my last post (maybe) on rick sanchez

Ok, this will be the last (maybe) round-up of a few more articles/blogs which looked past the surface of the Rick Sanchez firing. Here are some of the highlights:

In Slate: Is it so offensive to note the effectiveness of the Jewish lobby? by the famously secular Jewish British author, Christopher Hitchens we read:

It's not that long since the late Yitzhak Rabin was complaining that groups like AIPAC had too much influence on Israeli policy. Is there any other lobby that exerts a comparable influence? Perhaps the National Rifle Association. And, of course, on the single issue of the maintenance of a failed embargo, the Cuban-American caucus and its funding base in Florida and New Jersey. (I wonder if Rick Sanchez would offer me an argument there.)

Coming to Sanchez, then, I ask myself if the world in which I have worked for so many decades—the intersecting and overlapping world of the news media, publishing, the academy, and the think-tank industry—is even imaginable without the presence of liberal American Jews. The answer is plainly no. Moreover, I can't think of any other "minority" of which this is remotely true, unless it were to be the other minority from which I can claim descent: people of British or Anglophile provenance.

In I, Sanchez Chez Pazienza gives a much more behind-the-scenes and personal account of her own experiences with Rick Sanchez and the CNN staff and why she believes we haven't seen the last of him.

The Black Snob piece: Rick Sanchez Gets Fired Over Most Epic "Jews Sux" Stupidity Ever (Rants) gives us a refresher course on the first two rules of American society:

Look. This is America and there are certain things in America that will guarantee you will get fired. One -- Be a white person saying the actual N-word in its proper context, as a dirty, dirty slur. You can be as racist as you want in America, but DEAR LORD! Don't actually SAY the word "nigger." It has magical powers apparently. So, you can make all the watermelon jokes you like. Just don't say that word in it's proper context. White people DO NOT LIKE THIS. The fact that black people also don't like this goes without saying.

Two -- Don't diss Jews.

Americans don't do criticism of the Jewish people very well. Unlike the black people, of whom you can smack around as much as you like as long as you don't say that dastardly word and mean it, you can't say anything that even looks like it might want to be wrongiddy-wrong-wrong about the Jewish people. Almost anything negative comes off as antisemitic, so you really don't have to say much to offend. Hell, just try to take the side of the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and you could get called out as antisemitic even though you're criticizing a sovereign country with nuclear weapons ... not all sons of Abraham. Some folks, bless their hearts, don't know that Israel isn't the last word on Judaism, not even among Jews who are, wow, really critical of Israel at times.

But, whatever.

The most thoughtful and thorough discussion I've seen of the Rick Sanchez affair is in the Racialicious piece: On Rick Sanchez, Jon Stewart, and Why We All Lose Playing the Oppression Olympics by Latoya Peterson.

Peterson's piece is unique in at least two respects. First, hers is the only article I've found which didn't just take Stewart's (And Colbert's) non-racism totally for granted and actually questions the ways both shows use racial stereotypes to get a laugh (e.g. The Daily Show’s “Asian Correspondent” Olivia Munn, Dear Olivia Munn, The Daily Show Introduces Us to Gitmo, Open Thread: Cornel West on Stephen Colbert – Respect or Mockery?)

Second, Peterson's piece is also the only one I've seen on the Sanchez issue to actually take the time to debunk the idea that Jews run/own the media with any kind of evidence. She extensively quotes from a FAIR report The Jewish Media: The Lie That Won't Die and also links to Wikipedia's American Mass Media Owners

Of course, the ideal way to refute claims like Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World’s Media and put the issue to rest once and for all would be for someone to just do a survey or census of the media at the various levels (owners, executives, behind the scenes staff, columnists and anchors) and just deal with the issue objectively.

See also:
rick sanchez, jon stewart, jews and the media
cnn on rick sanchez
jews and the media

the almighty dollar

The Pew Forum: Income Distribution Within U.S. Religious Groups

cnn on rick sanchez

Ok, I'm not going to blog on this for a while after this...Today on CNN's Sunday morning show Reliable Sources, (transcript) there was a "discussion" of the firing of Rick Sanchez. I put "discussion" in quotes because CNN basically used the show to justify their decision to get rid of Sanchez.

What I thought was ironic is that Sanchez got in trouble for saying that Jews were not really a persecuted minority in the news industry, while several of the pundits on the CNN show were essentially saying the same thing about Sanchez himself.

Carole Simpson said:

he thinks that he could have been better and bigger and all of these other things, and he wasn't because of his race, as being a Cuban-American. And then it tickles me, because he looks as white as any white man. I mean, without his name, you probably would not know he was Cuban.

