I’m jihading to find the right words to say…

I heard somewhere that the Arabic language is difficult to learn. Not as challenging as Chinese, but challenging nonetheless. I’ve never formally studied Arabic, but I can already tell you from the six Arabic words I’ve learned through the cable news shows, this has got to be true.

Let's examine the fascinating life of my very first Arabic word, jihad, which I happened to learn on the 11^th of September, 2001.

Hmmm... something else happened on the 11^th of September, 2001.

Jihad, as I and the rest of non-Arabic-speaking America were taught on that Tuesday means that batshit crazy Arabs want to kill us unless we convert to Islam. This is a definition given credence by the mainstream’s most respected authorities who so graciously create knowledge for us with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

But a native Arabic speaker friend of mine claims that the actual definition of jihad is quite different:

Jihad means struggle. In Islam, it means to struggle for things God requires from you. For example, if you speak up in front of a tyrant ruler, that is Jihad; if you go through hardship to obtain an education, that is Jihad; if you fight off a burglar and protect you family, home, and property, that is Jihad. Then there is the greater Jihad, which is to go to war to defend, protect or even advance the interests of the Muslim Nation.

What?! Next he’s going to tell me that Allah is just the Arabic word for “God” when everybody knows that Allah is another God – not to be mistaken for the regular God, and who does this guy think he is – an authority on Arabic just because he’s a native Arabic speaker or whatever? This is all starting to sound just like that one time when another Arab tried to tell me that Salma Hayek was half Lebanese when everybody knows that the reason she can’t speak English is because she’s Mexican.

Batshit crazy Arabs, indeed.

Thank goodness Barack Obama’s people didn’t ask these two guys for help with their Arabic homework earlier this year, when Obama was accused of attending a madrasah while he was a kid living in Indonesia. Knowing their audience full well, CNN utilized their fluency in American-style Arabic in Obama’s defense:

Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa" are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa.

Seeing that the word madrasah is Arabic for “school” let’s take a fun moment now to stop and imagine how confused the Arabic-speaking world must have been as the American public accused a presidential candidate of going to school.

(Insert George W. Bush joke here)

And pretending that our country is teaching us to hate Latinos instead (... well, moreso than we’re supposed to hate the Arabs), let’s picture the headline: “Barack rumored to have attended escuela.” I don't think it has to take a person fluent in Spanish to see how estupido that sounds.

But so it is, and it will continue to be until we stop accepting that cable news and the government are the arbiters of "truth." In the Arabic we speak in this country it doesn't matter what a word actually means. What matters is what "normal people think it means." And in this country, the word madrasah does not just mean any “school.” Normal people know that a madrasah is a school where the Arabs go to learn, if you know what I mean.

And, I think you do...

Or maybe you're abnormal? Oh, such contested meanings -- the struggle many of us face in trying to communicate in Arabic: a language, it seems, is so nice you have to learn it twice. Quite the jihad, indeed.

[Tarboush tip: Fayyad, who played batshit crazy Arab #1]