Gray Lady Down (17 page)

The rejection of assimilation comes down to earth in reporting on the customs and values, attitudes and practices of various immigrant communities. While celebrating cultural difference, the
Times
does not scrutinize the implications of those differences for immigrants or for Americans generally. David Brooks, one of the paper’s two house conservatives, has written about “cultural geography,” a term used by sociologists to explain “why some groups’ values make them embrace technology and prosper and others don’t,” which, Brooks adds, is “a line of inquiry” that P.C. piety makes it “impolite to pursue.” It is certainly a line of inquiry that has been rigorously ignored by his own paper. If immigrants leave home with problematic cultural baggage, the
Times
believes it is dropped on the tarmac when they land on U.S. soil or left behind when they scoot across the Mexican border. Ironically, the paper tacitly endorses
problematic customs and attitudes that Third World progressives are trying to fight in their countries.

Many Indian immigrants to America see no problem with bringing their discriminatory and un-American caste system along with them. Indians may be a model minority for their above-average incomes and levels of education, but their impaired sense of social equality and their ethnocentric exclusivity are problems that they should not import into their new country. You won’t hear any concerns about it in the
Times,
however. In a 2004 piece about caste, Joseph Berger wrote that the practice may have “stowed away” to America, but quickly concluded that it survived here mainly as a form of “tribal bonding,” with Indians finding kindred spirits among people who grew up with the same foods and cultural signals. “Just as descendants of the Pilgrims use the Mayflower Society as a social outlet to mingle with people of congenial backgrounds, a few castes have formed societies like the Brahmin Samaj of North America.”

Yet the article contradicts itself. While Berger contends that caste is “withering,” he found plenty of examples where it has a “stubborn resilience”: bias in business dealings, discrimination in hiring, obstruction of “love marriages,” and disownments. One business owner from the untouchable caste said, “Our friends who came here from India from the upper classes, they’re supposed to leave this kind of thing behind, but unfortunately they brought it with them.” Yet this man told Berger that he was active in his Dalit (untouchable) group and would prefer that his son marry a Dalit.

While ethnic intermarriage has been the most dynamic engine of social integration that America has known, arranged or assisted marriages lead Indians to have the lowest rate of intermarriage of any group in the United States, perpetuating ethnocentrism and a separatist outlook. The
Times
has reported this phenomenon nonjudgmentally, even positively. The “Vows” column in the Sunday
Times
regularly honors various South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants or ethnics for finding their soul mate within their same group—Muslim, Sikh, Christian Arab.

Even voodoo gets good ink now. “Americans are hungry for spiritual fulfillment and voodoo offers a direct experience of the sacred that appeals to more and more people,” Steven Kinzer wrote in a 2003 piece. Timeswoman Neela Banderjee wrote positively in 2009 about a Christian African congregation, part of the Pentecostal “Spiritual Warfare” movement, that comes together at midnight to fight the devil, literally punching, kicking and slashing at him. “Some situations you need to address at night, because in the ministry of spiritual warfare, demons, the spirits bewitching people, choose this time to work,” said Nicole Sangamay, who came from Congo in 1998 to study and is a co-pastor of the ministry. “And we pick this time to pray to nullify what they are doing.” It’s hard to imagine Banderjee giving a group of white American Pentecostals the same slack if they held similarly wacky beliefs.

Another dimension of the assimilation issue that the
Times
has handled badly is a set of indicators that portend the creation of a permanent Latino underclass. Latinos have the highest dropout rate in America, the lowest rate of college-going and the lowest rate of GED attainment. They have high unemployment, high levels of crime and incarceration, and high levels of obesity. Latinos also have a high reliance on social services, which actually increases over the years, contrary to other immigrants’ historical experience. Illegitimacy has soared as well: half of all new babies in the United States are Hispanic, and half of these have unmarried mothers.

In his 1998 book,
Strangers Among Us
, the former
Times
reporter Roberto Suro said it was possible that the “great wave” of Latino immigrants would achieve upward mobility and fully integrate into American society. “It seems equally likely,” he continued, “that Latino immigration could become a powerful demographic engine of social fragmentation, discord, and even violence.” Yet the
Times
is timid about getting its hands around this story. Jason DeParle only scratched the surface of the problem with his April 2009 report headlined “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In,” which examined the culture of Latino low achievement and self-sabotage.

The paper’s indifference if not hostility to assimilation shows also in the near-total neglect of the issues raised by dual citizenship. At least ninety-three countries now allow their émigrés to keep their citizenship even as they become American citizens, and the list keeps growing. Dual citizenship has implications for cultural cohesion and for “the basic cultural, psychological, institutional and political organizations that have been the foundation of the country’s republican democracy for last 200 years,” argues Stanley Renshon of the City University of New York. Might too much diversity lead to “a fragmented, and thus dysfunctional, national identity?” he asks.

This is a question that the
Times
has never seriously examined. Reporting on the Dominican immigrants in America who are now allowed to vote in their native country’s elections, it describes them as being “closer to home than ever,” whatever that means. The
Times
has reported on how African immigrants might say they will stay two years but “Africa will always be home,” and how Mexicans living in the United States want to be buried in their “homeland.” A story in June 2010 by Kirk Semple described a Mexican immigrant as “Running for Mayor, Back Home in Mexico” after almost two decades of living in the United States without naturalizing; he had slipped over the border illegally in 1992. And the
Times
has featured statements like this one from a former official of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund: “California is going to be a Mexican state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave.”

