Author Archives: Arab America

Pope Francis canonized two 19th-century nuns from Ottoman-ruled Palestine on Sunday, just days after the Vatican moved to formally recognize a state of Palestine, offering tacit support to a bid for full sovereignty.

The canonization of Sister Mariam Baouardy, who founded a Carmelite convent in Bethlehem, and Sister Marie Alphonsine Ghattas, who founded a congregation of nuns, was not related to the Vatican’s announcement last week of a new treaty with the Palestinians, Vatican officials said Friday.

The two new saints, now named St. Mary of Jesus Crucified and St. Marie-Alphonsine, are being held up as beacons of encouragement to Christian communities in the Middle East that are being persecuted by Islamic extremists.

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Sunday’s ceremony in St. Peter’s Square was attended by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who met with the pope on Saturday, and about 2,100 people from the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Israel, led by the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal.

Last week before leaving for the Vatican, the patriarch called the canonization of the two nuns “a spiritual event of prime importance for the citizens of the Holy Land, amid the difficulties we are experiencing.” He added: “As the Holy Land, wrecked by violence and dissent, has for some time had a tarnished image, our two saints emerge to restore its sanctity, reminding us that sanctity is possible even in the most difficult circumstances.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

“Palestine on a Plate” is a cookery application that offers food lovers the chance to taste the beauty of Palestine through its famous dishes. The person behind the application is Joudie Kalla, a professional chef born to Palestinian parents who has lived most of her life in London.

Kalla says her love for food was ignited when, at the tender age of four, she would sit in the kitchen with her three sisters and watch her mother cook several dishes at a time. “I loved baking cakes with her [mother] and bread stuffed with different fillings. I knew then that I wanted to be a chef,” she says.

As a child, like most little girls, Kalla’s obsession was with Barbie dolls but food came a close second. When she started school she chose to study home economics which is “sadly not offered to children these days which I think is vital”, she explains.

She used to rush home from class to see what was for dinner and to see if she could help in any way to prepare the food. Kalla admits it made her a little anti-social as she loved to be behind the stove and interact less with people. “All I wanted to know is if someone liked my food. I felt comfortable in the kitchen and really blossomed there.”

At the age of 21 she decided to become a professional chef, something her father did not fully approve of. He was “exceptionally difficult to please as he always is, but he was tough on me for a reason. He wanted me to be the best I could be and true to myself,” she explains.

Her mother, on the other hand, was very supportive and encouraged her. “She really felt and feels that I am living on through her with my food. Which is actually true. “

Cooking for Kalla is a combination of a hobby, a profession and a lifestyle. “It makes me happy. Happy to cook and happy to feed.”

In addition to this, food has a nostalgic feeling, Kalla explains, that reminds you of “home” and connects you to your past and your identity. “My recipes were a way to become closer to her [mother] as I felt very far away when I moved out of London and went to France. I had never left home and being away made me miss all of my comforts,” she says.

Intrigued by the creativity of this field, Kalla says cooking “allows me to paint on a plate, so to speak. My mind goes into a totally different world as it closes off to everything else and frees me to just focus on what I wanted. I love creating things and finding a way to put my feelings on a plate.”

Being a Palestinian woman who wants to be a chef was not an easy task, Kalla had to work extra hard and often found herself the only woman in the kitchen. The only time she felt like she was offered any real guidance was at her last job “my chef guided me in the right direction to find my way and begin my own catering company and then later to open my own place. You really need support in this field to keep motivated when times are tough.”

Kalla went to the Leiths School of Food and Wine – a prestigious cookery school in London. She has worked in Pengelly’s, a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, Daphne’s and Papillon with Michelin starred Chef David Duverger.

After closing her deli at the end of 2014, Kalla took some time off but many of her old customers called and emailed her asking for recipes for dishes such as makloubeh, fattet djaj and sayyadiyeh. This inspired Kalla to document the recipes and so “Palestine on a Plate” was born.

The application began its life with the help of Kalla’s friend Steph, who helped build it. Kalla describes the venture as “a labour of love and it still is as it needs constant nurturing.”

She says she feels a special bond to the application not just because it is her own venture but she believes it has “benefited me because it made me learn more about my background and investigate my history. It has made my mother and I even closer and made me more proud to be – not only an Arab – but specifically Palestinian.”