While Jamie McIntyre was much more dismissive: "...to say that he was made uncomfortable at CNN because of his Hispanic heritage, I think it's close to delusional."

The most accurate comment on the show came from Paul Farhi:

Well, I mean, CNN is an employer, and in America, if you criticize your employer the way he did, you're going to lose your job. He went public. It's on satellite radio. Potentially now millions of people have heard Rick Sanchez' criticism of his own company. Not kosher.

Also see Matthew Yglesias: Rick Sanchez for a perspective from a Cuban-Jewish blogger.

planet of the arabs

Planet of the Arabs, was an official selection of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It is a trailer-esque montage of Muslim/Arab stereotypes as portrayed in American film and television. The selection of films strikes me as a bit dated today. They are all pre-9/11. Of course post-9/11 the images which could theoretically go into such a montage is much larger in number and more complex by several orders of magnitude. I wonder if there are any statistical breakdowns available for contemporary representations of Arabs/Muslims.

jews and the media

The whole Rick Sanchez issue reminded me of a joke from this year's Oscar award show:

Some related links:
An LA Times article, Who Runs Hollywood? C'Mon by Joel Stein who actually celebrates (to the point of gloating) the high levels of Jewish achievement in the entertainment industry.

A list of Jews in The American Media (From SimpleToRemember.com Judaism Online). Actually this one surprised me because I don't think I'd ever seen a list of names laid out like that. Did Rick Sanchez lie?

--
See also:
Mondoweiss: Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do? by Philip Weiss

rick sanchez, jon stewart, jews and the media

As you may know already, Rick Sanchez was fired from CNN, apparently because of a conversation he had on Sirius XM radio with Pete Dominick which included a passing implied mention of the role of Jews in the media.

This whole controversy is a bit surreal to me. The issue seems to have started off as just a personal conflict between Stewart and Sanchez. Over a period of time Jon Stewart repeatedly mocked Sanchez on various episodes of the Daily Show. (The Colbert Report has done similar things but to a lesser extent) For example, at one point Stewart calls Sanchez an over-caffeinated control freak (among other things) and Sanchez was featured several times on the Daily Show's "moment of zen" segment (for example in the wake of Sotomayor's nomination Stewart even did a bit including Sanchez' own mother.)

Then, this past Thursday, on the show with Pete Dominick, Rick Sanchez talked about a number of topics, his new book, his family, his faith, and his experiences of feeling marginalized in the news industry (including the mocking he's been getting from Stewart and Colbert).

Rightly or wrongly, Sanchez frames this marginalization in terms of race and class. He is Latino with a working-class upbringing in an industry where many of his colleagues are white and raised middle-to-upper-class. And if you listen to the entire interview Sanchez isn't fixated on Stewart or Jews but also mentions prejudice coming from Stephen Colbert, Glenn Beck, O'Reilly and some unnamed "top brass" at CNN as well:

Sanchez: I had a guy who works here at CNN who's a top brass come to me and say, ‘You know what, I don't want you to --

Dominick: ‘Will you wash this dish for me, Sanchez?’

Sanchez: No no, see that’s the thing; it’s more subtle. White folks usually don't see it. But we do - those of us who are minorities and women see it sometimes too from men in authority. Here, I’ll give you my example its this 'You know what, I don't want you anchoring anymore, I really don't see you as an anchor, I see you more as a reporter, I see you more as a John Quinones - you know the guy on ABC. That’s what he told me. He told me he saw me as John Quinones. Now, did he not realize that he was telling me, ‘When I see you I think of Hispanic reporters’? Cause in his mind I can’t be an anchor. An anchor is what you give the high-profile white guys, you know. So he knocks me down to that and compares me to that and it happens all the time i think. To a certain extent Jon Stewart and Colbert are the same way.

(I have to wonder if the same "top brass" Sanchez alludes to is still an executive at CNN.)

As a counter-balance, Dominick brings up Stewart's Jewishness to suggest that he is also a minority and has some understanding of Rick Sanchez's position. But based on Sanchez's childhood in Miami, Jews were just another flavor of white Anglo.

I grew up not speaking English, dealing with real prejudice every day as a kid; watching my dad work in a factory, wash dishes, drive a truck, get spit on. I’ve been told that I can’t do certain things in life simply because I was a Hispanic. My friends who are black, I’ve seen that with them; I’ve seen that with a lot of minorities. I can’t really think — although I understand the plight of Jews, and all the experiences, and the things that have happened historically for them — but I can’t say that my buddy Glen or my buddy Izzy who I grew up with in South Florida ever were prejudiced against directly simply because they were Jewish. There may have been jokes around them or about other things, but it’s kinda — you know what I’m saying, it’s kind of a different thing.