Furthering the deconstruction of American citizenship, the
Times
has reported favorably on noncitizen suffrage. In August 2004, Rachel Swarns wrote a piece called “Immigrants Raise Call for Right to Be Voters,” examining efforts nationwide to expand the franchise to people who are residents but not citizens. Although Swarns did quote one critic, Congressman Tom Tancredo, the story was mostly a platform for supporters of noncitizen voting. One New York academic was quoted as saying, “A lot of communities are not represented by [political] representatives who reflect the diversity in their communities and are responsive to their needs.”

Compared with other immigrant groups, Muslims in America have a disproportionately high rate of advanced education and high per capita income, along with lower-than-average rates of divorce and illegitimacy. One thing they do share with less-well-off Mexican immigrants is the solicitude with which the
Times
reports and comments on their struggles to find their place within American society. Particularly after 9/11, the paper has treated American Muslims, both immigrants and converts, as a protected class and as potential victims of “Islamophobia.” Through writers like Mark Lilla, the
Times
encourages its readers to have high sympathies but low expectations for Muslim immigrants: “So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,” wrote Lilla in the Sunday magazine.

On the issue of divided loyalties among Muslim immigrants, the
Times
has been particularly dishonest. As John Leo has noted, in place of a serious discussion about how well immigrants are assimilating to modern America, the
Times
has dispensed a “massive cloud of hands-off nonjudgmentalism.” There have also been calculated omissions, along with the mistake of reading the subject through rose-colored glasses. A picture and a caption for a November 2003 story capture some of the dishonesty. Beneath a large picture of a Muslim man with a boy perched on his shoulders holding an American flag was a caption that read: “Arab Americans Pray for Victims Soon after the Attacks.” The two were from Patterson, New Jersey, a place where it has been reported that a number of Arab Americans cheered in the streets upon hearing news of the World Trade Center catastrophe. The latter image may not be as reassuring as the lone act of patriotic witness, but it is certainly part of the larger picture that we have a right to see.

In May 2007, the Pew Research Center released a study on Muslim immigrant attitudes and experiences that was cause for alarm. According to the survey, which had 60,000 respondents, nearly half of Muslims in the United States (47 percent) say they
think of themselves as Muslim first, rather than American. Additionally, Muslim Americans under age thirty are both much more religiously observant and more accepting of Islamic extremism than are older Muslim Americans. Those under age thirty are more than twice as likely to believe that suicide bombings can often or sometimes be justified in the defense of Islam (15 percent vs. 6 percent). As the Muslim writer Tawfik Hamid put it, if the Pew study’s estimate that there are 2.35 million American Muslims is right, “that means there are a substantial number of people in the U.S. who think suicide bombing is sometimes justified. Similarly, if 5% of American Muslims support al Qaeda, that’s more than 100,000 people.”

Among other disturbing findings, relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and there is widespread doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. By roughly six to one (75 percent to 12 percent), Muslim Americans say the United States did the wrong thing in going to war in Iraq, while the general public is more evenly divided. Only 35 percent of Muslim Americans have a positive view of the decision to go to war in Afghanistan, compared with 61 percent among the public at large.

These findings were covered extensively in almost every media outlet in America—except the
Times,
which did not report on the Pew Study at all.

The
Times
has also rigorously ignored evidence of Muslim disloyalty in government service. Right after 9/11, the FBI hired dozens of translators with knowledge of Middle Eastern languages to process tape recordings from jihadists. One of those translators was a Turkish immigrant named Sibel Edmonds, who worked with a fellow Turkish immigrant, Jan Dickerson, whom Edmonds came to suspect of spying for Turkey. Dickerson would often preview a certain tape and tell Edmonds that it was not important and she would translate it herself. Curious about what was going on, Edmonds went through the tapes that Dickerson processed and found she had omitted crucial information from the final transcript.

It turned out that Dickerson had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI—something that had not been caught in the rush to complete background checks after 9/11. Dickerson also had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington D.C. who was a target of that government investigation. Dickerson had tried to recruit Edmonds into her conspiracy, promising an early and well-paid retirement back in Turkey if she cooperated and warning of trouble for her family back home if she didn’t. Edmonds went to FBI officials about her well-founded suspicions of espionage; but like many whistleblowers, she was the one eventually terminated.

The
Washington Post
gave a full account of the case, emphasizing the espionage. So did
60 Minutes
and
Vanity Fair,
of all places. But the
Times
not only got into the story late, it also arrived with considerable ambivalence, focusing on malfeasance in the FBI rather than the spying itself.

There was also the story of Gamal Abdel Hafiz, an immigrant Muslim FBI agent who twice refused on principle to secretly tape-record his coreligionists, thus hampering ongoing investigations. One of the cases to which he was assigned involved a bank that may have played a role in financing the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. He would not tape-record the bank president because he claimed it was against his religion to record a fellow Muslim. Hafiz also refused to record Sami al-Arian, the notorious University of Florida professor who was eventually convicted and ordered deported for helping to finance Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Other media outlets hopped on this story, but not the
Times.