The horrific, horrible revelation of Fareed Zakaria on the US election

Nov 09, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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In a column in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria made a deeply learned observation about American sociology and the nature of American society. He was writing about the near victory of Trump and he offered some advice to the Democratic Party in the future.
Zakaria argues that the Democratic Party because of its psychic embrace of American Blacks, because of the historical mistreatment of that race tends to empathize with all minority groups. He said this is a methodological (my word) mistake. He was looking at Trump’s collection of votes from these non-White communities.
Zakaria articulates nicely the point that many ethnic minorities do not identify with the justified struggles of Black America and in fact, see themselves in mainstream ways that make them think that the US system, even under Trump, is a sociology that has allowed them to take a nice place in the American fabric.
Here is the part that should make you not want to go through the emotional upset of what Zakaria wrote. He intoned that some of the most vicious racist people he encountered in the US are from immigrant groups; obviously he is referring to non-White people. Just in case you might not know; Zakaria is from India and is brown skin. Before we return to American minorities, let us divert to Algeria in the 1960s because the diversion is painfully relevant.
There is a 92-year-old radical White woman still alive today in the US. Her name is Elaine Mokhtefi. Her memoir has been recently published titled “Algeria, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers.” I haven’t read it so I will be quoting her from an article she wrote in the “London Review of Books,” Volume 39, No. 11, June 1997.
As a young left wing idealist, Mokhtefi travelled to one of the most Marxist, Third World countries in 1962. Algeria was home to the most Marxist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist groups in the world. The Black Panthers in the US, fleeing oppression in the US, opened up their international office in Algeria. The government assigned Mokhtefi to the Panthers and she spent an inordinate amount of time with the Panther’s iconic leader, Eldridge Cleaver.
In describing her time with the Panthers in that article, Mokhtefi said she was concerned with the open, conspicuous presence of the Panthers. They were to be seen sporting and doing other things quite visibly and she said she was worried because the Panthers were not aware that Arabs do not like Black Americans. She observed that bigotry in Arab culture in 1962, almost 60 years ago. Can you imagine how much more racist against non-White people the Arabs have become. Back to Zakaria.
He did not identify which immigrant group he was referring to. But if you travel to Canada, US and Europe, you can easily guess which race Zakaria has in mind. I will offer two examples from the days when I was a student at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. Graduate students have to be invigilators for the official exams of undergraduate.
I invigilated an exam with a Pakistani at McMaster University. He was lily White and showed open content for Caribbean people. He made it quite known to me that he disliked the people from Bangladesh because they were of inferior quality to the Urdu speaking people of Pakistan. In the doctoral programme at University of Toronto, we had a rich student from Lebanon. That woman was shamelessly racist and thought she was a White woman. Ironically, the student that put her down was a White girl from South Africa.
Make no mistake about it. Once Iranians, Syrians and Afghanistanis arrive in the US, they do not identify with non-White groups. I have mentioned on more than one occasion in these columns of mine that Arab people tend to be racist more than Caucasians Arab and judge other humans by colour. Give me a White American any day than an Arab.
So can we guess which group Zakaria has in mind? My take is that among them would be Arabs, South Koreans and Japanese. Second generation Latin people in the US have integrated and see themselves as Americans and are not into active struggle for Hispanic rights. In that article, Zakaria pointed to a poll that concluded that Trump secured 35 percent of the Muslim vote.
I doubt that poll is correct but it surely wasn’t 10 percent. Who are these Muslims? When you read this, you wonder how Nigerian, Ethiopian, Tanzanian Muslims could vote for Trump. These were not the Muslims that give Trump his ballots. They were from Pakistan and the Arab world.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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