The House Sand-Negro

Malcolm X once spoke about "House Niggers" as Blacks whom internalize White racism and pander to White racism and associate with White racists all in an effort to achieve accept by Whites whom harbor unreserved contempt for Blacks. These Blacks operate under a mentality of "if you can't beat them, join them" instead of forcefully confronting racism and defending themselves and their people.

segment 316 460x345 L1KEQ 19672

In the end, the Malcolm X-types (though ones less militant) who challenged White racism won and while still present racism against Blacks has been stripped from mainstream society. The House Niggers were shunned by their own and bu those they desperately sought acceptance from.

Today, a many Arabs and ostensible Muslims have inherited that role. Call them the "House Sand-Niggers." These are people whom are not even original in their writing, but simply rehash Western racism against Arabs and Muslims in an effort to achieve prominence. This has now become a career. Arabs and Muslims eager to achieve fame and be a part of the Washington establishment seek to speak at the native. There is a great demand for this. Western bigots can then claim that they are not racists and they are not saying this and that, instead this what Arabs and Muslims are saying about their own. These people are, as stated, are not even original in Western parlance of bigotry. That doesn't matter. They serve the role as puppets fine enough. Of course, native speakers whom champion, say, Palestine are not allowed. Only those natives whom will pander to Western racism, those whom will bash Islam, are allowed. These are uncreative people whom sit around (one of them was a psychologist) and one day thing of an easy way to achieve fame: I'll be a Muslim who will criticize my faith and the U.S. media, eager for such voices, will notice and I will be famous. These are people so eager for Western acceptance because coming from, say, small Syria the West and all its perceived glory holds out so much to desire and that urge to be a part of the establishment is so strong that, for some, nothing will stand in the way of attainment. These are individuals whom will tarnish themselves and families all for acceptance by people whom have contempt for them and while they'll accept them in the club will never view them as equal members. Is there anything more pathetic?

If there is one great embodiment of the House Sand-Nigger it is academic Fouad Ajami. A native of Lebanon, no single Arab is more powerful and more prominent in the press in America. Ajami has had an audience with President Bush and urged him to invade Iraq, and none other than Vice-President Cheney once reference him by name in a speech. Ajami is a frequent invite to conservative so-called think tanks, a CBS Middle-East adviser and guest on numerous other news shows, a column for U.S. News and World Report and a frequent op-ed writer for the Wall Street Journal. No Arab, or combination of Arabs even those whom write the same garbage, are as heard in the media as Ajami. For two reasons: one Ajami does not challenge but reinforce prejudice against Arabs. Every racist creed against Arabs, Ajami provides justification for through nothing but blunt statements that Arabs are this and that. He acts as that voice that makes Westerns feel okay to be racist against Arabs because, hey, even the Arabs says this. Western publications want such writers to criticize, nay attack, Arabs. They think it adds credibility. Arabs whom challenge racism need not apply. Second: Ajami is more prominent than his imitators because while they all spew the same trash, Ajami does so in an eloquent cloth. Few, even his enemies, can deny that Ajami is a good writer. Eloquent racism. How could the U.S. media not love?

It was not always like this. When Ajami came to America he was a critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and a champion of the Palestinian people.

Once upon a time, Ajami was an articulate and judicious critic both of Arab society and of the West, a defender of Palestinian rights and an advocate of decent government in the Arab world. Though he remains a shrewd guide to the hypocrisies of Arab leaders, his views on foreign policy now scarcely diverge from those of pro-Israel hawks in the Bush Administration. "Since the Gulf War, Fouad has taken leave of his analytic perspective to play to his elite constituency," said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East scholar at Boston University. "It's very unfortunate because he could have made an astonishingly important contribution." . . .

The Israelis, he wrote in an eloquent New York Times op-ed after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, "came with a great delusion: that if you could pound men and women hard enough, if you could bring them to their knees, you could make peace with them." He urged the United States to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984, and he advised it to open talks with the Iranian government. Throughout the 1980s, Ajami maintained a critical attitude toward America's interventions in the Middle East, stressing the limits of America's ability to influence or shape a "tormented world" it scarcely understood.