Her work has received much praise with Chef Ian Pengelley saying: “She is the foremost expert in Palestinian food and is by far the biggest contributor to making Palestinian cooking the popular cuisine that it is today.”

However, Kalla has also met with much criticism and abuse in particular from Israelis, and is often asked if she stuffs the food with explosives. This has not deterred her, “if it angers people than maybe I am doing something right. I would have thought that food is something that would unite people, but I am afraid not.”

There has been a highly publicised food war with Israelis claiming many Palestinian dishes as their own. Kalla has been attacked by many Israelis who have insulted her and even said they wanted to kill her for lying to the public about her dishes and claiming them as Palestinian when they are Israeli. However, Kalla is defiant: “I don’t react; I just let them have a fight with each other and show their true colours. Dishes like mussakhan and makloubeh are historic Palestinian dishes eaten by our ancestors before our land was split into smithereens. It infuriates me inside, but if they enjoy it enough to claim it, who am I to stop them?”

“Palestine on a Plate” covers recipes from all over Palestine and is not focused on one area in particular. Kalla is concerned that Palestinians are losing their identity. “People don’t see our food as Palestinian food anymore they see it as Israeli or Jewish food. We need to own this again and empower our culture with our history and background. Not lose it [to] propaganda and the media.”

This is the challenge that Kalla has set for herself: to educated people about Palestinian cuisine. “We have enough Italian, French and Chinese restaurants out there, but not many Palestinian restaurants,” she says.

Kalla’s passion for food and Palestine are the main force behind her determination. “I believe in this 100 per cent. I love it and people love it too. Since launching the Instagram account only a couple of months ago, I have had nearly 9,000 people connect and share their – mostly – lovely thoughts with me and so many wonderful messages from people who are so proud of what I am doing. It makes it all worth it. I was worried that not all markets would understand the title, because let’s face it, not many people acknowledge Palestine, but I am not going to hide the most important part of me.”

The most popular dish featured on the application, Kalla says, is m’tabak which her mother only recently taught her to make. “It is sensational. It is a flaky pastry filled with halloumi and ricotta baked at a high heat and then drizzled with lemon-sugar syrup, topped off with dried roses and pistachios. Incredible and simple. My own personal favourite Palestinian dish is makloubeh. The combination of lamb, cinnamon scented rice and fried aubergines with yoghurt is a marriage made in heaven. Always a crowd pleaser.”

Kalla’s ambition for the future is to see “Palestine on a Plate” turn into a cook book, a small deli, and supper clubs throughout the year teaching people how to cook Palestinian food.

“Sharing and loving our culture and giving people another reason to talk about Palestine. We are not always war based and in sadness. We have so much to offer as a people and as a country. I hope to shed light on that and many other wonders of our home,” she says.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

One of the best films of the year premiered in Venice last September, toward the end of the festival. “Theeb” press-screened there on Sept. 3, when more than half the festival decamped to Toronto.

Luckily, this rare Jordanian feature directed by the talented debuting director Naji Abu Nowar (pictured), also played at TIFF. Even though Venice gave “Theeb” a lousy spot, at least organizers put it in the program. The same can’t be said for most other major fests.

While the paucity of Arab titles in Cannes this year could suggests it’s not a great season for the region, their consistent, conspicuous absence from international events means it’s high time the industry questioned why so few programmers bother to look at what’s coming out of these territories.

Fortunately, “Theeb” benefited from the foresight of Fortissimo, which boarded as sales agents before its premiere. Since then, the classic adventure tale, rich in visual counterpoint and displaying a cinematic maturity surprising for a first feature, not only played at scores of fests, but is a success in the Arab-speaking world, where homegrown pics outside of popular Egyptian blockbusters tend to limp alongside U.S. fare.

In March, Film Movement picked up North American rights, hopefully signaling a decent art house roll-out. But why is it that in the current global climate, with the media awash in stories from the MENA (Middle East-North Africa) region, so few of these films make it onto international screens?

On the Croisette, only two Arab-lingo titles are programmed: Nabil Ayouch’s “Much Loved” (Morocco), in Directors’ Fortnight, and “Degrade” (Palestine), directed by brothers Arab and Tarzan Abu Nasser, in Critics’ Week. We know Cannes has always turned a more favorable eye on Francophone Arab nations — Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia — or directors like Yousry Nasrallah with close Gallic ties, yet attentive watchers have long felt dissatisfaction with Arab films’ limited exposure.

