Transmissible?
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

  

Washington has been roiled by mud-slinging within the halls of the US Congress. The target is Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert from Colorado portrayed Ilhan Omar as part of a “Jihad Squad” and even insinuated, riding with her in an elevator, that “we should be fine” because Omar was not wearing a backpack. (“House GOP leaders face calls to confront Islamophobia among their ranks,” Washington Post, December 1, 2021.)

 

Significantly, amidst all the talk of sisterhood, feminism, and female empowerment, the attackers and the attacked happened to be females. While males are often demonized as oppressors, what escapes adequate scrutiny is woman-on-woman torment. Not to be outdone, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Greene also assailed Ihlan Omar, on a November 30 Steve Bannon podcast, as “pro-Al-Qaeda” and “anti-American.” (Io Dodds, “Marjorie Taylor Greene launches Islamophobic attack on Ilhan Omar,” Independent, November 30, 2021.)

Digging deeper, one finds nothing new here. It is simply a continuation of a sordid pattern in American public life. Muslim women are often derided as being overly subservient and subjugated. When a young Muslim woman, Rima Fakih, won the Miss USA title in 2010, instead of being lauded, she was subjected to ugly attacks and branded as “Miss Hezbollah.” (Khaled Diab, “Miss USA 2010 and a confused conspiracy theory,” Guardian, May 18, 2010.) Helen Thomas, long-time grande dame of the White House Press Corps, was forced to relinquish her regular perch in the White House briefing room and retire in 2010, when she voiced displeasure over Israeli actions and policies toward Palestinians.

Why is this happening? A few factors may be posited here. Number 1, power imbalance: The lopsided power equilibrium encourages a climate of impunity wherein institutional scales are tilted against a target.

 

Number 2, lack of accountability: With little or no presence in the power structure, media, academia, government, or law, there is hardly any pressure or momentum to hold offenders to account. And even when on rare occasions it is done, mostly it is derisively dismissed as no big deal.

Number 3, perpetrators know they can get away with it: This well-founded sense of immunity breeds a sense of impunity in culprits that there won’t be consequences for misdeeds. Cowards strike when they feel secure.

Those at the receiving end often have difficulty in managing the battle of perceptions, wherein their voices are muted, and the offenders’ amplified.

The pandemic has revealed how vulnerable Asian-American women – with Sino-Korean features – have felt who hitherto were leading quiet, low-visibility lives being immersed in benign tasks. But that all changed when the pandemic hit. In the search for easy answers, they became easy targets. When 8 people, almost all Asian-American women, were killed at spas north of Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021, the police spokesman there expressed empathy for the killer, saying he had had “a really bad day.” (Washington Post, March 18, 2021.)

Fueled by paranoid propaganda over the ‘China virus,’ there has been a rising incidence of assaults on Asian-American women, many, intriguingly, by black perpetrators. On May 20, 2021, President Biden signed a bill to enhance law enforcement response to violent attacks and hate crimes against people of Asian descent, of which more than 6,600 (43% Chinese) had been recorded in the preceding year (Catie Edmondson and Jim Tankersley, “Biden Signs Bill Addressing Hate Crimes Against Asian-Americans,” New York Times, May 20, 2021.)

Being quiet, along with the desire to fit in, has neither insulated nor shielded the Asian community from extremist violence and bigotry. They can mask their faces but they cannot mask their features. The official ratcheting up of Sino-US tensions has had a predictable spillover effect on the Asian community, just as escalating Mideast tensions has had on the American Muslim community. With focus now on the new southern African Omicron variant, perhaps the more deadly form embedded center-stage is being overlooked. Hate, fear, and anger are more transmissible than any form of pandemic.