Randa Jarrar and the racist bias of the mainstream news media
A tenured professor at California State University at Fresno has come under attack after she criticized the late First Lady Barbara Bush for her family’s racist assault against Palestinians and the Arab World. There is no doubt that the Bush family has represented more violence against Arabs and Muslims than any other American president. Doesn’t that justify the anger and even hate some might have to the family?
By Ray Hanania
Barbara Bush didn’t take the spotlight often when her husband, George H.W. Bush, and son, George W. Bush, served as American presidents. But, she was in the spotlight last week when she passed away at the age of 92 and her passing stirred up much sympathy, and some controversy.
The first controversy started when it was announced that President Donald Trump would not attend the funeral. The mainstream news media went berserk denouncing him as “insensitive” and “hateful” of women, or noting that the president played golf instead.
Never mind that past presidents have not attended the funerals of many First Ladies. President Barack Obama didn’t attend the funerals of Republican first ladies Nancy Reagan and Betty Ford. And President George W Bush did not attend the 2007 memorial services for Democrat Lady Bird Johnson.
Trump sent his wife, First Lady Melania Trump to the funeral, and that caused another imbalanced, biased media assault. The vicious media attacks against First Lady Melania Trump is disgusting! The media is disrespectful, but they defend their right to criticize any politician, except when it benefits them not too. Like this week when an obscure professor of Palestinian, Greek and Egyptian heritage who was raised in Kuwait, Randa Jarrar, unleashed her anger over U.S. Foreign policy in her tweets criticizing Barbara Bush.
Jarrar posted this one last week, and it drew immediate condemnation:
“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words.”
The writers attacking her demanded Jarrar be fired from her job at the University of California at Fresno, where she is tenured. Vicious attacks against here are pouring out of every dark sinkhole in American journalism.
University President Joseph Castro issued a video response condemning Jarrar’s public comments. Click this link to watch the video or use the widget below:
Many of the critics were Jewish and supporters of Israel. Jarrar supports the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) movement which has caused so much irritation to Israel and to the apartheid-like government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mitch Albom, all the way from his biased, one-sided ivory tower perch at the Detroit Free Press, slammed Jarrar, who also tweeted that she can’t be fire from her job because she is “tenured.” He quoted other Jarrar tweets including:
“Either you are against these pieces of s— and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem.”
“I’m happy the witch is dead. can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. byyyeeeeeeee.”
And like many of Jarrar’s critics, he concluded, “And lost in this debate is the simple fact that Jarrar behaved like an obnoxious, petulant child. Her timing was insensitive, her glee at another’s death was disgusting, her lack of empathy for a grieving family was sub-human, and her chest pounding of tenure, a concept put into effect by the very government she apparently abhors, was hypocritical. It’s also beneath the behavior you’d expect from any teacher.”
Why is Albom writing about Randa Jarrar? He’s a sports columnist. That’s how deep anti-Palestinian hate resides in the mainstream American news media.
Albom also suggested that despite Jarrar’s tenured job protection, she should be fired. It was a demand made by many American columnists and TV talking heads including an “analysis” news story which read more like an opinion column distributed by the Washington Post through it’s syndication. Here’s the link from the Denver Post which carried the “story” by writers Cleve R. Wootson Jr., and Susan Svrluga.
Jarrar definitely used tough language. You can call it mean, insensitive and even ugly. But, can anyone deny that the former First Lady is where she is at because her husband and her son engaged in some of the most brutal and violent wars against Arabs, people like Jarrar?
George H.W. Bush was the least offensive, but led the assault on Iraq and it’s dictator Saddam Hussein imposing an embargo that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians that he argued were the result of Saddam Hussein’s actions, not the U.S. Embargo.
And then there is George W. Bush, who exploited one of the worst acts of terrorism against America on Sept. 11, 2001 to justify a war against Iraq. Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the investigation into the 9/11 terrorism attack to include false assertions that Saddam Hussein was involved.
In fact, they were more concerned about taking down Saddam Hussein and Iraq than they were with punishing the people responsible for the terrorism, Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. More resources and forces were sent to Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein — who survived the Bush wars — than were used to destroy al-Qaeda.
One can accurately argue that al-Qaeda continued growing and engaging in terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001 in a large part because not enough effort was made to stop them.
Ok, forget about the truth of the Iraq wars and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were murdered in their homes, at weddings and playing in parks by American forces under the 2nd President Bush.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, although the disregard for the well-being of Iraqi civilians in the U.S. military assaults undermined the Bush assertions that the war against Iraq was intended to “Free the Iraqi people.”
What bullshit.
Yea, set all that aside for a moment, because that’s not the only hypocrisy in this pathetic attack against someone whose only offense is to be insensitive in the days after a person’s passing.
For example, the violence by Israel that began on March 30, 2018. March 30 marks “Land Day” for the Palestinian people. That’s when in 1976, Israel massacred six Arab Israeli citizens who were protesting against the government’s forced and illegal confiscations of non-Jewish lands to expand Jewish settlement inside Israel. More than 100 other Israeli Arab “citizens” were injured in the brutal police attacks against the protestors and hundreds more were arrested.
This past March 30, thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip marched to the border with Israel and protested loudly demanding the right to return to the homes and lands that Israel stole from them in 1948 and again in 1967. In response, Israel’s rightwing, apartheid-like government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered Israeli snipers to shoot-to-kill any protesters who came close to the border.
They didn’t have to get close and they didn’t have to be threatening. Israeli soldiers have been shooting protesters, including many children, in the head like fairgoers at a carnival.
I didn’t see a column from Mitch Albom denouncing Israel’s murder of children, who were shot in the head by Israeli snipers. In fact, most of the U.S. mainstream news media has been playing down the weekly killings by Israel.
So far, 41 unarmed Palestinians including several children and teenagers have been killed by sniper fire from the heavily armed Israeli soldiers. It’s difficult to find that number because the media coverage of the weekly protests and killings has faded away. You have to go to the Palestinian media, which is censored and assaulted by the Israelis, to get updates these days on how many Palestinians Israel has killed at the Gaza border as hundreds of Israelis sit and picnic nearby cheering each and every time a Palestinian civilian is struck in the head by an Israeli snipers’ bullet..
Ever since the controversy over her comments exploded into a frenzy of condemnation, Randa Jarrar has had to go underground to avoid the vicious threats and personal attacks. Her Facebook and Twitter pages have been shuttered to the public. Maybe they were taken down, or maybe they were just “locked” by Jarrar herself. You can’t get facts because the mainstream American news media doesn’t provide facts any more, just bullying, biased coverage and slanted reporting.
But on the scales of the biased and racist American mainstream news media, the facts are clear and the imbalance in justice is obvious. You can kill a Palestinian child without consequence. But God forbid that you express indignation in racy language about the passing of an American First Lady.
Murder is less important than politics in America, when the “perps” are Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist, author, and former Chicago City Hall reporter. Reach him at his personal website at www.Hanania.com or by email at rghanania@gmail.com.)
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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