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I'll never forget the day in 1983 when white people on my college campus accused me of not being a "real" Arab. And, worse, of acting and thinking like a white person. It was a surreal moment because it was white people doing the accusing.
I'd been a dark-skinned person all my life, with a quintessential Arabic last name, but never considered myself white. I'm also Italian on my mother's side, and in the summers, my skin gets darker than Barack Obama's.
I was raised in a New Jersey suburban town of 20,000 and was the only person with an Arabic last name. I was heckled and teased a bit—the usual teenage stupidity. Luckily, my parents didn't intercede. To take such claims seriously, they explained, would give power to the offender. Moreover, I might lose sight of all the good white people who didn't care that I had an Arabic last name or dark skin.
The truth is, the vast majority of white people I met were exceedingly good to me. Many were rooting for me because I was different.
I focused instead on the things I could control. Things that mattered to me and my parents. My grades. My conduct. And my future, which would be determined by my choices. My attitude. And the people I surrounded myself with.
Personal responsibility and agency were a big deal to my Lebanese and Italian family. So too was hard work. It was all taught to me without ever being taught—it was that fundamental.
Love of country also ran deep on both sides of the family. The mere sight of a flag, the singing of the national anthem—or their favorite, "God Bless America"—brought them to tears. Literally, to tears.
I was an English major in college and an American history minor, and I served as editor-in-chief of my college newspaper at Fairleigh Dickinson, at the time the largest private college in New Jersey and a school with a large number of Arab students. I defended Israel and America after 241 U.S. military personnel, including 220 Marines, were killed by Islamists in October 1983. It was the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.
For taking that position, I felt the immediate wrath of the Arab students (some native-born and some from around the Middle East), something I expected because antisemitism is so deeply ingrained in the Arab world—Israel being the scapegoat for all that ailed the Middle East and beyond, with all the usual tropes. The kind propagated in Arab culture, literature and even comic books. Jews as devils. Jews as thieves. Jews as running America and the world. Tropes that have haunted Jews through the centuries.
What surprised me were the rebukes from white students and faculty members, most of whom were from a small and growing hard-left contingency in the college's liberal arts department. They were a minority back then but arrogant and vocal. I'll never forget the day they sat me down, intervention-style, and insisted in an almost unified voice—for my own good—that Arabs were victims of white Western culture through the ages. That taking sides with Israel and America reflected my colonial mindset. My white mindset, which is what they were saying without saying it, was the problem too. I'd adapted to and adopted both without even knowing it.
It all started, they insisted, with my grandfather's desire to leave Lebanon and come to America to make a better life for his family. That was mistake number one. Then the slow surrender began, beginning at Ellis Island when my grandfather's last name was changed from Habib to a less Arabic version, Habeeb. Worse, they argued, my grandfather went along with it. Didn't I understand that he'd experienced a not so subtle form of American violence at Ellis Island?
My dad, they insisted, doubled down on my grandfather's choice. His life was a never-ending series of compromises masquerading as choices to become more American. My dad served in the Air Force, studied U.S. history at Gettysburg College, taught U.S. history in a public school system he served for nearly 40 years and retired as a superintendent of schools in a white middle-class town in northern New Jersey. What could be better proof that he too sold out his Arab heritage to his newfound American—and white—one?
When I defended my grandfather's and father's choices—always a mistake with people who approve of only their own choices—they assured me I could end two generations of misguided family thinking and became a champion of "my people."
They urged me to read two books that would help me understand my authentic Arab walk. And how the mindset of the West—and America—affected me. And how Western ideas and ideals colonized people—mostly brown and Black—around the world. And kept them poor and powerless.
The first was a book called The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, which was recommended with the religious zeal a Christian would recommend the Bible to a nonbeliever. It was scripture to them, and Fanon was a high priest. I'd already read it and quickly saw through its intellectual pretense. It was less a book than a screed that squeezed all of life and human history itself into a neat artificial binary: the colonized and colonizer, with a dim view of capitalism as a system of economic theft underscoring everything.
