Author Archives: Arab America

Pope Francis’ personal envoy to Iraq will return to the country during Holy Week, bringing with him the pontiff’s love and solidarity along with a special gift from the diocese of Rome: cake.  

“During Holy Week, which is now close, these families are sharing with Christ the unjust violence of which they are victims, and participating in the pain of the same Christ,” a March 27 statement from the Vatican read.

Cardinal Fernando Filoni, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, traveled to Erbil as Pope Francis’ personal envoy in August of last year. He returns to Iraq in order to “stand beside the families” who have been forced out of their homes due to extremist violence.

With the funds taken up from a special collection, the families of the diocese of Rome will also show their solidarity with those suffering in Iraq by sending an Easter cake “to share the joy of Easter” based on faith in the Resurrection of Christ.

The gift being offered to refugee families is a traditional Italian sweet baked during Easter called a “Colomba” cake, which is formed in the shape of a dove.

In order not to “forget the suffering of the families in Northern Nigeria,” Pope Francis has also sent the cakes as a gift to those affected by extremist violence in the region by way of the local bishops’ conference.

Pope Francis, the statement added, prays for these families “and hopes they can return and resume their lives in the lands and places where, for hundreds of years, they have lived and woven good relationships with all.”

The capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, is where more than 70,000 Christians fled after their villages came under attack by the Islamic State (ISIS) last June. The militants have since established a caliphate and have persecuted non-Sunnis in its territory, which extends across swaths of Iraq and Syria.

ISIS has forced more than 1.2 million Christians, Yazidis, and Shia Muslims from their homes in Iraq, under threat of death or heavy fines if they do not convert.

In an interview with CNA shortly after his return from Iraq last August, Cardinal Filoni revealed that at that time, Francis had given $1 million as a personal contribution to help Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq who had been forced from their homes.

Source: www.catholicnewsagency.com

Nemr is a Lebanese/American Stand Up Comedian who is credited with establishing and pioneering the stand up comedy scene throughout the Middle East where he performs in English. He grew up in San Diego and then moved back with his family to Lebanon where he went on to break down barriers and unite people in a region where bombing on stage can have a completely different meaning.

He is an accomplished comic with six full feature specials, a prime time television show “A Stand Up Comedy Revolution’, a movie release of one of his specials ‘EPIC’, and currently holds the record for biggest show in every major country in the Middle East, with his latest special, Uninterrupted Funny Observations, selling out to 4,000 people in one night in Beirut alone just last July.

In May of 2014 he also featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine Middle East, yes there is one, and yes it’s just as big a deal. Except to Nemr’s dad. Who still thinks his son is unemployed.

He is now back in the land of the free, that would be the USA (some people confuse this with Saudi Arabia), and aims to do here what he did there, bring people together through laughter and merriment. He comes bearing gifts of myrrh and frankincense. No you can’t smoke them.

Source: thehowardtheatre.com

A young woman with a degree in music never expected to have a career in belly dance.

In 1970, just three months after graduating, Aida Al Adawi saw Bal Anat, the first Middle Eastern dance troupe in the United States, perform at a Renaissance fair.

“The minute they started, the show was amazing,” Al Adawi said. “I just got hijacked.”

Dancers balanced swords and tea sets on their heads and danced while carrying snakes.

Al Adawi took classes from the troupe’s director and went on to dance professionally in North and South America.

Now she teaches a unit on Middle Eastern dance in Dance in American Culture at OU, which satisfies the arts general education requirement. Students watch videos of Al Adawi’s performances, try Middle Eastern instruments and dance with veils, canes and finger cymbals.

“It’s just great to work with someone who’s that passionate,” assistant professor of dance Elizabeth Kattner said. Kattner teaches the academic portion of Dance in American Culture.

“I’ve learned so much from her,” Kattner said. “She is very, very lively.”
Al Adawi’s first class this semester was last Thursday. She gave a brief history of belly dance, then students got to try it for themselves. They learned to stand in a balanced position and that bending their knees moves their hips properly. She also taught students an Israeli folk dance called “Mayim.”

Jessica Zacharias, a communication major in her senior year, takes Dance in American Culture.

“I really enjoyed how she dove into the culture,” Zacharias said. “You could tell that she loves it.”

