Author Archives: Arab America

The United States and Iran have an opportunity to work together to create peace and stability in the Middle East.

I do not believe the nuclear negotiations with Iran are based on misguided premises that could have disastrous outcomes. The basis of these arguments seems to stem from the February 27, 2015 David Brooks article in the New York Times, “Converting the Ayatollahs.” Many critics, such as Brooks, cite outdated facts and policies that have resulted in more aggression and hostility in the region over the past several decades.  Such hostilities have mutated into tragic events such as the attacks on September 11, 2001, as well as the creation of ISIS.

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu does not appear to be interested or ready to help facilitate stability in the Middle East.  His views and strategies on dealing with Iran are very destructive and counterproductive. Mr. Meir Dagan, a former head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad, has accused the prime minister of endangering the country’s security with his stance on the Iranian nuclear programme. Mr. Dagan is an architect and supporter of assassination plot of Iranian nuclear scientist and he is not by any means soft on Iran.

The Prime Minister’s actions are not only creating tensions in the Middle East but also with its ally, the United States. President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, warned that Netanyahu’s trip to Washington in this regard is “destructive to the fabric” of US-Israeli relations.

In dealing with Iran, the United States does not and should not try to “convert the Ayatollahs.”  The United States and Iran do not need to share the same religion or ideologies in order to work together and create substantive progress in the region.  In the 1960s there was resistance in strengthening the relations between the United States and communist China.  Though neither side shared the same religious or ideological background, negotiations and agreements were created that helped further the progress of both nations.

A US-Iranian working relationship is essential, but its development is a very delicate subject that requires honest thought and consideration.  American foreign policy in the Middle East cannot be led or dictated by some radical lobbyists of Israel and Saudi Arabia who believe that a “good Iran is no Iran.”  A long-term cooperation and understanding amongst the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran is necessary to have a peaceful and stable Middle East. Productive negotiation is needed to begin turning several decades of misunderstanding into a period of mutual understanding.

Source: mondoweiss.net

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was still in the air between Tel Aviv and Washington when his propaganda machinery was set fully in motion. A senior Israeli official travelling with him told reporters: “The Israeli government had a good understanding of the agreement we can draw conclusions from… We know what we know. And believe me, we know a lot of information about this agreement… The prime minister is going to Congress to explain what they don’t know about this agreement that it is a bad agreement.” 

Source: www.aljazeera.com

Use this page to quickly find Learning Network lesson plans, crosswords and archival materials — as well as links to current Times articles and multimedia and great resources around the Web.

Source: learning.blogs.nytimes.com

Do you consider yourself a feminist? How would you define the word?

Is a feminist “one who believes in, and is committed to, the idea of true equality between the sexes,” as Betty Friedan says in the Times article (PDF) above?

Or is labeling oneself a feminist still, to some, a “militant” stance that implies, as a woman in this 1982 article says, that one is “a lesbian who hates men”? How are current projects like “I need feminism because…” contributing to the conversation?

A search on the word “feminist” in The Times returns 18,692 results. We restrained ourselves to linking to just a few of the most germane below, but we invite you to use Times Machine on your own to examine the cultural and political history of feminism as The Times reported on it from the earliest mention (1897) to today.

You can also find many more resources on our Women’s History Month page and, at the bottom of this post, a simple exercise you can do with any day’s Times to examine the role of women in the world, yesterday and today.

Source: learning.blogs.nytimes.com

A West Bloomfield resident who says township governance is a “hot mess” is leading a recall drive against township trustees accused of discrimination against Chaldeans and African-Americans.

At the center of the discrimination allegations, which surfaced in January, is township clerk Catherine Shaughnessy, who is accused of calling Chaldeans “crooks.” Chaldeans Americans are descendents of people from the northern Tigris-Euphrates Valley, currently part of Iraq. The majority of Chaldean Americans live in Detroit and the surrounding metro area.

Shaughnessy’s comment was allegedly made as the township was poised to remove Chaldean American Zia Oram from his job as an executive assistant to supervisor Michele Economou Ureste because he doesn’t have a college degree.

Ureste told WJBK-TV that “one of our elected officials basically wanted me not to put any nominations forward for Chaldeans on boards and commissions, that they would not be confirmed or ratified.”

Ureste alleged that racist practices are being carried out against minority applicants and workers by board members. She said the three members voted against confirming seven her planning commission appointments who were minorities.

The item regarding Oram’s removal never came up, but the controversy lingered.

Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce president Martin Manna condemned the incident in a statement, saying “there have been allegations that a member of this body said Chaldeans cannot be trusted, Chaldeans are not people we should hire within this township, that Chaldeans are a bunch of crooks.”

Shaughnessy has denied the allegations, and said “there is no proof.”

“We need to get at the truth,”she said.

Board members also have denied allegations that pictures of monkeys were placed around an employee’s workspace in an act of discrimination.

“The board is a hot mess,” Charlene Mitchell-Rodgers, who has lived in West Bloomfield for nearly three decades, told WJBK-TV. “When we watch these meetings it is like watching one of the ‘Real Housewives’ reality shows.”

