BY DEBORAH WILSON
The Globe and Mail
Arabs in Canada have been portrayed as money-hungry sheiks and bloodthirsty terrorists, and they have paid for the characterization in harassment and discrimination, community spokesmen say.
Dr. Ismail Zayid, a professor of medicine at Dalhousie University and president of the Arab Canadian Association of the Atlantic Provinces, said that as a result of unfavorable stereotypes of Arabs in the media, Arabs are denied jobs and immigration permits and their children are taunted at school.
Many Arab-Canadians are denying their ethnic origins and going as far as to change their names to less Arabic-sounding ones, Dr. Zayid told a conference of the Canadian Arab Federation in Toronto on the weekend.
Some conference members observed the Moslem holy month of Ramadan with dawn-to-dusk fasts. Many other participants made bitter observations of alleged racism in the media as they considered measures to battle unfavorable stereotypes.
Their concerns were made more urgent by incidents such as attacks on Arabs in Europe and the bombing of the Anti-Arab Defamation League offices in Santa Ana, Calif., that killed one man in October.
Now, the conference was told, anti-Arab sentiment is being whipped up to make the bombing of Arabs' countries of origin less distasteful to North Americans.
Alexander Dewdney, a computer science professor at the University of Western Ontario and a member of the university's Palestine Israel Committee, said anti-Arab sentiment, nurtured by the casting of Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi as a madman and despot, has "dehumanized" the image of Arabs as seen by North Americans, making the idea of bombing their homes less offensive.
In the same way, the cultivation of the image of Arabs as greedy oil sheiks made them easy to blame for the oil crisis of the seventies, he said.
Dr. Zayid said that until 1983 he was approached several times by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who tried to recruit him to inform on the Arab-Canadian community.
"There is a notion that (Arabs) have to be followed," Dr. Zayid said.
Soraya Hafez, a teacher, said children in the Chinese-Canadian class at Edmonton's Glengarry Elementary School were frightened when she arranged to take her bilingual Arab Canadian class to meet them because they believed Arabs were masked, dagger-wielding and dangerous.
Mohammed Alwazni, a Palestinian studying business at York University on a student visa, said he introduced himself on his first meeting with Mary Stephenson, his girl friend, as "a Palestinian, but not a terrorist," because of the usually hostile reaction to his nationality.
Rashad Saleh, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, said his 20-year-old son endured accusations from fellow students that his father was a terrorist.
The federation also has received reports from members who have been turned down for jobs and who believe it is because of their race, Mr. Saleh said. "It's difficult to prove," he acknowledged.
Lorne Kenny, a retired University of Toronto professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies and the author of two studies on the characterization of Arabs in Ontario school textbooks, said students receive a "biased...pejorative" and inaccurate depiction of Arabs and their culture, and an "anti-Islamic bias."
Textbooks referred mainly to a nomadic Arab way of life, which no longer exists, and gave the impression that Palestinians simply wandered away from the area they claim as a homeland, leaving an undeveloped, unpeopled area for settlement by Israel, he said.
Dr. Zayid complained that a recent three-part radio program about the Israel-Palestine problem did not include one Arab among the many people interviewed.
Another radio broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. featured a story about an anti-terrorism training program in Surrey, B.C., in which the potential terrorists were portrayed as Arabs. The program was broadcast a half-hour after a story about discrimination against Arab Americans.
While Arabs and Arab governments are portrayed as bloodthirsty, the Israeli Government "has a unique immunity to criticism," Dr. Zayid said.
Ann Medina, a reporter for the CBC television program The Journal, said journalists "do not do a good job with respect to Libya," but that country is largely to blame because it does not allow reporters to determine the truth or fiction of U.S. Government allegations.
"Unfortunately, when you get an official-sounding release from the U.S. State Department...giving facts and figures, and on the other side you have nothing that says that might not be true, it's a very difficult situation." she said.
Reporters wanting to determine the truth of charges by U.S. President Ronald Reagan that Libya was connected to the airport attacks in Rome and Vienna in December were unable to do so because of restrictions on their movements and their work in Libya.
And a reporter cannot work freely in Iraq, Syria, and in many cases, in Israel, she said.
"If I were an Arab here, I would want more accurate
reporting....
I would hope Libya would provide access (to reporters)."
(text of May 19, 1986 Globe and Mail article)