Zacharias also said she liked that Al Adawi wore a coin belt and brought traditional headpieces to class.

Zacharias has taken dance classes since she was little. She was on the OU athletics dance team for four years and was captain for two. However, Dance in American Culture has taught her about dance forms that she had never tried before, including Latin dance and African dance.
“My love for dance has really expanded because of this class,” Zacharias said. “It’s so fun.”

Al Adawi also teaches belly dance from home in Pontiac. She holds class in her living-room-turned-studio and makes sure that her classes have a friendly environment.
“It’s not about competition. It’s about sharing,” she said. “My classes are safe.”

Al Adawi said she can teach three years of belly dancing in three months because she breaks steps down to their simplest elements. However, the dance is not easy.

“[Students] learn that it is very difficult, very technical,” Kattner said.
Al Adawi said belly dance is a good form of exercise that won’t beat up the body.

“This is an art form for any age, for any size,” Al Adawi said. “They can do it until they drop.”

Teaching at the university level gives Al Adawi a chance to show that belly dancing, which Al Adawi calls “the most bastardized dance form on the planet,” is legitimate.

She said that belly dance is about the beauty of being a woman in the best way.

“If the women and children don’t like you, you’re wrong. Because this is not a sex show,” Al Adawi said.

She also has an extensive collection of resources about the Middle East. She makes and sells costumes and jewelry and archives video and audio recordings of herself and other belly dancers and musicians.“It’s a tremendous art form,” Al Adawi said.

Some professional belly dancers stay at Al Adawi’s house for up to a week for coaching, costume making and studying Al Adawi’s archives. She also teaches workshops all over the United States and some in Canada.

Belly dancing is more than Al Adawi’s income. It’s her art—how she defines herself.

“You always have to put your art before you,” she said.
Al Adawi hopes that her students get joy out of belly dance and find the work gratifying.

“I want [students] to leave with a great amount of satisfaction about themselves,” she said. 

Source: www.oaklandpostonline.com

hat’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.

The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities.

The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

Source: readersupportednews.org

The Student Government of Loyola University in Chicago narrowly passed a resolution to divest from companies that do business with Israel.
The vote on March 26 was 15 to 15, with two abstentions. The speaker of the student senate broke the tie with a vote in favor of the resolution.
More than an hour of public debate and three hours of debate by student senators preceded the vote, according to the university’s student newspaper, the Loyola Phoenix. The voting was anonymous due to fear of reprisals.
The companies named in the resolution are Caterpillar, United Technologies Co., Raytheon, and Valero.
The tie-breaking vote came from an intern for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the College Fix news website reported. The CAIR Chicago chapter assisted the Loyola Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which sponsored the resolution, after it was temporarily suspended from holding campus activities following the harassment of a Jewish group on campus.
The Loyola Student Government passed a divestment resolution in March 2014, but the resolution was vetoed by the student body president. The university also issued a statement at the time that it would not adopt the student’s divestment proposal if passed.

Source: www.jta.org

He has returned to Palestine. On the fraught road through the country he relives the choice that sent him to America and the forces of history now driving hi…

Source: www.youtube.com

Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed apology for his incitement against Palestinian citizens of Israel during Israel’s recent election campaign, his government continues to spread anti-Arab hatred.

Israel’s verified Arabic-language Twitter account and Facebook account, titled “Israel speaks Arabic,” published the above caricature on Sunday, which asks “Which is better, relying on yourself, or relying on someone else?”

Source: electronicintifada.net

The underwater rock formations provide the best fishing grounds off Gaza, but they are just beyond the limit set by the Israelis for local boats. Tawfiq Abu Riyala dreamt up an ingenious plan to solve this problem; but it may have ended up costing him his life.

The 32-year-old fisherman had built up his own artificial rock with planks of wood, tyres, and bits of metal, seemingly well within the area in which he and his colleagues are allowed to operate. It was while he was adding to this pile that an Israeli gunboat opened fire, wounding him fatally.

Tawfiq and four other fishermen were in two boats that he owned. Both vessels were seized: two of the men were injured; two others arrested. “I told him not to go that day, because the Israelis were doing a lot of shooting; but those boats had cost him $50,000 [£34,000] and he had to earn money to pay back the loan he had taken for them,” said his brother Mohammed, 29.

