How opposing racial stereotypes combine to create anti-Arab racism

An "interesting" conspiracy tale circulated in the wake of September 11, 2001. It went like this: Arab Muslims were too dumb to plan something like the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington; it must have been Mossad that was behind the attack.

The story is interesting because it combines two racial stereotypes: the anti-Semitic stereotype of the conspiratorial Jew and the typical colonial stereotype of the dumb, inferior, "Third World-looking" colonised. The fact that these two racisms are combined in trying to come to terms with an action initiated by Arab Muslims is not a coincidence. The latter have always had an ambivalent position within the spectrum of European otherness.

This spectrum is structured by a polarity between what we might call "the other of the will" and "the other of the body". The other of the will is the cunning other, the competitive other, the manipulative other, the conspiratorial other, the other that can thwart my plans and undermine me, the other who, deep down, I fear might be superior to me at least with regard to intelligence. The epitome of this other is, of course, the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew. It is also the product of a racism very specific to it, the racism of extermination.

The other of the body, on the other hand, is an unambiguously inferior other (except, perhaps, when it comes to sexual prowess), inferior in terms of intelligence, inferior in terms technical know-how, inferior in terms of capacity to be productive (eg the category of "the lazy other"). The epitome of this other was the colonial portrayal of the black African. Likewise, it is also the product of a very specific type of racism, the racism of exploitation.

Paradoxically, it was his or her supposed inferiority and lack of intelligence that made the lazy other of colonisation, the other that is all body, exploitable. The other of the mind, the cunning other, was by definition un-exploitable, for if anything, such an other had the potential to exploit the European colonisers, to manipulate and use them against their will. By definition such an other could only be exterminated.

This does not mean, of course, that the other of the body was never exterminated. The history of colonial extermination in the process of territorial and political domination is well established. Yet, what is interesting about such processes of extermination is that, within them, the colonised other was much less, and on fewer occasions, essentialised as an object of extermination. The European colonisers, like everybody else in this world, try to exterminate what they classify as a threat, not what they classify as inferior. And once the colonised are eliminated as a threat, once they have been reduced in number, once their political will has been eradicated, once their capacity for resistance has been squashed, that is, once they have been "killed" politically and socially as a group, then, most often than not, begins a period where a substantial number of people among the colonisers begin to love those "socio-politically dead other", and yearn to "preserve" their culture. One can see this, in an anthropological spirit, as a kind of "political necrophilia" specific to the evolution of colonial culture. Perhaps it is best exemplified by those European settlers or their descendants who, once the natives have been politically smashed, but only then, not only express their love of "native cultures" (like the European "appreciation" of indigenous desert paintings in Australia) but manage to express outrage at their "living conditions", at "the death rate among them" and even courageously celebrate their "resistance". All is done for as long as it is subliminally well- known that it is a resistance of the politically dead, doomed to have no effect on the quality of life they, as colonisers or descendant of colonisers, have acquired from being "well positioned" in this cumulative process of resource appropriation and theft.

It is this necrophilic appreciation of the politically dead other that characterises the racism of exploitation. Practically, it means that the other has been subjugated, pacified and tamed enough to become classified as "valuable", either aesthetically or for labouring purposes.

This necrophilic dimension is totally absent in the racism of extermination. For the Nazis, no matter how many Jews have been exterminated, the Jew was still a threat. The capacity of the cunning, manipulative other to be a threat is not dependent on numbers as is the case with the colonised. One manipulative Jew can do as much harm as ten, or a thousand, or a million. One cannot imagine a situation where a Nazi says, "we have this Jewish family in our neighbourhood, they have such an interesting culture" while another says "we have 'too many'". For the Nazi, one Jew is always already too many.

