Little terrorists

When you go grocery shopping you might expect to buy things you hadn’t planned for. Or perhaps to bump into someone who you haven’t seen in a while and have a chat. Maybe sit and have a coffee. You don’t, as a general rule, expect to have your small children called terrorists. Call me crazy, but that’s just me.

A while ago I was in the grocery store with my two boys, in a fairly multicultural area of Sydney, and said something to them in Arabic (which, when small people are involved, seems to be so much more commanding and imperative than English). The man behind us in the checkout line then asked me a question. The exchange went something like this:

Man: What language are you speaking?
Me: Arabic.
Man: Oh… (knowingly) …they’re little terrorists!
Me: No, but you’re a half-witted imbecile. (That is, in fact, what I didn’t say but wished I had said in retrospect.)

So the question here is: Does speaking Arabic (or being Muslim, for that matter) make you a terrorist? If it does, then by the same logic, and using erroneous but widely spread stereotypes, the following must also be true:
Speaking French makes you romantic.
Speaking German makes you a Nazi.
Speaking Hindi makes you of sub-par intelligence.
Speaking Italian makes you a good lover.
Speaking Australian makes you laidback.

Today I met a French woman and a German man on the beach and we got talking. My first thought wasn’t that she must be a fabulous cordon bleu chef, or that he may quite possibly be a white supremacist. No, we were focused on the life-sized crocodile sand sculpture they were creating, with no thought of casting each other with suspicion because of our accents or the swarthy hue of my child’s skin. That’s how normal, informed people interact.

I think.