Richard Jeffrey Newman

Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Steven Green­house in The New York Times, that’s around 25% of the 3,386 reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion claims filed with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion (EEOC) in the year end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2009 – an awful lot con­sid­er­ing that Mus­lims make up less than 2% of the pop­u­la­tion in the United States. It’s also 20% more com­plaints than were filed by Mus­lims in 2008 and 60% more than in 2005.

The com­plaints allege harass­ment and other forms of dis­crim­i­na­tion that range from name-calling to the dis­rup­tion of prayer breaks. The EEOC has filed some pretty high pro­file law­suits in response to some of the com­plaints. In August, for exam­ple, the EEOC brought a suit against JBS Swift on behalf of 160 Somali immi­grants, claim­ing that “super­vi­sors and work­ers had cursed them for being Mus­lim; thrown blood, meat and bones at them; and inter­rupted their prayer breaks.” Other com­pa­nies against which the EEOC has filed include Aber­crom­bie & Fitch and a Four Points by Sher­a­ton Hotel.

Green­house ends his piece with a story about Imane Boud­lal, who is from Casablanca, Morocco. My own sense is that Ms. Boud­lal is being unrea­son­able, but I am curi­ous what oth­ers think – and let me also say here that any­one who tries in dis­cussing this post to use Boudlal’s story to under­cut the over­all point of this post or of Greenhouse’s arti­cle will be banned from this thread. Here are the last three paragraph’s of the article:

Imane Boud­lal, a 26-year-old from Casablanca, Morocco, had worked for two years as a host­ess at the Sto­ry­tellers Café at Dis­ney­land in Ana­heim, Calif., when she decided she would begin wear­ing her hijab at work dur­ing Ramadan last month. Ms. Boud­lal said her super­vi­sors told her that if she insisted on wear­ing the scarf, she could work either in back or at a tele­phone job. She refused and has not worked while the dis­pute continues.

Dis­ney offi­cials said her head scarf clashed with the restaurant’s early-1900s theme, and they pro­posed a period hat with some scarf that would fall over her ears. Ms. Boud­lal rejected that as un-Muslim. “They wanted to hide the fact that I looked Mus­lim,” she said.

Michael Grif­fin, a Dis­ney spokesman, said the company’s “cast mem­bers” agree to com­ply with its appear­ance guide­lines. “When cast mem­bers request excep­tions to our poli­cies for reli­gious rea­sons, we strive to make accom­mo­da­tions,” he said, adding that Dis­ney has accom­mo­dated more than 200 such requests since 2007.

…with­out get­ting into the whole ques­tion of whether the term anti­semitism should apply only to Jews and with­out the com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor that not all Mus­lims are Semitic. Why? Because if you replace the word Mus­lim with the word Jew in what this man says and alter the his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences appro­pri­ately, he would be speak­ing – intel­li­gently, artic­u­lately, with good humor and a con­trolled poten­tially per­sua­sive anger; which is what is most fright­en­ing to me – some of the most per­ni­cious of clas­si­cal anti­se­mitic tropes. And so I wish I could use the term anti­semitism, not to make this about the Jews, or even to con­jure Jew-hatred, but because I wish I had a word, a sin­gle, pow­er­ful word that would cap­ture the xeno­pho­bic, racist, essen­tial­iz­ing, reli­gious hatred of Mus­lims that this man is espous­ing. Muslim-bashing doesn’t do it for me because Muslim-bashing cap­tures nei­ther the tone nor the intel­li­gence with which the man speaks.

My own under­stand­ing is that the build­ing at ground zero that the Mus­lim orga­ni­za­tions have pro­posed is going to be a com­mu­nity cen­ter that includes a space for prayer – which is very dif­fer­ent from build­ing a mosque. Now, whether or not it is appro­pri­ate to have any religion-specific build­ing at ground zero, com­mu­nity cen­ter or oth­er­wise, seems to me a legit­i­mate ques­tion, but even if this man’s descrip­tion of the pro­posed build­ing as a mosque were accu­rate – and, come on, a 13-story mosque? That just doesn’t make sense – his argu­ment is not about the build­ing per se; his argu­ment, which sounds an awful lot like the argu­ment in books like The Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion, is about assert­ing that Mus­lims have an agenda of world-domination. Watch­ing it sent chills down my spine, because I am very aware of the kind of vio­lence and oppres­sion that this kind of rhetoric can lead to, and I say that not as a cloaked ref­er­ence to the Holo­caust, or to any other instances of the oppres­sion of the Jews specif­i­cally, but as a ref­er­ence to the ways that all oppres­sors fash­ion an intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion – and thereby cre­ate an intel­lec­tual his­tory that can­not be erased – for the oppres­sions that they prosecute.