This is all context to the essential gaffe. When Dominick suggests that Stewart has minority status which should help him understand where Sanchez is coming from, Sanchez comes back with:

He’s such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

Sanchez doesn't hold Jews in the media to any special scrutiny or suspicion. He just views them as part of the dominant establishment with all other white people. If anything, he is actually indifferent about the distinction. As he says to Dominick:

You brought the whole Jewish conversation into this. I don't think Jewish has anything to do with this. I don't think you are are less apt to be prejudiced or more apt to be prejudiced because you are or aren't Jewish.

Here is a partial Transcript of the Sanchez/Dominick interview but I would definitely recommend that you go to the very first link above and listen to the whole conversation. Sanchez does not go on a rant. He does not have a meltdown. He does not say "Jews are in control of all media". (Contrary to how some of the coverage is parsing the incident).

Some other thoughts:
If CNN is so racially sensitive then how was Lou Dobbs able to stay on CNN for such a long period of time before leaving? It's pretty clear that Mexicans don't run CNN. For that matter, even Dr. Laura is still on the air after her N-word rant. She announced her retirement after the incident, but she's still basically leaving on her own terms. Helen Thomas unceremoniously lost her job within a day or so.

At the same time, how is Patrick Buchanan able to stay on the air, on MSNBC no less? I would argue that comments about Jews are much more of a third rail than comments about other groups, but the whole picture is more complex than a question of who gets offended. To be honest, I suspect that Rick Sanchez's real mistake wasn't what he said about Jon Stewart, and implied about Jews, as much as what he said about "top brass" at CNN. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, regardless of ethnicity.

Grenada's Past
thoughts on helen thomas
more on helen thomas
why don't they talk about bennett the way they talk about farrakhan?
us deports lou dobbs

Phoenix New Times: CNN Fires Rick Sanchez, Hires Eliot Spitzer, World's Most Famous "John"

naif al-muwata on the 99

I've mentioned the Muslim superhero team the 99 before, but here is Naif Al-Muwata giving a really engaging talk in anticipation of the upcoming cross-over between the 99 and the Justice League. He gets into the religious correlations of some of the more mainstream heroes (Superman, Batman, Spiderman), he talks about the thought process which inspired the 99, and some of his aspirations in terms of what the 99 comic books can do for Muslim youth.

josiah x
"'x-men' is not a cleverly named documentary about the nation of islam..."

us apologizes for syphilis experiment in guatemala

Reuters: U.S. apologizes for syphilis experiment in Guatemala

cuban muslims need help

Dripping River Water: Please help this community of Cuban Muslims

former guerrilla set to be the world's most powerful woman

The Independent: Former guerrilla Dilma Rousseff set to be the President of Brazil and the world's most powerful woman

a glance into the archives of islam

It was a little over a month ago that I "discovered" cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek. The Huffington Post did a brief article echoing some harsh things he had to say about Western Buddhism from a Marxist perspective and it made me curious about what such a person would say about Islam. As a consequence I found A Glance into the Archives of Islam where Zizek compares and contrasts Islam, Judaism and Christianity using an eclectic approach invoking Levi-Strauss, Hegel, Nietzsche, St. Paul, along with Freud and others.

Some highlights: He claims that the Muslim world effectively cock-blocked the West which was trying get with the Buddhist East. Jews and Muslims have so much trouble getting along because Judaism and Islam are "substantially one and the same thing." He also goes through some odd intellectual gymnastics in order to psychoanalyze the Muslim world by unpacking the stories of Hagar and Ishmael, Muhammad and Khadija, and even Amina and Abdullah.

Even though I was a psych major, my basic response to Freudian psychoanalysis is that most of the time "a cigar is only a cigar". And when it comes to post-modernism I mainly think that the Emperor has no clothes. (see the Sokol Affair) So I would argue that much of what Zizek said about Islam in his "Glance..." is worthless. (Although to be fair, the piece he wrote in the wake of 9/11, The Desert of the Real wasn't bad. In fact, the more articles I'm finding by him, the more I like him when he sticks to current events and popular culture). But his leaps of fantasy when it comes to Abrahamic religious history make me want to throw away Freud, and makes me wary of Lacan. I think I should reread my Frantz Fanon.

sidney, ny wants local muslims to dig up their graves

A town in upstate New York is trying to force a local Muslim religious community to dig up a small cemetery on its property and never bury anyone there again because it says it's illegal. Part of the "problem" is that there are no laws in Sidney -- or New York state, for that matter -- covering cemeteries on private land -- religious cemeteries included. Plus, the town approved the cemetery in 2005.