That’s benefited Toronto, which had the intelligence to hire Rasha Salti as programmer for the region, and the fests in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which actively promote filmmakers from across the Arab world.

It makes little sense that so few European and American programmers fail to rise to the challenge presented by the increasing demonization of the region. Cinema, a facilitator of cross-cultural dialogue, is the ideal platform for combatting one-dimensional portrayals. (Talk to Arab actors trying to make English-language pics and they’ll tell stories about casting calls in which they’re offered nothing but terrorist roles.)

Even Tribeca, created in response to the need for cultural bridges, screened only one Arab film this year, a nine-minute short (“Kingdom of Garbage” by Iraq’s Yasir Kareem). Mention must also be made of the recent tragic loss of MoMA curator Jytte Jensen, one of the very few U.S.-based programmers who gave Arab cinema an appropriate platform.

Could it be there just isn’t the product? In truth, late 2014/early 2015 wasn’t the best moment for Arab features. (Documentaries however, such as Egypt’s “Mother of the Unborn” and Palestine’s “The Wanted 18” had a much stronger showing.) Political turmoil certainly plays a role, not just because making films in, say, Syria, is all but impossible, but because finding funds continues to be an uphill battle.

When Western film funds do express interest, they often demand script changes. One of the few exceptions is Berlin-based Razor Film (“Wadjda,” “Paradise Now,” and Assad Fouladkar’s upcoming “Halal Sex”), which doesn’t impose its vision on the directors it supports.

Back in 2011, Pacha Pictures was founded as the first company specializing in selling Arab-lingo movies internationally. Everyone thought the timing was ideal, given worldwide interest following the Arab Spring, yet the company folded the following year, unable to find enough buyers for its line-up.

With everyone looking at the MENA region, where were the brave programmers and distributors willing to showcase real Arab voices? Luckily, today Egypt’s MAD Solutions is drawing attention to the range of Arabic films available, but fest programmers need to expand their horizons and recognize that the problem isn’t with Arab cinema. The problem is with them.

Source: variety.com

In a dark kitchen, by the flickering light of a single safety candle, two men bundled in hats and jackets against the cold put on an impromptu video satire: live from Yarmouk, at the southernmost edge of Damascus, a cooking show for people under siege.

“This is the new dish in the camp of Yarmouk. It hasn’t even hit the market yet,” said the man on the right, 40-year-old Firas Naji, the blunt and humorous host.

He picked up a foot-long paddle of sobara, Arabic for prickly pear cactus. Holding it carefully by one end to avoid thorns, he displayed first one side and then the other for the camera.

“In the U.S., they get Kentucky [Fried Chicken], hot dogs. In Italy, spaghetti and pizza,” he said, his raspy voice caressing the names of unattainable foods. “Here in Yarmouk, we get sobara.”

“It’s not enough we have checkpoints in the streets and shelling,” he added, laying the cactus back on the counter with a sad laugh. “Even our cooking has thorns.”

When the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Jabhat Al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) swept in and seized control of Yarmouk last month, they were fighting people who had been under siege by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for more than two years. Since December 2012, the 18,000 people trapped in this neighborhood have been living with hardly any electricity or fuel. They have had no running water since September 2014. They had so little food that at one point a Muslim cleric in Yarmouk issued a ruling allowing people to eat the flesh of donkeys, dogs and cats.

But one thing they have always had in Yarmouk, which was originally a camp for displaced Palestinians, is sabr. Roughly translated, sabr is the patience and perseverance that gives the prickly pear cactus its Arabic name. For Palestinians, the sobara — thorny, tough, often planted at the borders of vegetable gardens as a living fence — is a symbol of resilience.

Under siege by the regime and now by insurgents, Yarmouk’s forgotten civilians have been fighting the medieval weapon of hunger with creativity, humor and the ultimate grass-roots resistance strategy: gardens.

A matter of life and death

Yarmouk is one of a handful of neighborhoods, villages and towns being held under siege in the four-year Syrian conflict. Across the country, civilians under siege have been devising creative survival strategies for feeding themselves and their neighbors. Many of them are based on age-old agrarian practices like foraging, communal kitchens and community gardens. In Yarmouk a new generation of urban gardeners has defied bullets and artillery fire to cultivate as many as seven large community plots and dozens of smaller kitchen gardens.

