and my belief is that many young american muslims are influenced by what goes on in majority-muslim countries. i would want to ask specific questions re: apostasy and pluralism, mostly to get it on the record and shift the central tendency if possible, just like i think it was good when people challenged mormons before 1978 on their church’s position vis-a-vis blacks in the priesthood. catholics and jews in the united states had to adopt and were challenged during the 19th and first half of the 20th century when most of their co-religionists lived in regions or lifestyles which were simply not in keeping with liberal democratic principles (it is recorded that many rabbis in central europe objected to the liberation of jews in the 19th century specifically because they feared, rightly, assimilation to the gentile culture of those jews who had previously been under their legal jurisdiction).
re: orthodox judaism, remember that practice is strongly filtered through the commentaries within the talmud. so quoting from the hebrew bible can be problematic (there are usually “work arounds” for many practices, and more broadly gentiles are subject only to the noahide laws, not the 612 commandments on jews). similarly there is a debate within islam about apostasy based on appeal to interpretations of texts or selections of hadiths. obviously i want the less savage side on this question to win out, but the do-not-kill-the-apostates is definitely starting in the minority position from everything i read.
According to Wikipedia, Ibish is not even an Arab, but a Kurd. This makes his conflation of Islam with Arab even more strange.
1) yeah, but he works for that arab-american group. that’s what i recall him working for in the early 2000s. so no matter his own ethnic identity, he would be shilling for their talking points.
2) he was born in beruit. i think there’s a lot of debate about “arab” identity in that region, and even if he had kurdish ancestry he might still identify as arab. i know that traditionally many more lebanese who are greek orthodox identify as arab than those who are maronite christian, even though both groups are arabic speaking.
Annachech, you are capital.
Yes, it’s rather weird that Judaism was mainstreamed so quickly after WW2, given that the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor were Jewish.
What? You don’t believe me? Then why did they choose “Torah! Torah! Torah!” as a signal? See? The Tiger can’t change his shorts.
The Colbert show guest segments are not to be taken seriously. Regular viewers will know that Colbert is portraying a stereotypical TV pundit (largely inspired by Bill O’reily).
The lines: “I find it offensive, that you are implying that all Hindus are child molestors. Your words, Sir. Your words.†is a pretty standard line in his interviews. The mode of taking the guests comments and giving it an insidious twist for laughs.
I had never heard of the Sepia Mutiny until today, but live and learn. I am glad at least some people on this blog understand that it was Colbert (or rather his obnoxious and militantly illogical character) who made the equation, not I. To those who are offended, perhaps you should consider the meanings of the words “or†and â€perhaps†and the connotation of the phrase â€or perhaps†which in English draws a clear distinction between the two examples of false allegations people might make that I was citing. The structure of the sentence is to raise the stakes within it, that is to move from a benign false claim â€secret Hindu” to a malign false claim â€child molester.” In no serious reading or interpretation of my words could I possibly be found to be making any comparison between the two, much less a â€metaphor,” an error made by at least one person on this blog. If you want to be offended, I can’t help you, but if you simply were to apply the essential rules of the English language and the structure of sentences you will instantly see that I made no such equation. Colbert did, as a joke, in the manner of his character whose stock in trade is inanity and foolish misinterpretation of everything that comes his way.
I prefer Gaydolf Fitler.
What does child molesting have to do with the name thing anyway. it makes no sense. He could have given an example of another religion. It is being offensive slyly which unfortunately is the practice in the new millennium. I’m with anna J “Shame on Himâ€.
Does pedantic condescension deliver favorable results in your line of work Mr. Ibish?
While, I am not offended.. I find it curious to see the placement of Hindus next to child molester, pyschologically speaking. Perhaps it is just random, but considering brain does work off patterns, there might be something here. I think his brain was thinking of using some religion as example, hence came Hindu… next came child molester, off the Catholic priest thingie, and the two were juxtaposed… Enough of this amateur psychology… anyway , I don’t think its a big deal. Hinduism might be funny to some, but at least all agree its harmless.
36 · rudie c said
You don’t mean: “If someone says…that you…are a secret Jew or perhaps a child molestor…are we to take that as…â€
Now that would have brought Mr. Ibish’s talking-head career to a sudden demise. He lucked out by using a religion that is still in its infancy political muscle-vise in the US.
