Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anti-Middle Eastern sentiment (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus.  Sandstein  12:55, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Anti-Middle Eastern sentiment
AfDs for this article: 
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This article consists of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH with a generous dollop of WP:COATRACK. It has seen no substantive improvement since a previous AFD closed as "no consensus" 3 years ago. Topic is already covered at articles including Anti-Arabism, Anti-Iranian sentiment, Anti-Turkism, and Islamophobia. E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:29, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2016 July 20.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 16:45, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: The previous AFD was Articles for deletion/Anti Middle Easterner sentiment. -- do ncr  am  01:58, 26 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete - If there are other articles that technically deal with the exact same topic (like Islamophobia, for one), then this definitely should go. Very superfluous. Parsley Man (talk) 23:48, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep: As you may see all parts of the article are sourced. Anti-Arabism and Anti Middle Easterner sentiment are different. Anti-Arabism is more focused on arabs only but anti middle east is about all the middle eastern people. So why to delete to whole article? any other reason? Anti-Arabism probably is a term better reserved for racist actions targeted specifically against Arabs, which I would expect would be more common in places like the Middle East, where Arabs are part of a mixed Middle Eastern population. "don't worry about repeating information." If article have any problem OK, fix it, but there is no acceptable reason for deleting a well sourced article, which can also expanded even more. The article is not about "Anti-Arabism, Anti-Iranian sentiment, Anti-Turkism, and Islamophobia", none of these. It is about Anti-Middle Eastern evidences, some of the victims are not Arabs, Iranian, Turks or even Muslim! and they were just stereotyped as Middle Easterner.. Any edit or fixation to article is totaly welcomed, but deleting this article, actually based on no true reason . Please come and edit and contribute to the article, but no reason for deleting this article and these sourced facts and evidence. The article is different from "Anti-Arabism, Anti-Iranian sentiment, Anti-Turkism, and ..." and stuff like that. It is different Topic. KhabarNegar  Talk 08:02, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
 * — Note to closing admin: User talk:KhabarNegar is the creator of the page that is the subject of this AfD.


 * Weak Delete/Redirect to Islamophobia (maybe?) - So the first glaring problem is that the sources aren't about the concept "Anti-Middle Eastern sentiment"; they're examples of what could be described as such. Taking a bunch of articles describing specific incidents and creating a broader concept based on that is WP:OR (and/or potentially a WP:COATRACK). What we need is substantial coverage of the phenomenon. Note that number of sources about Islamophobia in the Islamophobia article, for example. If it comprised only examples of discrimination in which the writer called it Islamophobia, it wouldn't have survived the various deletion attempts. I've no strong objection to this being userfied if someone thinks sufficient sources do exist and this is usable content (I'm skeptical, though). Not entirely sure about the best target, actually -- it's possible there are too many imprecise targets to make sense of a redirect. &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 13:53, 22 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep, but improve, perhaps cut back drastically. My first reaction was to assume this topic is Wikipedia coining a term.  However, I wondered about the experience of the extended family in 2009 film Amreeka, which is about Palestinian Americans who happen to be Christians in the U.S. who face discrimination, e.g. all of a doctor or dentist's patients switching away.  If not this term, what is the general term to describe the generalized dismissal of all of "them" (who look and/or sound different:  darker-skinned foreigners with accents, from the Middle East and South Asia?) without making distinctions and without particularly caring about having failed to make distinctions.  The Google searches give hits like this Hollywood Reporter one.  I actually tend to agree with User:KhabarNegar and find their links above compelling.  You can't take the view that the murder of a Sikh-American was mistaken and the perpetrator was only anti-Arab, as if there is no discriminations against Sikh-Americans (and others lumped together).  Of course there is, I think.  