The cemetery is part of the Osmanlı Nakş-ı'bendi Hakkani Dergahı led by Shaykh Abdul Kerim al-Kibrisi.

For more details about the facts of the case, you can check out: Tiny Upstate New York Town Wants Local Muslims to Dig Up Their Cemetery

For me the case raises a couple of different issues. Obviously on one level its just a basic (and all-too-frequent) example of Islamophobia. What makes this case especially frustrating is that Sufi groups like the above mentioned Naqshbandis are supposed to be among the "good Muslims" and yet they are still facing difficulties finding acceptance.

islam, catholics and st. francis

Just today I got a nice note from one of my Catholic aunts in the mail. It was an article from her Church bulletin: Franciscans Lift Voices Against Tide of Anti-Muslim Rhetoric. The piece makes a number of interesting points. The article parallels the prejudice faced by American Muslims now with the difficulties faced by Catholics in an earlier period.

Pastor Jones' teaching that "Islam is of the Devil" is contrasted with the orthodox Catholic teaching out of Lumen Gentium which after describing the role of the Church and the children of Israel says:

the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohamedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.

The Islamophobia around the Ground Zero mosque is contrasted with Dignitatis Humanae's statement that:

religious groups . . . must be allowed to honor the Supreme God in public worship ... and promote institutions in which members may work together to organize their own lives. ... Religious communities also have the right not to be hindered by legislation or administrative action by the civil authority ... in erecting buildings for religious purposes, and in the acquisition and use of the property they need.

The piece also referred to an interesting anecdote about St. Francis' meeting with the Sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil during the Crusades. "Francis was not able to win the Sultan over to the Gospel of Christ, but returned to Europe impressed by the faith he had experienced among the followers of Islam, convinced that he had met other worshipers of God like himself."

It turns out that the details of the meeting between St. Francis and the Sultan are contested so the story tends to be an inkblot for how the storyteller feels about Muslim-Christian relations. Some accounts talk about St. Francis' mission to convert the infidel Saracen while others (like the statement above) emphasize the mutual respect across religious communities. In fact I would argue that Catholic doctrine generally is somewhat of an "inkblot" in the sense that one could probably identify a number of exclusive statements to counter-balance the above inclusive teachings. Nevertheless, it is nice to know that in contemporary times some voices in the Church are making the former choice instead of the latter.

i am black as well

Here is a brief documentary about Miriam Abu Khaleid, a teenage African-Arab teenager working with the Freedom Theatre and sharing her experiences of race and racism. (h/t to Magari Aziza)

see also:
the black knight
black iraqis in basra face discrimination

israel and race

Russia Times:
Inter-racial dating taboo leaves Israeli society divided
Israeli government to deport 400 children
Arabs living in Israel are accusing the Jewish state of racism

israel and ethiopian jews

Russia Times:
Israel accused of dooming Ethiopian baby boom
Ethiopian Jews: trapped in-between
Israeli schools refuse enrollment to Ethiopian-origin students

green party candidate killed by an suv while riding bike

Huff Post: Natasha Pettigrew, Green Party Senate Candidate, Dies After Being Struck By SUV While Riding Bike Like they said on South Park, if irony was made of strawberries we'd be drinking a lot of smoothies right now. Condolences to Natasha's family.

is glee racist?

Here is a mini-roundup of some articles on Glee. My take on the issue is that the first season definitely engaged in some edgy but entertaining "self-aware racism" and was mostly limited to the outlandish comments of Sue Sylvester. But based on the premiere episode of the second season, the "racism" is less self-aware, more gratuitous, and may not have quotes. It is certainly less entertaining. Let's see how the rest of the season shapes up.

The Stir: Is Glee Racist? by Brittney Drye
Charice on Glee, Racism and the Corporate Media by Yfur Porsche Fernandez
Feminist Frequency: Top 5 Problems with Glee: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Season 2 Premiere

the f-word: feminism in islam

Religion Dispatches: The “F” word: Feminism in Islam by Amina Wadud

mooz-lum on npr

NPR: Film 'Mooz-lum' Confronts Public Perceptions Of Islam is an interview with film creator Qasim Basir and actor Roger Guenveur Smith. I liked hearing more from Basir and I hope the film does well.