In fact, it was Ajami who stood in front of a pro-Israel U.S. audience and took on none other than the slick-talking, manipulative and immature thug named Benyamin Netanyahu. At the time, Netanyahu was not yet the prime minister of Israel but a American-raised Israeli working for a consulting group in Boston. But his same propaganda language, later made famous, was already crafted and Netanyahu was already a strong public advocate for Israel. And notice that Netanyahu knows how to connect with an American audience, no doubt due to his American upbringing:

Notice that even when the U.S. audience and it was clear that most were one Netanyahu's side, Ajami then was not intimidated. What happened? At some point Ajami realized that in America there is not room for those whom dissent from pro-Israel dogma. It is not that the pro-Israel dogma is the majority-view, but supporters of the Palestinians are tolerated as an acceptable alternative point-of-view. No, there is simply no room. Zionists want no dissent. If there are 50 people in a room and 49 are pro-Israel, it is not that Zionists will accept that one person has the right to dissent. That they, Zionists, can't win them all. And it is not that they will engage that person in respectful debate to try to persuade them to be pro-Israel. No, Zionists will smear that person. They will attack and demonize them. They will seek to ruin their career. They will attack and attack until that person is simply pushed out of the room. These are the tactics of American Zionists. Ajami saw this and did not want to be a scholar on the fringe of American society, so "if you can't beat them (or exist alongside them), then join them."

People whom know Ajami:

depicted a man at once ambitious and insecure, torn between his irascible intellectual independence and his even stronger desire to belong to something larger than himself. On the one hand, he is an intellectual dandy who, as Sayres Rudy, a former student, puts it, "doesn't like groups and thinks people who join them are mediocre." On the other, as a Shiite among Sunnis, and as an émigré in America, he has always felt the outsider's anxiety to please, and has adjusted his convictions to fit his surroundings. As a young man eager to assimilate into the urbane Sunni world of Muslim Beirut, he embraced pan-Arabism. Received with open arms by the American Jewish establishment in New York and Washington, he became an ardent Zionist. An informal adviser to both Bush administrations, he is now a cheerleader for the American empire.

Ajami made a slow transition toward pro-Israel dogma and even cut off contact with pro-Palestinian writers. The turning point, it may be stated, was probably "when Ajami was invited to speak at a Harvard conference on Islam and Muslim politics organized by Israeli-American academic Nadav Safran. After the Harvard Crimson revealed that the conference had been partly funded by the CIA, Ajami, at the urging of Said and the late Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad, joined a wave of speakers who were withdrawing from the conference. But Ajami, who was a protégé and friend of Safran, immediately regretted his decision. He wrote a blistering letter to Said and Ahmad a few weeks later, accusing them of "bringing the conflicts of the Middle East to this country" while "I have tried to go beyond them.... Therefore, my friends, this is the parting of ways. I hope never to encounter you again, and we must cease communication. Yours sincerely, Fouad Ajami.""

But it was not enough for Ajmai to just pander to Western dogmas but he also began to associate with unabashed anti-Arab racists, principally Marty Peretz the then-owner of hawkish pro-Israel journal The New Republic. At a fundraiser for Israel about two-decades ago, Ajami stood alongside Henry Kissinger as the latter acted Arabs as "liars" and people whom one can never trust. Dan Rather, then anchor of the CBS Evening News, also followed with his anti-Arab tirade and supporting words for Israel which were regularly seen in his "news" casts. Ajami. who worked then and now for CBS, gave his own lecture and thanked his friends Peretz and Mort Zuckerman; two Israel-can-do-no-wrong media owners.

This is the sad fate of Ajmai. A man of great talent brought to resorting to uttering tired dogmas all for acceptance by racists. This a man whom speaks in front of Western audiences and streets that he has been cleaned of his Shiite Arab heritage. This is a man now so divorced from his own identity, so keen on pandering to Western bigotry, that he writes about Arabs as if he were not one:

I was troubled by the tone of Fouad Ajami’s review of Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” (Aug. 2). Ajami throws his lot with the voices of alarm over the growing Islamic presence in Europe, describing Muslim immigrants as either “desperate wards or determined invaders” and characterizing arguments on the other side as “works of evasion and apology.”..In America, these are the folks “keen to keep their world whole and theirs” — just one example among many to undermine Ajami’s awkward effort to legitimize European isolationism under a mantle of democracy.

Having all that, Ajami is at times a brilliant writer whom greatly captures the problems of Arab society, which need to be confronted honestly in order to be attended to in order to used the long-waited for Arab renaissance.