“It may be that the Israelis saw something metallic in his hands and that’s what led to them firing. But he has been building that thing for more than 18 months. They have seen him doing it. So, why shoot this time? And what about all the other shootings?”

Source: www.independent.co.uk

Some of these were unexpected.

Source: stars.topix.com

Even though Arabic is the official language of the Middle East, and it is the fifth most commonly spoken language worldwide, each Arabic country has its own unique dialect and style of pronouncing the language.

There are 26 countries worldwide which have Arabic as the main language, with 10 of these speaking the language alongside another, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, French is fluently spoken alongside Arabic. In Iraq, people speak Kurdish as fluently as Arabic.

Although the Arabic language consists of the same alphabets and words, the way it is used in forming sentences in each region might be hard to understand from one dialect to another, even a small word such as “Hello” differs from the Gulf countries to the Levant than Morocco and Tunisia.

Yet, there are a few dialects that are understood by most people living in the Arab region including Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese accents, due to the popularity of TV shows in these languages.

The differences in languages are often not mainly in the words themselves, but in the grammatical inflections used before or after words.

After the Arab expansion and spread of Islam in the Middle East, which started in the seventh century, Arabic spread across the region. Egyptians were aware of the Arabic language and spoke it even before it was an Islamic country due to trade with Arabs, but it started to be spoken fluently and became the country’s official language during the time of having the ”Fustat” period, the first capital of the country in the same century.

Source: www.the-newshub.com

An eclectic mix of experimental electronic music from Egypt, Palestine and the Netherlands features in Thursday’s DCAF music programme.

Ismael, from Egypt, will kick off the night with an experimental electronic set. Beyond DJ-ing on the local music scene, Ismael is also a member of the electronic duo Wetrobots and a member of the music collective Kairo Is Koming (KIK).

“Taking feedback loops as a primary source of inspiration, he sculpts the chaos into control, offsetting a series of sonic possibilities and infinite reactions that take form under his steady hand and curious expeditions into the unknown,” according to the DCAF website.

Ismael is also a partner at the Cairo-based EPIC 101 Studios and, as a musician, is signed on to the label 100 Copies, also based in the Egyptian capital.

The second set will feature famed experimental musician and MC Boikutt, from Ramallah, Palestine.

Boikutt creates sounds using sampled material, field recordings, and electronic devices, with results ranging between hip-hop, downtempo, glitch, ambient and experimental, according to the DECAF website.

His music is both political and innovative, relying on a lot of storytelling and ranging musically from hip-hop, electronic-experimental, ambient and is infused with lots of sampling.

In 2013, he wrote, produced and released his debut album Hayawan Nateq  to great audience success and regional acclaim.

Boikutt is also a co-founder of Tashweesh, a sound and image performance group from Ramallah and, according to DCAF’s bio of him, has composed scores for international and local films.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Birth of Joy will wrap up the night.

Their music is described as having been “influenced by psychadelica, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll… with a modern twist influenced by stoner, grunge and punk”.

They have performed all over Europe, but Thursday will be their first time in Egypt.

They released their latest album, Prisoner, this month with the label Sixties on Steroids.

Source: english.ahram.org.eg

Basil Soda, who helped put Lebanon at the forefront of the international fashion scene, passed away Monday. He was 47.

Soda, who spent two decades dealing in the world of fashion before starting his own clothing line in 2001, died at a Beiruthospital Monday after a two-year battle with an illness, a close aide told The Daily Star.

He opened his own design house in Horsh Tabet, east of Beirut, in 2009.

The famous designer dressed a large number of Hollywood stars as well as celebrities from around the world, including Katy Perry, Emily Blunt, Marion Cotillard, Jiang Yiyan, Morena Baccarrin and Guiliana Rancic.

Alongside his Couture line, his ready-to-wear collection was launched in 2010, opening doors for a new market to acknowledge the Basil Soda aesthetic.

His brand is in major international cities, including New York, Washington, Cannes, Toronto, Vienna, Moscow, Dubai, Beirut, all the way to Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

“We are sorry to announce the loss of Basil Soda, the great international designer, he who built his company single handedly from the ground up. A great man who will always be remembered for his craft and beautiful soul,” his company announced in a statement.

It said funeral services will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Cathedral of our Lady of Annunciation in Beirut.

Source: www.albawaba.com