In some ways asking this question is useless because there is only one answer that doesn’t amount to political suicide. But why is it important anyway ? I would think religion would be a much bigger part of a muslim politician’s identity than that of a Christian or Hindu politician. Islam doesn’t really work with separation of church-and-state and that is part of what leads to all the radicalism and non-pluralistic societies in the Islamic world (arab or non-arab). So why doesn’t it make sense for voters to question a Muslim politician’s stand on some issues a lot more than other candidates ?
could this be any more boring?
maybe we could talk about identity politics next?
Anyone not wanna be a doctor?
Anyone having problems with their parents and dating?
Anyone offended by anything lately?
YAAAAAAAAAWN. this site has jumped the shark, pony, pit bull and turtle
Not Hindu myself but that’s a terrible pair of analogies. “If someone says you are a secret Hindu or perhaps a child molester, are we to take them at their word?” That isn’t literally equating Hindus with child molesters, but to me it does imply that a person would be equally offended or horrified by either accusation. And that is a pretty nasty statement about Hinduism.
In that video clip Ibish just did not express clearly at all that he intended one false claim as benign and one as malignant – or whether he regarded both as equally malignant. I was ready to give some benefit of the doubt in terms of it being a heated conversation, Colbert doesn’t make it easy to get a word in edgewise, etc. and maybe Ibish just didn’t have the time to draw that distinction properly, but – I guess if the response is basically “learn English” that tells you all you need to know.
I did not find it offensive when I saw it. It is possible he meant it subconsiously as a derogatory thing. But I am not sure enough to worry about it. It is a non issue in my opinion.
Don’t know what my words are worth, although I didn’t watch the video, I find the quote offensive. What an ass.
It was a poor choice of words, but I doubt that any perceived connection between “Hindu” and “child molestor” was intentional, and unless Mr. Ibish has made it a habit to malign Hindus, I really think it’s a non-issue.
Let’s file this with the Michael Moore “Gooopta” post.
Nan English thappuillama pesuvan…yin fact, Thalaivar-sonnamadrey, “I can talk English, walk English, laugh English”.
34 · Hussein Ibish said
While you demonstrate a firm grasp of the English language and the construction of clauses, you seem to fail to grasph the higher order concept of connotation. It’s not just what’s being said (the construction of the phrase you thoroughly deconstructed), but how it is being said that’s also important. At the very least you should be able to understand the placement of Hindus in the vicinity of child molestors is unfortunate.
They’ve yanked the video looks like. I can’t see it. Damn!
To be clear- I was offended because:
1) As Razib articulately said upthread, people like Ibish are held to a higher standard, especially because they demand sensitivity from everyone else. It’s hypocritical to take people to task for their ignorance and then be so reckless with one’s own words. Make no mistake– if I had said something similar in a blog post, I’d have my kundi handed to me by you readers, and for very good reason; it would be unacceptable for me to state something as unfortunate as what Ibish did, given my history at SM. I have to take great care with my words, lest I see, “Anna of Sepia Mutiny made an unfortunate remark…”, and I’m not even 1/100th as important as Ibish is!
2) I was angry that he chose to use Hinduism in his awful counter-example. Would he have dared say Jew? No. If someone said something similar about Muslims, they’d automatically be seen as an ignorant, biased asshole. But drop “Hinduism” in the mix and it’s all good, because Hindus don’t matter, they’re available for such disrespectful purposes. So what if that’s a shitty thing to do? It’s not like there will be consequences for such a poor choice of words.
3) No, he was not saying that one was exactly the same as the other, but I think enough people heard what I did, because they are nonplussed, too. It was not his finest moment, considering he is a crusader for equality and respect.
I continue to be disappointed; it’s very easy to leave a patronizing comment which archly bludgeons us about the head with the opinion that I am illiterate, it is difficult to react with grace and say, “that’s not what I meant, but it’s terrible it might have sounded that way.”
39 · Gruhasthu said
i mean, “if someone says that you are a secret hindu or perhaps a Jew….are we to take that as”
see i don’t understand how child molestor would come into the topic. people can “or perhaps” on anything.