Coca Cola versus coffee

It is always a pleasure and a privilege to listen to intelligent people talk, because they often draw your attention to new aspects of an issue.

One such talk was given by Professor Bernard Lewis during a visit to Amman. 

Asked to comment on the invasion of the Coca Cola culture, he pointed out that coffee is essentially an Arab drink, and there are more people in the West who drink coffee than there are Arabs who drink Coca Cola. Yet, the West does not feel threatened by Arab cultural domination.

Professor Lewis’ logic seemed convincing, but he was proved wrong shortly afterwards, when a school in the US introduced shawerma to the menu offered to its students. Angry parents protested against their children being fed “terrorist food” that may lead them to being indoctrinated by alien, hostile, cultures.

In all fairness, the courts wasted no time in dismissing these petitions, but the people were clearly not convinced. They persisted in their beliefs and multiplied in numbers to the point where they expressed themselves politically in the last presidential elections.

Others of the same ilk are hotly contesting positions of leadership throughout Western Europe. 

On our side, xenophobia is rising equally fast. 

For instance, I listened last week to a radio debate on the crisis between Turkey and Holland. I hoped the speakers would help me understand why the issues are so emotionally charged that they pushed leaders to throw diplomacy to the four winds and exchange accusations of fascism.

The speakers were not Turkish or Dutch, so they should have stayed impartial; instead, some of them decided to join the battle where the fray was thickest, adding their own accusations of imperialism and modern Crusades.

Not one of them felt it relevant to mention that the mayor of Rotterdam, the epicentre of the crisis, is a Muslim Arab son of an imam who still has dual Dutch-Moroccan citizenship.

Seriously, the world is in a sorry enough state already, and we have all contributed to making it the mess it is. Things will not get better if political and opinion leaders allow themselves to be led by sheer hatred.

We would all do better if we devoted our energy and imagination to searching for solutions rather than apportioning blame.

Educational reform would be an important step in checking the hate culture that threatens to poison our souls, but it is only one step. A sustained long-term effort is needed, one that incorporates many approaches, because what we need is not only to revise our outlook on others, but our perceptions of ourselves.

We, in Jordan, need to be particularly wary of the culture of hate.

Jordan is a small country that depends immensely on tourism, attracting foreign investments and remittances from Jordanians working abroad. These activities will not be helped if we are brainwashed into hating anyone who is not us.

Failing to address this problem will not only be detrimental to our ethical standing, but also disadvantageous to our economic sustainability.