Arabic words are scary for English speakers. Routinely the English-speaking world is taught a single new one, and invariably, it is meant to frighten them. Never do you find on the lips of every British or American journalist an Arabic word related to love or humour or popular culture. We are told about "jihad", "mujahideen", "dhimmi", "kafir", "kuffar", etc.
Occasionally, we are even given a distorted meaning of a word simply to render it more frightening. As every beginning Arabic student knows, "madrasa" simply means "school", but most Americans will tell you that it refers to an Islamic school, most likely one where children are taught about jihad.
As a godless communist, I have every interest in defending women's rights and no interest in defending conservative men or the Muslim faith. However, as part of the latest push to vilify Arabs and Muslims, the bourgeois media has now decided that everyone must be aware of the latest evil Muslim/Arab threat to women: The Arabic term "taharrush", which now brings up hundreds of thousands of results on Google.
The Daily Mail, the definitive example of dangerous bourgeois "news" media, tells us:
"There remains debate about what defines 'taharrush' - some still insist it is a reference to flirting - though scholars argue its definition changed after the attacks seen in Egypt from 2011 onwards."
Nothing
could be further from the truth. The definition is "harassment".
"Harassment" as a concept is of course debated in Arabic, but then, is
it not in English? But the bourgeois media needs this word. And they
need it to mean something terrifying and tell us something terrifying,
and for good reason.
Right now, thousands of poor refugees from Arab countries in desperate need of shelter because of the war in Syria that NATO and GCC states have fomented for their own imperialist designs. The bourgeois media of those same countries now needs to provide excuses for its inhumane treatment of the poor of that country. The bourgeois media which calls for us to turn them away now provides, for an English-speaking audience unlikely to have access to Arabic language information, a convenient "fact": These filthy Arabs bring with them a culture so obsessed with public harassment (and even gang-rape) of women that they have invented a word to encapsulate their unchecked rapaciousness. The Daily Mail reminds us of one of "our" white women who thus fell victim to "the Arab phenomenon": "The Arab phenomenon first came to the attention of the Western world when South African reporter Lara Logan, working for CBS, was set upon by a large group of men while reporting on celebrations in Tahrir Square, Egypt, in 2011. " |
In order to justify endless profits through endless wars it becomes necessary to paint those with whom we wage war as villainous, even comic bookish, thus making more acceptable acts of violence and carnage.
ReplyDeleteIn a population of 1.5 billion followers of Islam, those who we classify as terrorists number in the few tens of thousands, yet we see constantly in our media a demeaning of all.