The West's fear of Islam is no excuse for racism

ON A rainy summer afternoon in 1992, a certain Colonel Popovic welcomed me to the notorious concentration camp at Manjaca with a question. "Do you know what jihad is?" he roared. My heart sank. He could have stepped out of any Hollywood movie or Western newspaper report, let alone from the heart of Serbian nationalism. Inside Manjaca were the "ethnically cleansed" Muslim survivors of north-western Bosnia. But listening to Colonel Popovic, I reflected I had heard the same pernicious, insidious words used about Arab Muslims in the Middle East.

A reporter is uniquely positioned to observe the cancer of racism. Just a year later, I was in southern Lebanon, interviewing hundreds of Palestinian Hamas members who had been illegally deported from Israel and the occupied territories and marooned on a mountainside inside Lebanon. Most of them were intelligent men, some with university degrees, several educated in Britain. They were against the "peace process", but only a few of them believed violence could achieve their ends. A week later, I was back in Bosnia where, on CNN, I heard them described as "extremists". A further three weeks later in the California resort of Pismo Beach, I was watching the American CBS television channel and there were the same Palestinians on their cold mountainside, this time described as "suspected terrorists".

Pismo Beach was an ironic place to witness this transformation of humans into potential beasts. For it was on the sands here that Hollywood first immortalised the Arab as a heroic son of the desert. This was where Rudolph Valentino made The Sheikh, where the Arab was defined as a romantic, courageous figure in the third decade of the century. Unfortunately, you only have to watch the scratched old movie to realise that Sheikh Ahmed is not an Arab. "His father was an Englishman," says the script. "His mother a Spaniard." So that's all right then.

Later this week, in the sublimely neutral countryside of Ditchley Park, some of the great and the good will be gathering to debate how we in the West have demeaned, stereotyped and racially abused Muslims in our press, television and cinema. Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, former US ambassador Edward Djerejian, Arab editor Khaled al-Maeena, Rabbi Neuberger and sundry diplomats and journalists will spend three days discussing the ever-more dangerous "Islamo-phobia" that is currently infecting our reporting and vision of the Muslim world - and especially of the Middle East.

They will have a lot to talk about. For the portrayal of Arab Muslims over the past 30 years - in our cartoons and films as well as words - has reached Nazi-like proportions. Greedy, hook-nosed, vicious, violent, rapacious, turbaned or "kaffiyehed" Iranians and Arabs have replaced the cartoon Jews of Volkischer Beobachter or Der Ewige Jude. I had just arrived in the Middle East more than 20 years ago when I first saw, on television, the movie Ashanti. It starred Omar Sharif and Roger Moore and portrayed Arabs as slave traders, murderers, child-molesters and sadists. The film was, said the credits, partly made on location in Israel.

I was stunned. No wonder so many reports spoke of Arabs as "terrorists". No wonder so many editorials referred to "terrorist animals". And the more films I watched, the more cartoons I saw, the more editorials I read, the more our fear of the despicable, fearful, alien Muslim seemed to be spreading. If the Nazis could portray the Jews as sub-humans who threatened Western "civilisation" and "culture" so could we portray Muslims as sinister, evil, over-breeding and worthy of destruction.

How come, I asked myself, that a Palestinian who murdered innocent Israelis was in our reports a "terrorist" - which he surely was - while an Israeli who murdered 29 innocent Palestinians in a Hebron mosque was merely an "extremist", a "zealot" or (my favourite) "a member of the Jewish underground"? How come a Hizbullah guerrilla fighting Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon was an "Islamic fundamentalist" while Croatian or Serb killers in Bosnia were not "Christian fundamentalists"? Even our most right-wing newspapers refer to "IRA terrorists" rather than "Catholic terrorists". How come an Arab who threatens America (Ossama bin Laden) is a "super-terrorist", but an Israeli who murders his own prime minister is just a "fanatic"?

Who laid these ground rules, these vicious double standards? You only have to go to Hollywood to understand part of the answer. Navy SEALS, True Lies, Broadcast News, Delta Force, even The American President - remember the Arab "terrorist" attack on US forces in Israel which leads "our" president to launch an assault on Libya? - are only a few of the dozens of movies to portray Arab Muslims or Iranians as a hateful, cruel people.

An investigation by Professor Jack Shaheen of Southern Illinois University provides a list of expressions used about Arabs in Hollywood movies (most of which have been widely shown in Britain), including "scumbag", "son- of-a-bitch", "a fly in a piece of shit", "animals", "bastards", "sucking pigs", "stateless savages", "desert skunks" and, of course, "terrorists". Cartoons and American papers routinely show Arabs as virtual animals.

In 1996, the Miami Herald pictured a bearded ape creature with "Islam" on his turban, saying "We bomb innocent women and children to smithereens". Two days after the bombing of the World Trade Centre - a wicked act that was indeed carried out by Muslims - the New York Post carried a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty with this distorted version of its poem: "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, your terrorists, your murderers, your slime, your evil cowards, your religious fanatics..."

Needless to say, when Americans bombed the Oklahoma government building, Muslim "terrorists" were the first to be blamed. "In the name of Islam", one of Rupert Murdoch's US papers headlined over a picture of a dead child. Even in Britain, we did the same. Bernard Levin wrote that: "As for Oklahoma, it will be called Khartoum on the Mississippi, and woe betide anyone who calls it anything else." Needless to say, when Americans bombed the Oklahoma government building, Muslim "terrorists" were the first to be blamed. Once the culprits turned out to be Americans, the word "terrorism" faded from the headlines. They were "fanatics". A similar transformation occurred when the "terrorist" bombing of a TWA flight turned out to be a disaster probably caused by a technical fault.

Turbaned mullahs became stock figures in British cartoons from the Seventies - especially in Punch. By 1992, The Times could show a Muslim wiping his bloodied sabre on a union flag while an innocent woman lay dead behind him. The Rushdie affair brought forth a contagion of such images while journalists and political leaders warned us of the dangers of a coming war with Islam. "Muslim fundamentalism" announced Nato secretary general Willy Claes in 1995, "is at least as dangerous as communism once was... It represents terrorism, religious fanaticism."

Yes, I know the Arabs can be their own worst enemies. They have produced some truly grotesque dictators and their violent groups have committed some evil deeds in the name of Islam. It didn't need 23 years in the Arab world to make me rage about those puritanical, infantile clerics - Christian as well as Muslim or Jew - who refuse to see that the world is a complex society worthy of compassion as well as dogma. And in the Cairo press, Jews are often pictured in top hats with money bags - the classic Nazi image - although it was a Jewish-American friend who lamented to me the other day about the number of anti-Arab cartoons and films produced by Jewish Americans.

So this week's Ditchley conference will have plenty to discuss. It should not forget the flaws of Muslim societies or the cruelty of Arab regimes. Guests should remember how seriously - and rightly so - we regard any racial or anti-Semitic slur against Jews. But I wonder if they should not also ask themselves whether it is time to show the same sensitivity, the same concern and - given the fact that Arabs are also a Semitic people - the same hatred of racism when Muslims of the Middle East are portrayed in the same manner that Hitler used for the doomed Jews of Europe.