“Most of the people in Yarmouk do gardening today,” said Abdallah al-Khateeb, a 25-year-old Yarmouk native and student-turned-activist-turned-gardener, over Skype, in an interview conducted before the ISIL takeover. “Most of them have made little farms inside their houses or close to their homes.”

Source: america.aljazeera.com

In parts of the Middle East, some women are groped as a matter of course. There are men who feel free to run their hands over women, like they’re buying produce, or a cow.

Mona Eltahawy has endured that and much worse, as a young woman and as an outspoken Egyptian-American journalist, commentator and feminist.

In 2011, she was arrested by security forces during the uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and reported being sexually assaulted and beaten.

Her left arm and right hand were broken. She was detained by the Ministry of the Interior and then military intelligence for some 12 hours, two of which she spent blindfolded.

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She borrowed a cellphone from another activist and managed to send out a tweet about being assaulted and held. Alec Ross, then a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, responded. That started a Twitter campaign called #freemona, which eventually helped her get released.

Compared to that, wearing a headscarf seems like just a nuisance.

But to Eltahawy, 47, it is another kind of prison for women. Hence the name of her new book, “Headscarves and Hymens: Why The Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.” The collection of feminist writings will bring her to Elliott Bay Book Company Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m.

“The first time I wore a head scarf I was 16,” she said on the phone from her home in Harlem. “I looked and felt like a nun. I missed the wind in my hair. For me, it was not a comfortable thing to wear.”

She once tried on a burqa from Afghanistan, “and I just remember wearing it was incredibly suffocating. You don’t have any peripheral vision.”

No way to see what’s coming, she said — and no way to stand up for your rights.

“We are fighting misogynists in every culture,” she said. “My solution is to listen to the women in each community and amplify their voices.”

Eltahawy has done that in opinion pieces that have run in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers, as well as in guest appearances on national news shows.

Her fearlessness comes from her parents, who met while attending medical school.

Eltahawy and her siblings were born in Egypt, but lived in London while their parents earned their Ph.D.s in medicine there.

“I grew up looking at my parents as equals,” she said, calling their union “a feminist marriage.”

The family then moved to Saudi Arabia, where the parents had teaching jobs — and where Eltahawy first encountered Muslim culture, and soon felt like “the walking embodiment of sin.”

Her first year in the country, the family made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where she writes that she was assaulted twice. While circling the Ka’ba — a large building inside the al-Masjid al-Haram mosque and the holiest place in Islam — a man repeatedly grabbed her from behind.

She cried, but only told her parents that the crowds were getting to her. Later, a policeman groped her breast.

She started to wear a hijab.

“I needed something to defend me,” she wrote, “and I thought the hijab would.”

Author appearance
Mona Eltahawy
The author of “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution” appears at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 21, Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave., Seattle (206-624-6600 or elliottbaybook.com).

One day, she stumbled upon a feminist book store, and was transformed.

“These journals and books put into words the frustration I felt,” she said. “I became a full-fledged feminist.”

There are many observations in the book about Westerners.

One is that we “respect” other cultures, Eltahawy writes, but let that political correctness trump our defense of human rights — especially those of women.

“There is a reluctance here to speak out,” she said.

At least one critic called her out for making “false moral equivalencies” of the pay gap in Manhattan and virginity tests in Cairo.

Others found her 2012 defacing of a controversial subway ad supporting Israel to be misguided, and damaging to her credibility.

Eltahawy worries that Westerners see Muslim culture through the prism of 9/11. There is no such thing as “The Muslim World,” she said.

“It is much more complicated,” Eltahawy said. “But it ends up being reduced to a stereotype; the angry, bearded Muslim man who looks like he wants to reach through the TV and swallow us alive. You don’t get the image of happy Muslim men, loving their families.”

The women, too, are stereotyped.

“They’re covered in black and silenced and you never hear from them,” she said. “The only thing that is discussed is the veil. We are more than what’s on our head and more than this obsession with virginity.”

Eltahawy’s goal is to “complicate the narrative of Muslims.”

The same group that attacked the U.S., she said, was attacking people in Eqypt, Iraq and Syria.

“The ones who want to kill have been killing Muslims for a long time,” she said. “So when 9/11 happened, I knew what it was like to be attacked by that hateful ideology.

