#macarthyism

By Jasmine Baehr

The Herräng Dance Camp in Sweden is considered one of the world’s most recognized swing festivals. At this year’s gathering, a group called Jazz with Palestine held an open meeting. Hermlin was performing as a drummer with another ensemble, not his own orchestra.  He later learned that organizers not only excluded him from that group’s jam sessions but also made it clear they would not consider booking his personal projects, like The Swing Dance Orchestra. "I went with the sole intention to just listen to their concerns and if possible have a dialogue," Hermlin explained.

Andrej Hermlin and David Hermlin during the Askania Award 2023 at Berlin Capital Club on February 14, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. (Tristar Media/Getty Images)

He said he was stunned when a board member told him some attendees were uncomfortable.

Hermlin also faced criticism for wearing the small yellow lapel pin, which symbolizes solidarity with the 50 hostages still held by Hamas. Festivalgoers suggested the pin was inflammatory or political propaganda. Hermlin rejects that characterization. "People pointed at my yellow pin and said, maybe people are aggressive because of your pin. I asked them, do you know what it means? They said no," he said. "This pin is about the hostages. It’s not about the IDF or the government. It’s about empathy."

After Herräng, Hermlin said other festivals began dropping him from their lineups while keeping his band. "I’m the only one being excluded. Not the band, just me," he said. "A festival told me, don’t take it personally, you’ll get a cancellation fee. But how is that not personal?"

     The year is 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. Two years later in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue, unrelated to the proceedings. The census bureau provided the locations of predominately-Japanese neighborhoods, and the round ups began. In the midst of this, Senator Joseph McCarthy was turned loose on the nation; his enemy: communists. Over 300 actors, artists, lawyers, civil rights activists, and 205 government officials were investigated on the suspicion of adhering to communistic ideologies and were blacklisted. Thousands more were accused of the same charge. Fast forward to March 2011. Post-9/11, we have the same situation, but the enemy has a new face and name: Islam. At least that is what Representative Peter King would like you to think. Our nation’s government has a history of scapegoating an entire segment of its population in its times of trial.   

     The Muslim population of the United States is estimated to be between 5 and 7 million. Of those, roughly 2 million actually attend any type of mosque (Bagby et al., The Mosque in America: A National Portrait).  The majority of mosques in the United States use English as the primary language for lectures and the Friday Sermon (Bagby et al.).  The number of mosque goers in America that have actually gone radical is less than 20 per year with the exception of 2009 when it spiked to 47 due to 17 Somali teens that left the US to join the terrorist group Al-Shabaab in Somalia, according to a study by Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina (Muslim-American Terrorism Since 9/11: An Accounting). Even with all of this information the American committee on Homeland Security chooses to continue to demonize America’s Muslims, much like the House Committee on Un-American Activities did during the Red Scare. In Berger’s essay ‘Ways of Seeing’ he says, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of our past.” The American public doesn’t see that once again their fear is driving the government to harm an innocent group.

      The government is not entirely to blame for their habit of blindly stereotyping an entire group of people; the root of the problem is the American public. When the twin towers were attacked people wanted answers, they wanted to know who, why, and if it could happen again. And the government was fully prepared with their answer: Muslims, hatred of freedom, and yes. That answer, that entire line of thinking, ignited a fire that has lasted to this very day. Now one must ask himself why it was so easy for the government to invent this new monster. The answer is simple; fear of the unknown and ignorance of our past. Lowen says in his essay “Lies My Teacher Told Me”, “Understanding our past is central to understand ourselves and the world around us” (335). Americans today don’t know anything about the world around them, with very few exceptions. Which again isn’t entirely their fault; our education system is the culprit. In high school a world history class consists in the history of the “world”, also known as Europe, a little bit of China, Japan, India, and minimal parts of Africa and the Middle East. Special attention is paid to Ancient Greece and Rome, the spread of Christendom throughout Europe, the European Renaissance, the Dark Ages, the Industrial revolution, and the splitting of the Church. However the something that is completely ignored is the fact that during the 1000 years that Europe spent in the dark, the Islamic Empire was going through its golden age. Giant strides were being made in the fields of philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and art. Arab scholars busied themselves with translating the works of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates while Europeans busied themselves with war and plague. After the fall of the Islamic Empire many of those translations, and the works that came as a result of those ideas were lost forever when Crusaders burned the libraries of Baghdad and Damascus. Many of the original Greek and Roman documents that were also housed in those libraries were lost. The authors of history textbooks and some historians choose to glaze over this period briefly highlighting Muslim Spain for maybe a paragraph or two that may or may not be brought up in an American classroom. That brief blip of history enhances the American’s willingness to believe that Islam is evil because the Islamic Empire took over Christian Spain and Queen Isabella I saved Christendom and Western Civilization. It also leads them to ask the government if what happened in Spain all those years ago could happen here.

      The government has been presented with the question ‘Could this happen again?’ In response the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee Peter King decided that the most appropriate action to take was to put American Muslims on trial. He is choosing to be critical of a minority group. Scholes says in his essay ‘On Reading a Video Text, that “criticism is the only way we have of taking something seriously” (375). Which is true, criticism of something is the only way any subject is handled seriously. However, being overly critical of a minority group as opposed to humanity as a whole and the human race’s potential to be radicalized he is over simplifying the problem. Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles County during the trials opened by saying “...I would caution that to comment only on the extent of radicalization in the Muslim American community may be viewed as singling out a particular section of our nation. This makes a false assumption that any particular religion or group is prone to radicalization than others” (Radicalization in the US Muslim Community, Organizations Panel). The hearings do make the false assumption that any particular religion or group is prone to radicalization than others. Just like during the Red Scare, the assumption was made that actors, civil rights activists and Japanese Americans were more prone to be communists or communist sympathizers than any other group. But the fact of the matter is any troubled person is prone to radical action regardless of group affiliation.

     The only thing the American people has to fear, is their own fear of the unknown. It drives them to undermine the very values they claim to value more than their own lives. Their fear drives the government to take irrational, unsubstantiated actions against a group or groups of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. And it takes us back to where we were 70 years ago afraid and blameworthy for our own problems.

                                           Works Cited

Bagby, Ihsan, Paul M. Perl, and Bryan T. Froehle. The Mosque in America: A National Portrait A Report from the Mosque Study Project. Rep. Council Of American Islamic Relations, 26 Apr. 2001. Web. 1 May 2011. <http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/The_Mosque_in_America_A_National_Portrait.pdf>.

Kurzman, Charles. Muslim-American Terrorism Since 9/11: An Accounting. Rep. Muslim-American Terrorism Since 9/11: An Accounting. University of North Carolina. Web. 1 May 2011. <http://sanford.duke.edu/centers/tcths/about/documents/Kurzman_Muslim-American_Terrorism_Since_911_An_Accounting.pdf>.

"Radicalization In The US Muslim Community, Organizations Panel." C-Span. 10 Mar. 2011. Web. 4 May 2011.