The correct term is not "Anti-Islamic", and I think not "Anti-Arab" either, it is a broader, racist thing, and "anti-Middle Eastern" as used by the Hollywood Reporter in passing seems to capture that. -- do  ncr  am  02:32, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Interesting. To me, this looked like simple duplication of the several, admittedly not excellent, articles we already have on racism and anti various specific ethnic and religious groups. I do have a hard time seeking the Sikh argument.  Sikhs have been targeted a number of times by violent ignoramuses assuming that turban = Muslim.  I accept that they are discriminated against by those who dislike ethnic diversity, or dislike immigrants.  And if a Sikh cuts his hair and buys all his clothes at JCrew, I assume that he will be discriminated against because he looks foreign.  That undoubtedly happens to in the West to all people  whose ancestors spent the Neolithic south of the Alps.  (Of course, if a blue-eyed blond walks into an upscale shop where valuable items are displayed on open shelves in Tokyo, a plain clothes security guard will not-so-subtly shadow him until he leaves.  A perfect mirror of what would happen in Baton Rouge. But I digress.)  My point is that racism is real. As is anti-group sentiment against a literally infinite numbers of groups in an infinite number of situations.  The one part of the world where I am aware that anti-Middle Eastern sentiment is a significant phenomenon separable from anti-Muslim sentiment and racism, is not covered in this article, and that is the scorn for and discrimination against Middle Easterner Muslims found in neighboring states, particularly Turkish and Persian lands where there is a record of anti-Arab pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and in places and at times a Jim Crow/glass ceiling situation.  That, however, can,  and IMP, should go into Anti-Arabism. Having looked at the sources, and thought this through (because I know and respect DonCram's opinions)  I am still failing to see adequate sourcing for this article, which duplicates the topics covered in racism and many other articles.  Or a demonstration that the examples/sources given fail to fit into Anti-Arabism, Islamophobia and racism.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:39, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your courtesy, and I have to grant that my argument is irregular for AFD. I won't take it personally if the AFD outcome goes differently.  Responding (sorry for perhaps being too long):
 * I guess ignorant, uninformed racism is the main idea I am getting at. Speculation: is "anti-Middle Eastern" a catch-all or euphemism, in the U.S., for racism other than against blacks and Asians?  Speculation: Is it a combination for Anti-Iranian sentiment, Anti-Arabism, Antisemitism, Anti-Armenian, and more, which expresses a rejection for any need to be more specific?  Is it a good summary term for "anti-non-Americans" / anti-Other-ness, beyond the main threads of racism, in the U.S.?
 * First, let me say that as someone who, er, gets around, lacking sartorial, linguistic, or behavioral clues, there is no way to reliably tell a Turk from an Argentinian, an Italian from a Libyan, or to know just by looking whether the parents of a student at the University of Pennsylvania came from Persia or Sicily, or whether someone crossing the street in Dubai comes from Islamabad, Yerevan, Tehran or Seville.      Sometimes you can "see" east insular south Asian, sub Saharan or Amerindian physiognomy - but by no means always.   But, even setting aside the fact that an awful lot of American resentment of immigrants is directed at Hispanics,  you may be onto something.  However, if "Middle Eastern" is  a "catch-all... for racism other than against blacks and Asians" I suspect that this would be because it is socially acceptable to speak of religio-cultural differences, but not of  racial ones, in other words, I can see where "Middle Eastern" is being used as socially acceptable code for "Muslim."  Which brings us back to Islamophobia, (see, for example,  2016 Minneapolis shooting ).E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:39, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * A lot of Americans didn't or don't distinguish between Iraqis vs. Iranians (and there are numerous pre-2011 "anti-Middle Eastern sentiment" hits that seem to follow from Iran hostage crisis, and there is Anti-Iranian sentiment article), between Shiites vs. Sunnis vs. other Islamic schools and branches, between different kinds of Palestinians, and don't distinguish any specific borders for the Middle East (maybe it includes Turkey, and all of North Africa, and Afghanistan and Pakistan and India and Bangladesh). "Anti-Middle Eastern", which doesn't distinguish between Jewish Israelis vs. very different other peoples, is kind of infuriatingly in-your-face ignorant and maybe proud of it.
