Wall Street Journal Serves Up Stereotypes, Smears About Dearborn, Michigan
It’s repulsive.
Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Steven Stalinsky titled, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.” Although Muslims use the word “jihad” to describe three different types of struggle, most non-Muslims — especially the WSJ target audience — translate the word simply as “holy war.”
The article’s sub-hed is “Imams and politicians in the Michigan city side with Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.” (Imams refers to Islamic leadership.)
Dearborn, Michigan, is a suburb of Detroit with a significant Arab American population. I should stress the “American” part of Arab American, as many of their families have been here since the early 20th Century. Almost half of Dearborn’s population is Muslim. However, they are people, not a dangerous monolith. As Dr. Sally Howell from the University of Michigan-Dearborn told The New York Times last year, “There are Arab Christians in Dearborn. There’s a working class, a professional class, Republicans and Democrats. The Arab community in Dearborn reflects the full diversity of political points of view and cultural identifications, and it’s all held within this enclave.”
During an interview on Sunday with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said that after the WSJ op-ed was published, “We received many calls from faith leaders across the community who no longer felt safe.” Hammoud increased the police presence at houses of worship and other public places where Muslims and Arab Americans might gather. He posted on social media, “This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn. Stay vigilant.”
President Joe Biden responded to the op-ed on social media Sunday:
“Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong. That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn — or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms.”
Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow from Michigan called out the WSJ by name: “The @WSJ column is outrageous, dangerous and just plain wrong!” Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who hopes to replace Stabenow, also responded with appropriate disgust: “Bigotry. Hatred. Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim. If the headline was about any other minority — with the worst stereotype of that group — it would have never gotten through the editors at the WSJ.”
This is true, expect for the part where the WSJ would ever recoil at smearing other minority groups. Just last week, the WSJ editorial board declared, “Chicago Votes for Hamas,” because the City Council and Mayor Brandon Johnson passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. “Skeptics wonder when the mayor will support a cease-fire on the West Side,” the editorial board snarked, because violent crime in the area is merely a rhetorical cudgel for them and not an issue of legitimate concern. However, this “joke” suggests that Johnson represents the criminals and not the city’s law enforcement. Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che would make the same joke a few days later. When you have the same punchlines as the WSJ, maybe you should evaluate your comedic sensibilities.
I’m fairly certain, though, that WSJ editors would immediately nix a headline that disparages a mostly white group. No media outlet refers to predominately MAGA communities so callously. In fact, we’re usually instructed to empathize with them so we can better understand why they reject a multicultural democracy or even observable reality. The many (and quite tedious) profiles about Donald Trump supporters are rarely judgmental and never frame them as a direct threat to the nation, which is quite something considering that Trump supporters stormed the Capitol three years ago. When polls revealed that “MAGA-identifying Republicans” preferred Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to US President Joe Biden, the media reported this concerning fact with an almost matter-of-fact shrug.
This is why I won’t even dignify the premise of Stalinsky’s op-ed. I presume there are Dearborn residents who are not pro-Israel, which doesn’t make them reflexively pro-Hamas, of course. However, even if they were pro-Hamas and pro-Iran, they are still Americans and holding misguided political positions is our birthright. According to exit polls from the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary, four out of 10 Trump voters believed the Confederacy should’ve won the Civil War. The media didn’t suggest non-treasonous Americans lock their doors and windows.
The same day that the WSJ published its offensive Dearborn op-ed, it ran this piece that reeks of Weimar-era Germany: “Incompetent Elites Make Trump Look Appealing.”
The sub-hed added an extra coat of populism over the white nationalism.
His supporters don’t love everything about him but are sick of being disdained and misgoverned.
I know I’m damn tired of hearing about how people with so little demonstrated self-respect nonetheless demand that we respect them. There’s never even the pretense of reciprocity. If you so much as suggest that marginalized people might have legitimate cause to feel “disdained and misgoverned,” you’re accused of promoting a victim mentality or, worse, encouraging violence. Only white cis Christians deserve collective understanding. Everyone else must simply be controlled before they lash out.
The WSJ is not alone in dehumanizing Muslims and Arab Americans. Here’s what the New York Times ran on Friday:
Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who admits he’s watched too much Animal Planet, applies Kipling’s The Jungle Book logic to the very serious situation in the Middle East. Everyone’s an animal! The US is “an old lion” and Benjamin Netanyahu is a lemur. That’s not so bad. He’s less flattering, though, about other nations and their people.
Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.”
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host — Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq — and eat it from the inside out.
Friedman says Hamas is “like the trap-door spider,” which is arguably a step up from the parasitoid wasp. Spiders have some positive depictions in media. There’s Spider-Man and Wilbur’s MILF friend Charlotte. You cried as a kid when you read Charlotte’s Web. No one cares if a wasp dies, and perhaps that’s why Friedman argues that the lion and lemur have no “counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.”
Don’t you hate it when your cute Pixar movie takes a dark turn into genocide?
I confess I lack Friedman’s layered insights into the Middle East conflict, but I do think everyone involved is a person, not an animal or a stereotype but an individual with their own identity and unique perspective. That’s also true of the people from Dearborn, Michigan.
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I’ve read enough articles about MAGA supporters to come to the conclusion that empathy isn’t deserved. If you choose to be willfully ignorant, that’s on you. The WSJ perpetuating stereotypes seems on brand.
The “fuck your feelings” crowd should understand that this works both ways.
The dehumanization is thick and rancid.
Something you pointed out in this is something I've long felt is an indication of the privileged people the WSJ and other media outlets work for. Isn't it interesting how acceptable it is to shit on predominately majority-minority cities (or at least Democratic) and states?
Imagine the hew and cry if Democratic politicians and media figures decided to just constantly crap on, say, Idaho or Nebraska, or talk disparagingly about "Oklahoma values?" Huntington (West Virginia) values?
It makes me sick.