It is from within the field constituted by the polarity between the racism of exploitation and the racism of extermination, and their imaginary others, that we can appreciate the "ambiguous categorisation" of the Arab by the European colonisers. For the Arab is at the same time a hybrid that is both a "Jew" and a "black African" and an in-between that is neither. He is an other of the will and the body, and neither. She is both cunning, and too dumb to be cunning. Even in phenotypical terms, the Arab is neither a "Jewish type" nor a "black type" but an in-between, or a "both". The Arab is both an uncivilised other like the black African but also, like the Jew, belonging to an early modern civilisation that has shaped European civilisation. The Arab is a monotheist like the Jewish other but with an "inferior" religious imagination (eg the paradise as full of virgins) akin to more primitive religious forms. And while the dangerous Jew of the anti-Semitic imagination is categorised as a snake, a hyena, or a vermin, and the exploitable black as a domesticated animal, the Arab is neither. The Arab seems to be for the European coloniser what the pig is for Jewish and Muslim cultures, a polluting non-exploitable (ie not good for consumption) creature, and yet unlike the "Jewish snake" not so much of a threat that it must be exterminated at all cost.

Today's racialised Arab, the bin Laden-like figure of the scheming international terrorist, is a continuation within a global context of this racialising dichotomy. For is not the imaginary bin Laden an in-between figure, hybridising the two key figures of otherness in the era of globalisation: the superior, manipulative, scheming (Jewish) international banker and the miserable, inferior, exploitable (Third World-looking) migrant labourer?

And here again, the postcolonial state is ambivalent about the Arab within the metropolis in much the same way as the colonial state was ambivalent about him or her in the colony. It continually asks itself the same question: Is the Arab a migrant "black African" bodily other, or a "Jewish" subversive scheming will?

Like every bodily migrant other, the Arab migrant smells (his or her house, kids, clothes, cars and cooking smells and pollutes the neighbourhood), his or her way of life and place of worship is an eyesore that needs to be contained. Within this "bodily register", one or two Arabs might be tolerable but when there are "too many" it becomes unbearable.

But, unlike many migrants, the Arab Muslim migrant is a subversive will. He or she is interested not only in opening a restaurant and offering exotic food. He or she (especially, she, the veiled one) embodies the will of the other, the one who can subvert the European national/patriarchal order by speaking and acting in the name of another, Arab Muslim, supranational patriarchal order. They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere: explicit bin Ladens and closet bin Ladens; conscious bin Ladens and unconscious bin Ladens; bin Ladens on the beach and bin Ladens in the suburbs. Within this register, the Arab, like the Jew of the Nazis, is intolerable as such. Even a single Arab is a threat.

Contain the Arab, or exterminate the Arab? A "tolerable" presence in the suburbs, or caged in a concentration camp? Exterminate their political will or remove them physically, in their totality, will and body? The politics of the Western postcolonial state is constantly and dangerously oscillating between these two tendencies today.

When I first arrived in Australia in 1976, I was an anti-Muslim racist. Born and raised in a staunchly Christian Lebanese environment, leaving Lebanon in the midst of a civil war I understood as "backward Muslims hordes out to destroy civilised Europeanised Christians", I embodied and felt most of the racist categorisations I am critically reflecting upon today.

But as I began my studies at Macquarie University, I increasingly interacted with many anti-racist students and teachers who were forcing me to question my beliefs. My early interaction with them was reasonably hostile. But in the end, they were offering a version of human relations that was very far from, and I say without hesitation ethically and practically far superior to, my "Christians versus Muslims" world outlook. As I thought things through, which is what a university allows you to do - despite what some simplistic anti-university journalists want people to believe today - it did not take long before I was won over.

I like to think that, through these anti-racist students, the Australian society of the 1970s made me a better person. They represented what was best about that society. And so, today, as I see Australia moving towards the very "Christian versus Muslim outlook"' that it has so successfully rid me of, I experience puzzlement, pain and a sense of dread. On one hand, I can see in the new "Christian versus Muslim" zealots a part of me, and as such, I understand how good people can come to think in such ugly ways. I have no desire to diabolise racists just as I don't diabolise my early self. But on the other, I cannot but feel that such people are taking a well-trodden path, one that has proved a disaster for all those who have taken it.

In the name of being part of an advanced civilisation, they are taking Australia backward, in the direction of the ignorant, arrogant and prejudiced Lebanese Christian culture of the 1970s I thankfully left behind. And so, even if part of me thinks that it is useless to preach, I have to tell such people: You never go forward by thinking of yourself as protecting Western Christian civilisation against Muslim hordes. You only go backward. This has been proved historically again and again. Please believe me.