Author Archives: Arab America

QPR defender Rio Ferdinand says the incident in which Chelsea fans stopped a black man boarding a Paris train shows football cannot be complacent about tackling racism.
Chelsea have banned five fans over the incident before their Champions League game at Paris St-Germain.
“We’ve started to think ‘football has cured it’ and put the whole issue on the back-burner,” the former England captain told The Sun on Sunday.
“It is a rude awakening for the game.”
The former West Ham, Leeds United and Manchester United defender, 36, admitted that he had “been guilty of complacency” himself.
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho said he was “ashamed” by the conduct of the club’s fans in the French capital.
Amateur video showed a man being pushed from a train at the Metro station while a group chants, “we’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it”.
“It is a rude awakening for the whole game and now it’s essential that there has to be a continual effort,” said Ferdinand, who is a member of FA chairman Greg Dyke’s commission looking at how to improve English football.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

Palestinian students from Gaza are still prevented by Israel from studying at West Bank universities, after an announcement this week to the contrary was retracted as a mistake.

On Wednesday, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announced that a quota of 50 students would be permitted to exit Gaza “for the purpose of academic studies” in the West Bank. However, as related by NGO Gisha, the very same evening, COGAT clarified that there had been a “clerical error” in the relevant document, and that there would be no such permits.

The Israeli government has opposed Palestinians from Gaza studying in the West Bank on the grounds of ‘security’. The High Court of Justice has also rejected petitions by human rights groups on the matter, including one filed on behalf of five women studying gender, democracy and law.

In 2009, 21-year-old, Bethlehem University student Berlanty Azzam was arrested at a West Bank checkpoint and immediately returned to the Gaza Strip, after a solider noted Gaza City as the town of residence on her ID.

The ill-fated announcement was included on a list of various measures apparently prepared by Israel to “ease” restrictions. According to reports from COGAT and Palestinian officials, it would appear that the number of merchant permits will rise, as will the type and quantity of goods permitted to exit from Gaza for sale in the West Bank.

Back in November, two truckloads of wooden planks left Gaza for sale in the West Bank, the first time that wood from Gaza has been sold in the West Bank since the blockade was imposed in 2007. The same month, some truckloads of clothes, fish, and agricultural products made the same journey, again for the first time.

This is less indicative of Israeli authorities’ generosity but rather highlights the deception that is the ‘security’ rationale for the restrictions in the first place. Why were Gaza’s farmers allowed to send cucumbers to the West Bank on November 6, 2014 – but not before? Why won’t Israel lift restrictions on exports, save for piecemeal exceptions?

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

In a show of solidarity, Muslims are standing with Christians and giving up guilty pleasures for lent.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

Picture the scene: across the rooftops and minarets of an unspecified Middle Eastern town, the call to prayer rings out. Is it just another day in your hometown? Is it an ad for exotic holidays for orientalist westerners embarking on a journey of self-discovery? Or is it the beginning of yet another Hollywood movie about terrorism?

Sadly, in the modern Hollywood lexicon, opening a movie with just such a scene has become filmic shorthand for “and now, a movie involving terrorists, bombs and the noble struggle of the US of A to keep the peace through the use of a remarkable amount of expensive and suspiciously unpeaceful, military ordnance”.

The Oscar-nominated American Sniper is just the latest in a long line of such movies though, admittedly, this one foregoes the romantic rooftop setting in favour of tanks for its opening scene.

But it is by no means unique. A quick straw poll pulled up an impressive list of movies that start with that very scene of the call to prayer: Black Hawk Down, Delta Force, The Kingdom, Syriana, Zero Dark Thirty, Three Kings, The Hurt Locker

Source: www.thenational.ae

Israel on Wednesday unveiled the largest collection of medieval gold coins ever found in the country, accidentally discovered by amateur divers and dating back about a thousand years.

The find was made two weeks ago near the port city of Caesarea and consists of about 2,000 coins, weighing about 13 pounds, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.

The coins were probably swept up in recent storms, said Kobi Sharvit, director of the authority’s marine archaeology unit, adding that they provided “fascinating and rare historical evidence” from the Fatimid era in the 10th and 11th centuries.