“This ISIS group, they attack Muslims more than they attack anyone else.”

Her readings draw a mix of people — young women who are veiled and not veiled, and Egyptian men who have asked her to sign her book for their sons. She is also greeted by American and Canadian feminists “who remind me not to be complacent.”

The other day, she was asked to project to 2050: What did she see?

The inauguration of the first woman president of Eqypt. The first woman Mufti in Saudi Arabia. And by then, the third consecutive woman president of the United States.

“In 2016, I really want a woman to win,” Eltahawy said. “A Democrat. Whoever she is.”

Nicole Brodeur: nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Source: www.seattletimes.com

Faced with the suffering of their own people, the Palestinians recently decided not to help. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas rejected a deal with Israel brokered by the United Nations that would allow Palestinian refugees living in Syria to resettle in the West Bank and Gaza. Abbas stated unequivocally that “we rejected that and said it’s better they die in Syria than give up their right of return.” The Palestine Liberation Organization has also ruled out any military action to help the 18,000 or more refugees who are trapped in the Yarmouk camp near Damascus.

Abbas’s cold-blooded response reveals something fundamental about Palestinian society and identity. Far more than territory, the key Israeli-Palestinian issue is the idea of a Palestinian “right of return”—the belief in a legal and moral right of Palestinian refugees, and more importantly their descendants from around the world, to return to ancestral homes in what was once Mandatory Palestine. This belief is so vital to Palestinian national identity that their leaders would rather they die than give it up and have a chance to live.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948 supposedly codifies this “right.” However, a closer look reveals it to be conditional: “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” The resolution also calls for the United Nations “to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation.”

Interestingly, all the Arab States in the UN at the time (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen) voted against the resolution, since it implicitly accepted the partition of Mandatory Palestine that recognized the Jewish right to a state. But the actual text of the resolution has been irrelevant since the beginning; Palestinian identity has crystallized around the dream of an unconditional “right of return,” as has Palestinian propaganda to the world.

Since 1948, the “right of return” has been repeated innumerable times and has become rooted deeply in Palestinian culture. Abbas himself stated that “the right of return is a personal decision… neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return.” Put this way, which Palestinian would be the first to violate a cultural norm?

More amazing still is the extent to which this imaginary right has been embraced elsewhere. One example, of many, is the American Friends Service Committee, a leading architect of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, which calls for the “implementation of refugees’ right of return, equality, and justice for Palestinians and Israelis.” This simply means the end of Israel as a Jewish state, hardly equality or justice for both peoples. Such dishonesty about this pivotal Palestinian demand prolongs the crisis. So, too, do high-ranking UNRWA officials who defend the Palestinian “right of return,” in speeches and official web pages, not to mention through pervasive promotion in UNRWA schools. How does promoting the claim that Palestinians are entitled to return to places in Israel once occupied by their parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents serve the cause of peace?

Yet pointing out, however gently, that they are unlikely ever to return to these places violates a code of silence. Such was the case with former UNRWA spokesman Andrew Whitley. In a 2010 speech to an Arab-American group, he stated, “We recognize, as I think most do, although it’s not a position that we publicly articulate, that the right of return is unlikely to be exercised to the territory of Israel to any significant or meaningful extent… It’s not a politically palatable issue, it’s not one that UNRWA publicly advocates, but nevertheless it’s a known contour to the issue.”

UNRWA swiftly condemned Whitley, saying it “unequivocally distances itself from the statements,” and Whitley himself recanted, saying, “I express my sincere regrets and apologies over any harm that my words may have done to the cause of the Palestine refugees and for any offence I may have caused… It is definitely not my belief that the refugees should give up on their basic rights, including the right of return.”

Abbas’s statement takes that “right” a step further still. He has effectively said it is an obligation for Palestinians to die rather than return under the wrong circumstances by moving to the territories of the Palestinian Authority itself and renouncing the desire to settle in what is now Israel. The centrality of the “right of return” to Palestinian identity, along with the concept of “resistance” as a means to restore both “justice” and “honor,” have reliably thwarted any consideration of resettlement. Now Abbas has laid out fully the idea of death before dishonor, or even the possibility of life under Palestinian Authority rule.

There have only ever been two solutions to the Palestinian problem, repatriation and resettlement. While at the beginning Israel offered to accept meaningful numbers of Palestinians, anything short of a complete restoration has always been off-limits politically among Palestinians. Now as Palestinians are dying, the barriers have been raised that much higher.

