From: ronf@panther3.panther.mot.com (Ron Feigen)
Subject: Re: Stop the Racist Articles
Organization: Motorola Panther Project, Chandler, AZ
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 23:11:53 GMT


I saw this in soc.culture.arabic and thought it was worthwile cross-posting


In article <l9np9pINN5lh@cajal.usc.edu> khademi@cajal.usc.edu (Peyvand Khademi) writes:
>
>It's refreshing and heartening to hear the voice of reason and
>enlightened principle rise amid the litany of rhetoric on this Iranian/
>Arab thread.
>
>In <jamshid.714849354@cgl.ucsf.edu>, Jamshid Naghizadeh writes:
>
>> SCI is not the school yard where people can throw around ethnic or 
>> racist jokes  for laughs or enjoyment. This is a powerful medium 
>> with over 20000 subcribers many of them non-Iranains. These jokes 
>> and racist remarks create ill feeling between us and our Arab 
>> neighbors.
>
>Jamshid, you make a very good point.  Your analogy of the school yard
>is particularly poignant:  ethnic bias, resentment and hatred are
>childish.  A child imitates behavior. A mature adult investigates,
>reasons, ponders.  For centuries, even millennia, Iranians have
>hated Arabs, the English have hated the French, the Chinese have hated
>the Japanese, and everyone has hated the Jews.  Each generation learns
>the hate from the previous.  Each child is burdened with the festering
>hate brought on by attachment to perceived historical injustices.
>This is caveman behavior.  Time to grow up.  Time to look into each
>others eyes and see not ethnicity, but humanity.  After taking that
>critical, first step, time to set about the difficult, perhaps even
>torturous task of disentangling our psyches from the hatred and
>learning to love.  How many of us Iranians have ever come into contact
>with an Arab, approached him or her with openness and allowed his or
>her humanity to touch our hearts?  Far too few.  If we are honest with
>ourselves, the likely after-thought from the most civil of such
>encounters is a snide, "Nice guy.  Too bad he's an Arab."  Who among us
>is not repulsed by the vileness of the KKK, or the Neo-Nazi movement?
>And if we reflect for a minute we'll discover that what really offends
>our inner sensibilities even more so than the dreadful actions they
>perpetrate is the reeking, naked hatred that emanates from them.  Yet
>we sit smugly at our terminals arms folded, and say, "that's ugly; I'm
>sure glad _I_ am not like that."  And in an instant, we are stretching
>our fingers, flames at the ready, full of righteousness, about to
>revisit "history's dark hall of fame."
>
>Prejudice is prejudice, bigotry is bigotry and hate is hate.  Not that
>history is not full of injustice, but to concentrate on that is to
>perpetuate the cycle of hate.  Whether an Iranian child learns to hate
>Arabs, or an Arab child learns to resent and despise Jews, whether a
>Turkish child is poisoned with hatred for Armenians, or vice-versa is
>purely circumstancial to where the child is born.  Dreadful as it may
>be, all socities have developed the knack to pass down the hatred;
>that's the one universal constant.  The challenge of the new world
>order is for our loyalties to expand from provincial to global, our
>sense of self from nationality to humanity, and our focus of attention
>from addressing the injustices of the past to meeting the challenges
>of our joint future.  The key, IMHO, is to stop pointing the finger at
>others and to look within.
>
>
>Regards
>Peyv&
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Peyvand Mark Khademi
>Department of Computer Science         khademi@cajal.usc.edu
>University of Southern California      Los Angeles


-- 

>
Ron Feigen
ronf@panther.mot.com
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon