Calling out Cataldi

Is a slur against Muslims offensive if no one seems to care?

by E. James Beale

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Published: Jun 18, 2008

On the morning of Thursday, May 29, a Hindu woman drove her husband through Center City. He was headed to a meeting in D.C.; she was taking him to 30th Street Station. As they drove, the couple — originally from Trinidad, now living in the area — flipped through the radio, eventually landing on 610 WIP, a local Philadelphia sports talk station. Their on-air host was Angelo Cataldi, who has become famous both for interviewing politicians such as Ed Rendell, Arlen Specter and Barack Obama on sports radio, and for asking female callers what they're wearing.

That morning, Cataldi and his team played a skit by local comedian Joe Conklin. Cataldi introduced the clip thusly: "Here is the actual recording of me yesterday with 'the Arab dude' purchasing gas at 3 a.m." What followed was a back-and-forth between Conklin's impersonation of Cataldi, and an impersonated gas station attendant with a stereotypical Indian accent. The two converse for a minute as the Cataldi character tries to haggle down the price of gas. Then there's this exchange:

Conklin's Cataldi: I don't know why you're wearing a turban, Akmar, you ought to be wearing a mask.

"Arab Dude": Oh, Chief, wasn't it you who was in here the other week complaining about 25 cents for air?

CC: I'd call it highway robbery but I can't even afford to get on the highway!

AD: Well for an additional $35 it will be my pleasure to squeegee your windshield, as well, bishop.

CC: You want to squeegee something? Squeegee that decimal point over your forehead!

AD: You infidel! You die! I curse you!

The woman in the car was extremely offended. What she had just heard insulted her religion, heritage and sense of decency. A local radio station had conflated caricatures of Muslim and Hindu cultures, and had done so to a character they referred to as "Arab dude." Was this type of language really acceptable on the radio?

The answer, it seems, is yes.

Though the woman says she formally complained to WIP (and forwarded City Paper an e-mail she received from Marc Rayfield, WIP's general manager, in which he agrees to speak with her), Andy Bloom, the station's program director, claims the station has not received any complaints about the skit (and would offer no further comment). Neither Conklin nor Cataldi will be fired, fined or censured for the incident.

Apparently this response is fairly par for the course. Laila Al-Qatami, communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), is quite possibly the single most attuned person in the country to media slights of Arab-Americans. She says that "skits like that are pretty common. ... While it is offensive and inaccurate, I've certainly heard a lot worse on some of the more mainstream shows."

Indeed, on his CNN Headline News program, pundit Glenn Beck once said to Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress: "I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is: 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'" And radio host Michael Savage told his audience of 8 million weekly listeners that he thinks Muslims "need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... it's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings." When placed in this context, someone telling an Indian character to "squeegee that decimal point over your forehead" seems ... well ... still kinda bad?

"Of course I think this is bad," says Al-Qatami, "but people have become desensitized to attacks on Arabs and Muslims." That desensitization may account for the disparity in outrage over slurs against different ethnic groups. It's probably impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison of the offensiveness of various statements, but it is worth noting that within the last year or so, radio personalities Don Imus and Kidd Chris both lost their jobs for airing skits that seem at least comparatively distasteful. One difference may be the groups that were targeted: While Imus and Chris both aimed at African-Americans, Conklin and Cataldi made jokes at the expense of some confused stereotype of Indian, Arab, Hindu and Muslim cultures. Al-Qatami doesn't think the divergent outcomes are an accident. "If you did the same skit with different ethnicities, I think you'd see a very different reaction," she says.

Read more of E. James Beale's sports commentary at citypaper.net/sports

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