The divers initially thought they had spotted toy coins from a game but later showed a few of them to officials.

Marine archaeologists, using metal detectors, then found the larger haul with coins of various denominations, dimensions and weights. The divers handed over all the coins.

Mr. Sharvit said they probably came from a boat that sank on its way to deliver tax money to Egypt or from a merchant ship trading among Mediterranean coastal cities.

He said archaeologists hoped that further excavations at the site of the discovery would make it possible “to supplement our understanding of the entire archaeological context, and thus answer the many questions that still remain unanswered about the treasure.”

Robert Cole, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s curator of coins, said the coins were in excellent condition. They did not require any cleaning or conservation, despite having been at the bottom of the sea for about a millennium.

“Gold is a noble metal and is not affected by air or water,” he said. “Several of the coins that were found in the assemblage were bent and exhibit teeth and bite marks, evidence they were ‘physically’ inspected by their owners or the merchants.”

The earliest coin exposed in the treasure was a quarter dinar minted in Palermo, Sicily, in the second half of the ninth century.

Most of the coins, though, appear to have belonged to the Fatimid caliphs Al-Hakim and his son Al-Zahir and been minted later. The Fatimid kingdom ruled Northern Africa beginning in the 10th century.

Source: www.nytimes.com

A Palestinian lady from the Gaza Strip is a leading figure in operating NASA’s Orion Spacecraft and is responsible for software/hardware integration and testing to ensure the spacecraft is functioning properly.

The story of engineer Soha al-Qeshawi was published on NASA’s Arabic Facebook page as a success story. The Facebook page’s administrator referred to her as an intelligent Palestinian lady.

Speaking about herself, she said, “As a senior software engineer working on Orion, I am responsible for software/hardware integration and testing to ensure all the spacecraft’s computer commands perform as expected for America’s next generation spacecraft designed for deep space exploration.”

Al-Qeshawi described her role within NASA’s programme. “Working with bits and bytes all day is much cooler than you might think. I get to simulate Orion missions almost every day, just as if we are flying in space. I test the systems from launch, through flight and back to Earth.”

Regarding her role in the system, she explained, “If I find any issues, I resolve them and retest to ensure a smooth and safe flight for our future crews.”

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

It’s Friday at noon, and a balmy minus 5 – pretty good for Fort McMurray in late November. Crowds are streaming in on foot, and cars are lined up for blocks. Everyone’s heading to the downtown mosque, the Markaz ul Islam, trying to make it in time for afternoon prayers.

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A man from West Africa comes in with one from Pakistan, walking past an SUV whose licence plate sits in a frame marked “Dubai.” Somali cab drivers are parking, taking a break from their shifts. Most of the faithful are wearing parkas, some with a shalwar kameez underneath. Others arrive in bright yellow construction vests, on their way back from the oil sands. Fort McMurray is home to one of Canada’s fastest-growing Muslim communities.

The old mosque – opened in 1990, before oil money started pouring into this Northern Alberta city – is showing its age. In the slush-stained foyer where the men remove their shoes, a well-used light switch is held together by masking tape. On Fridays, demand is so high that they need to split the traditional communal prayer into three shifts, a couple hundred worshippers at a time.

Outsiders can see Islam as a monolith, but the religion incorporates more than a billion people worldwide, hailing from dozens of countries and speaking even more languages. Larger Canadian cities don’t have a single Muslim community so much as many different ones, each with its own mosques, support networks and social centres.

Not so in Fort McMurray. Due to the nature of Canada’s immigration patterns and to explosive growth in the Alberta oil industry, every sect, every ethnicity, has sent envoys to this boom town. Thrown together in a small space over a short span of time, Fort McMurray’s Muslims are engaging in an inadvertent social experiment, striving for a goal that eludes much of the Islamic world today: unity.

This spring, if all goes according to plan, an enormous Islamic centre will start to rise across town, its minaret an exclamation point in city’s skyline. The $50-million, 150,000-square-foot complex will include a K-12 school, a rec centre and a swimming pool. Far more than just a house of prayer, it will be a one-stop shop for families interested in worship, school and sport, and will be capable of accommodating more people for Friday prayers than can fit in the junior hockey arena for the games of the Fort McMurray Oil Barons.

