Lebanese TV Host Juomana Haddad on Racism in the Arab World: We Are Tenth, not Third, World; We're Wallowing in Our Own Backwardness

Lebanese TV host Joumana Haddad said in a September 19, 2019 monologue on Al-Hurra TV (U.S.) that the Arabs are a racist people who lack human and ideological awareness. She criticized the Arab nation for looking down upon other races and nationalities and for not seeing anything shameful about its racism. She said that Arab countries legally condone racism and forms of human trafficking, slavery, and systematic humiliation, and that the Arab countries are "wallowing" in their backward past. In addition, Haddad said that it is human advancement, interest in culture, and intellectuality that determines the value of a country, rather than how many skyscrapers a country has, and added: "We do not belong to the third world, but to the tenth world."

Joumana Haddad: Unfortunately, without generalizing, we are racist people. We are racist because we still lack human and ideological awareness. We are racist because we look down upon other races and nationalities, which we consider to be "inferior" to us, while ignoring the fact that we ourselves are treated with contempt by many cultures and countries. Maybe our ugly and criminal behavior constitutes an act of revenge for the racism of some in the West towards us, but our bigger problem is that we still do not see anything shameful about racism. We even condone by means of the law, using many names, like the kafala sponsorship system. These names do not conceal the fact that this is slave trade, human trafficking, and systematic humiliation. I cannot understand how an Arab can be so arrogant towards other peoples, races, and nationalities. In Ethiopia, they have a female president, while we wallow in our backward patriarchy. Sri Lanka has no power outages, and Nepal is one of the most ancient civilizations in history. Meanwhile, we boast about the oil, which is, in fact, our curse, and we are proud of progress form which we took only the scraps. People, we do not belong to the third world, but to the tenth world.  It saddens me to tell you this. What increases the value of any country is its level of human advancement, how much interest it shows in culture, and the role in plays in thought – not how many skyscrapers it has.