Al-Jazeera editor Mehdi Hasan recently wrote, “Now is the time for those of us who claim to care about the Palestinian people, and their struggle for dignity, justice, and nationhood, to make our voices heard” but added that “Our selective outrage is morally unsustainable. Many of us who have raised our voices in support of the Palestinian cause have inexcusably turned a blind eye to the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by fellow Arabs in recent decades.” That criticism applies first and foremost to the Palestinian leadership.

Asaf Romirowsky is a fellow at the Middle East Forum. Alexander Joffe is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum. They are co-authors of the book Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). This article was originally published by The American Interest.

Source: www.algemeiner.com

Last month, two intense rallies by Yemeni Americans and others were held outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn over the war in Yemen.

Both featured the waving of flags, emotional speeches and passion about the conflict in a country where thousands in metro Detroit have roots.

But the views expressed were quite different: While the first one attacked Saudi Arabia and was sympathetic toward the Houthi rebels, the second one was more supportive of Saudi Arabia and said the Houthis were terrorists.

The clashing views reflect a split among Yemeni Americans and other Arab-American and Muslim-American groups in Michigan. Some of the divide is along sectarian lines: Shias generally are more supportive of Houthis (who are Shia) and against Saudi Arabia, while Sunnis are generally more supportive of Saudi Arabia and its allies. Saudi Arabia accuses the Houthis of being supported by Iran, whose leadership is Shia.

At the first rally, on April 5, Yemeni Americans who support the Houthis railed against Saudi Arabia, saying its attacks were harming Yemen. The rally also included Shia clerics in metro Detroit of Iraqi and Iranian descent, and Lebanese-American Shias.

Related: Yemeni-Americans want rescue from war-torn country

“The Saudis are destroying everything in Yemen, the entire infrastructure,” said Wali Altahif, of Dearborn, a Yemeni American who took part in the April 5th rally.

The viewpoints expressed at a rally at the same location, on April 25th, were the opposite. Some held up Saudi Arabia’s flag, showing support for the country’s actions against the Houthis. Participants also waved American and Yemeni flags and displayed a big banner that read “Houthis = Terrorists.”

“The Houthis killed Yemeni people,” said Mahmoud Ali, of Dearborn, at the April 25 rally against the Houthi attacks. He wore a T-shirt that read: said: “I (heart) Yemen.”

“We’re all supporting Saudi Arabia.”

Despite the differing views, both sides agree the U.S. should do more to help evacuate Yemeni Americans trapped in Yemen.

Contact Niraj Warikoo: 313-223-4792, nwarikoo@freepress.com or on Twitter @nwarikoo

Source: www.freep.com

By EMILY CADEI, OZY

If you were asked to name countries where women vastly outnumber men in higher education, somewhere in the ultra-traditional Arab world would probably not be your first guess. A

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

The Mohamed S. Farsi Foundation and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television are opening up a new avenue for Arab woman filmmakers with a partnership and fund that will include three new four-year full-ride graduate scholarships for UCLA TFT’s Master of Fine Arts in Directing.

Designed “to give voice to the unique perspective of Arab women,” as a statement put it, the Hani Farsi Graduate Scholarship Fund will start in the fall 2015.

London-based Saudi philanthropist, entrepreneur and film producer Hani Farsi (pictured) has long been producing and distributing films with sociopolitical undertones such as Elia Suleiman’s “The Time That Remains” and Mira Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” He is also co-owner of French distribution and sales company Le Pacte, which have eight films at Cannes this year, including Nanni Moretti’s “My Mother” and Palestinian dramedy “Degrade” by Arab and Tarzan Abu Nasser.

While a number of Arab female directors have come to the fore in recent years – such as Saudi Arabia’s Haifa Al-Mansour (“Wadjda”), who is on the Un Certain Regard jury in Cannes, and Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki (“Where Do We Go Now”) – Arab women certainly face more barriers to becoming filmmakers than their male counterparts in the region.

“We want these scholarships to be a catalyst, to capture the imaginations of future filmmakers, and to inspire them to reach their goals,” said Farsi.

“This partnership with the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television represents the first step in a call to action, which we hope will lead to a positive change for women in the film industry and in my part of the world.”

Source: variety.com