Mitchell-Rodgers, who is spearheading the recall drive to boot Shaughnessy and board members Howard Rosenberg and Lawrence Brown, also said the board has repeatedly violated the open meetings law.

A hearing on the recall petitions will be heard next week. If approved, a board member could be removed with 4,000 signatures.

In the meantime, a Diversity Committee appointed by the board on Monday will begin to examine the claims to discrimination and racism to determine if they have merit.

The Arab American News reports that the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce is interested in establishing an anti-defamation group to defend the approximately 120,000 Chaldeans living in the region.

However, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Michigan (ADC-MI) represented the interests of a Chaldean American who was accused in a series of assaults in West Bloomfield in 2012.

Source: patch.com

On Feb. 15, Tony Blair arrived in Gaza with an ultimatum. He traveled not on his own behalf, as a disgraced former head of government potentially facing war crimes charges over his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but as the special envoy of the Middle East Quartet.

The Quartet is a group composed the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia. It was established in 2002 to mediate the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During his brief visit, which lasted only hours, Blair reportedly found the time to demand that the Hamas movement amend not only its policies within Palestinian governance, but also its own agenda as a political party.

“Blair says that there is no reconstruction unless these five conditions are fulfilled,” Hamas leader Mouza Abu Marzouk wrote on his Facebook page on Feb. 17, before listing Blair’s demands that the group accept a reconciliation agreement with its Fatah counterpart, base its political program on a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, emphasize its nature as a Palestinian movement and renounce any “Islamist” affiliation or regional goals, accept a two-state solution as a final outcome, and coordinate anti-terror efforts in the Sinai with the Egyptian government.

Source: www.mintpressnews.com

As part of our Special Focus on Palestinian Women – Shared Struggle, Diverse Experiences in conjunction with the forthcoming International Women’s Day (March 8), the Institute for Palestine Studies has made available a series of articles from our archives. This archival collection includes articles on the early Palestinian women’s movement in the 1920s and ‘30s, the role of Palestinian camp women as “Tellers of History,” the experiences of Palestinian female laborers in Gaza under direct Israeli occupation, and many, many more, including the aforementioned two by Abdallah and Gluck. These articles, which include several interviews, relate extraordinary stories often told in the voices of Palestinian women. In presenting them, we hope to inform our readers about the exceptional stories that make up the whole of Palestine.

Source: www.palestine-studies.org

Three thousand women protested outside the Israeli Knesset calling for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
The protest Wednesday was held by Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization founded after last summer’s war in Gaza that supports a peace agreement. According to the Times of Israel, the group has 7,000 members.
At the protest, the women formed a circle around the Knesset and chanted “It’s reality, not a dream, women make peace.” They also sang “A Song for Peace,” which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sang at a rally shortly before his assassination in 1995.
“It’s time for us to be part of the dialogue that revolves around security and peace,” Yael Elad, head of the organization’s press team, told the Times of Israel. “We sense that women disappear from the public space when you look at TV panels or listen to radio shows. This place is reserved for generals or politicians, but never for women.”

Source: www.jta.org

Bibi Netanyahu speech before a Joint Session of Congress, is the best time ever for the American people to rise up, as a proud nation and dethrone Bibi Netanyahu, his Royal Court AIPAC and put them out of business once and for all, and never ever again, allow the likes of Bibi to humiliate our nation and our presidents.

While we are it, it may be time to also vote out of office all those Israel-First members of Congress, those who chose to attend the speech and give Bibi his standard dozen ovations, and all those who chose to snub our elected president and insult our nation and our sense of honor and dignity.

Source: www.veteranstoday.com

Just one day after the court in Egypt ruled that Hamas – the entire Islamist organization, not just its military arm – is a terrorist group, Hamas asked Saudi Arabia to pressure Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi to revoke the ruling. The request is interesting in particular because Hamas seems to think that the new Saudi king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, will be willing to listen to the organization, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood – which Saudi Arabia itself has declared to be a terrorist movement.

Source: www.haaretz.com

On March 3 after Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and as thousands of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) activists finished their visits with members of Congress, about 150 protesters gathered for the JVP-DC Metro’s  “Netanyahu, You Don’t Speak for Me” rally in freezing rain on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building.

Protest organizer Carolyn Karcher explains “AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and Israel are trying to force on the United States a foreign policy that is not in the interest of the American people. On false pretenses, the American people were dragged into wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, which have had a disastrous impact, not only in the United States but especially in those countries. And now the same people who tried to drag us into those wars are trying to drag us into another war that would be even more disastrous.”

On January 21, Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress to challenge President Obama’s negotiations strategy with Iran. On February 8, Netanyahu stated that he would be addressing Congress as a representative of the entire Jewish people. In response, Jewish Voice for Peace–D.C. Metro began to organize a protest, “Netanyahu, You Don’t Speak for Me” for the day of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, March 3

Source: mondoweiss.net

In the latest episode of Truth in Media, Ben Swann investigates the origins of the militant group referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Source: benswann.com