His focus on the psychological trauma people of color around the world experience because of colonization was itself traumatizing to anyone who came in contact with it, especially young people without a real defense system to combat such propaganda. After finishing Fanon's magnum opus, the susceptible reader is left to choose sides: You're either with the oppressed or against them. You were with capitalism or for some kind of massive wealth redistribution from rich white colonial powers to poor brown and Black colonized ones. The choice was that simple. That stark.
Fanon's world was utterly devoid of human agency or responsibility. Life simply happened to us, and there was little to do but overthrow the existing power structures or forever become a part of them.
But there was also a liberating force that attracted my leftist peers: By joining Fanon's world and his cause, a young person was granted instant and unearned moral superiority for simply choosing to follow his theology, a kind of sanctification that in real religions requires actual heroic deeds, real-life work and sacrifice. This was heady stuff for young middle- and upper-middle-class white college kids from bucolic suburban New Jersey away from their parents' authority for the first time.
For me, especially given my upbringing, Fanon's construct of the never-ending power struggle between and among the oppressed and oppressors was, in the end, not only rubbish but a real bore. Especially compared with the material I was reading at the time: Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Melville, the King James Bible, among others—all of which were doing precisely the opposite of Fanon. Those texts showcased the universal and complex struggle of humankind through the ages to know our own hearts and grapple with our own sin. Love and death, free will and fate, cowardice and courage, ambition and sloth, envy and humility: the human personality itself on display, and on display for the ages. Through those stories, we could—if we dared—see ourselves, for better and worse.
If my mind was being colonized, it was with the sheer magnificence of Western civilization itself. I was also reading Aristotle, Plato, Edmund Burke, the authors of the Federalist Papers and great economic minds like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, all of whom had a much more comprehensive glimpse into the realms of human psychology and political and economy reality than the thin gruel Fanon was peddling.
The other book people insisted I read was by Edward Said, a glamorous Palestinian professor at Columbia University who made arguments similar to Fanon's, this time wrapped around a fancier and more complex conception called "Orientalism."
The white people I knew gave me those books because they wanted me to think and be less American. But what they were really asking me to do was join their religious sect. A sect that deplored and demonized its own country, Western civilization—as well as Judaism and Christianity—and had little to offer but envy and rage masked in sanctimoniousness.
I could never have known or predicted the degree to which Fanon's and Said's ideas would go from the very fringes of my undergraduate education to utterly mainstream thought on college campuses across the world. It took a mere 40 years of work to cancel the study of Western civilization and all it has brought to the world—and not just art and philosophy and our rich Judeo-Christian heritage but also property rights, the right to contract, freedom of speech, freedom to think and worship, due process of law, the separation of powers, and the miracle of the modern free-enterprise system that's helped lift much of the world out of poverty. I love America for all of those things and more, just as my parents and grandparents did.
I let my leftist peers know they could save their proselytization for other Arab-American students more amenable to their empty pleas. They accused me of being a traitor, one who embraced my oppressor's narrative. I had assimilated not because I chose to but because assimilation chose me and I didn't have the courage to resist it. Soon, I was no longer invited to their parties or events.
Long before today's social justice movement, I experienced progressive high-handedness and condescension—and a foreshadowing of the cancel culture—way back in 1983.
Which is why watching those students across our college campuses chanting for the destruction of the state of Israel—and chants like "From the river to the sea"—was no surprise to me. Those former friends of mine and their totalitarian progressive peers across America who now run the universities and liberal arts departments of our major academic institutions canceled the study of Western civilization for the same reasons they canceled me. Because deep down inside, they know their arguments can't withstand legitimate debate.
The results of that purge—a decades-long, McCarthy-style purge—are now on display for all of America to see. The progressive revolutionaries created those young monsters calling for the elimination of the state of Israel. And there is nothing they can do about it now.