 * Dunno if folks are proud about this, but it is universal, and it works like adjusting a telescope. Someone standing in Damascus any time in the last thousand years would say, with dismissive scorn, something like: Well, what would you expect of a foreigner; of a Frank, a Greek, and finally, Well, what would can you expect of an idiot from Aleppo?    This sort of thing reverses: an individual leaving home for distant parts will speak of or be described as being from: a specific village, then a specific district, then Fujian province, then south China, and, but by the time he gets all the way to San Francisco, he has become Chinese for probably the first time in his life.  This is amusing, but because it is the way of the world, it is irrelevant.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:52, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * We don't have good sources defining it, but what about the number of news hits, and the 6-10 Google Scholar hits on exactly the term "anti-Middle Eastern sentiment"? How many more hits if we look for "anti-Middle Eastern discrimination" or other variations.  One hit with a variation in its title, so perhaps including a definition within (but whose full version I have not obtained), is: "An Investigation of African American College Students' Beliefs about Anti-Middle Eastern Hate Crime and Victims in the Wake of September 11th", by Craig-Henderson, Kellina; Brown-Sims, Melissa. Western Journal of Black Studies28.4 (Winter 2004): 511-517.  Maybe a few of these do make a stab at a definition.
 * There is this passage in Wikipedia's islamophobia: "In some societies, Islamophobia has materialized due to the portrayal of Islam and Muslims as the national "Other", where exclusion and discrimination occurs on the basis of their religion and civilization which differs with national tradition and identity. Examples include Pakistani and Algerian migrants in Britain and France respectively.[64][65] This sentiment, according to Malcolm Brown and Robert Miles, significantly interacts with racism, although Islamophobia itself is not racism.[66]" It seems to me that Islamophobia is defined to be against Muslims, while the current-in-the-U.S. uninformed/ignorant generalization is broader, and needs to be discussed somewhere more prominently, as its own topic.
 * And the term is in fact being used. Can't we have a stub article that notes that it is being used, with some examples of usage, and with any definitions that have been put forward, though noting it is not well-defined?  I would be inclined to toss almost the entire existing article, which I gather was formed as a fork of the Anti-Arabism article, to just provide a place-holder type article on the term and its apparent usage.  With emphasis on what it seems to go beyond, i.e. going beyond recognized Islamophobia.  I think it is an emerging term, and there should be a Wikipedia article monitoring it and providing some perspective. Its Talk page then provides a forum for continued intelligent discussion of what this is and is not. -- do  ncr  am  18:26, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I took a little time to look carefully at this part of your argument (aside: it is a pleasure to engage with you in this civilized discussion,) because I was almost persuaded at first read of this section. And yet I cannot help but see that although this term/concept has been around for quite a few years, it has gained neither wide, popular currency or significant attention from scholars and pundits. As you point out, we don't have definitions by scholars.  I will not repeat here arguments I have made above, except to say that if usage and scholarly attention emerge, the article can be recreated, but, lacking such sources, I continue to think it should be deleted.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:25, 26 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete Seems to be better covered (or what isn't covered might better fit) at the more specific See Alsos. I get that this one's a bit different, in that it deals with percieved Middle Easterness (Easternism?), but it fails to define what's perceived as Middle Eastern appearance or culture. There are a bunch of each. The cases here seem to mostly involve perceived Arabs, and even Arabs have a fair mix of styles and traditions. If a standard Middle Eastern vibe that applies to all these cases can be summarized (and doesn't simply describe a stereotypical Jew, Turk, Arab or Persian), I'll change my mind. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:19, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   15:58, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep The article provides sources making the case that this is a real and notable thing.Kitfoxxe (talk) 17:16, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ethnic groups-related deletion discussions. NewYorkActuary (talk) 06:56, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Middle East-related deletion discussions. NewYorkActuary (talk) 06:56, 30 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep - sources has been provided that show that this is indeed real and in my opinion notable.BabbaQ (talk) 20:28, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. It does seem to have been used to a significant extent as a term for the generalconcept, and that's sufficient for an article.  DGG ( talk ) 21:28, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 01:07, 2 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.