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

Lebanese brewer Mazen Hajjar and chef Joseph Abboud (Rumi, Moor’s Head) have extended their beer collaboration, jointly opening Hawkers Beer in Reservoir.

This brewery’s name derives from “hawking” – something the pair know a little about, the two having spent considerable time on the road promoting Hajjar’s 961 Beer, which Abboud imports.

Founded during the Lebanon War in 2006 in a bid to “bring good beer to Lebanon”, 961 Beer is now being enjoyed in 26 countries. But for his latest pursuit, Hajjar has relocated to Melbourne. “The beer culture here is super-exciting, so I thought: why not set up a beer for Australia, brewed in Australia?” Hajjar says.

Hawkers’ American-inspired pale ale. Photo: Wayne Taylor
Hawkers Beer, which opens to the public this weekend, is one of the Southern Hemisphere’s most high-tech breweries. “I’ve learned in nine years of brewing that to fine-tune recipes, equipment makes a big difference,” Hajjar says.

Hawkers’ range differs from that of the Middle Eastern-inspired Beer 961, and its initial releases – an American-inspired pale ale, a Czech pilsner, an IPA and a saison – will be staggered over the next month. “It’s exciting to approach beer from Joe’s food angle along with my beer angle,” Hajjar says.

While the cellar door is not yet, a fully fledged bar, visitors can sample brews and buy a slab on site ($60-$65). They’ll also hit the shelves of selected independent stores.

Hawkers’ pale ale will pour at the Geelong Beer Festival on Saturday, February 21, and an expanded range will feature during Good Beer Week, May 16 to 24.

Open Monday-Friday 9am-5pm.

Hawkers Beer, 167 Henty Street, Reservoir, 9462 0650

Source: www.goodfood.com.au

Oscars 2015: “Arabs Crash Hollywood”: What started as a campaign to support Arab Films nominated for Oscars last year, has been voted to become a Cinemoz tradition. Back by popular demand. Say it loud. Say it proud: Arabs Crash Hollywood. Cinemoz presents its selection of nine of this year’s Oscar nominated films that got a … Continued

New proof that the richest little emirate in the world is playing a double game with Washington and the so-called Islamic State.
The Imam Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab Masjid Doha is the biggest mosque in the emirate of Qatar, and it is a fountain of hate.

Built mainly in the first half of the 20th century mixing traditional and modern Islamic architecture, the air-conditioned, red-carpeted, chandelier-lit central hall can accommodate 11,000 men at prayer with a special enclosure for 1,200 women.

Re-inaugurated in 2011, the Grand Mosque was renamed after the founder of Wahhabism in the desert wastes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 18th century. Although his extreme and ascetic view of Islam has come to be associated mainly with the Saudis, it is also the official faith of incredibly rich little Qatar, which sits on a spit of land and a huge amount of natural gas in what most people know as the Persian Gulf. And Wahabbism, whether Saudi- or Qatari-funded (their zealous zillionaires compete), has provided the underpinning for the extremism in the Muslim world that spawned al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.

So Qatar, which is also home to a major American military installation, to branches of major American universities (Northwestern, Georgetown, and Carnegie Mellon among them) and to Al Jazeera television, whose English and American branches are responsible for award-winning reporting, tries to be many things to many different audiences.

But the Islamic State and its self-anointed caliph are highlighting the deep contradictions, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the Grand Mosque.

Thus, Qatar’s authorities were quick to condemn this month the burning alive of captured Jordanian pilot Muadh al Kasasbeh. One would expect such a reaction from a country that is part of the international coalition arrayed against the Jordanian’s murderers.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com

Conservatives are deeply troubled by President Obama’s reluctance to use the words “Islam” and “Islamic” often enough when talking about terrorism. We saw this when many conservatives reacted with condemnation to the White House’s Summit to Counter Violent Extremism, which wrapped up yesterday.

But the importance many on the right are now placing on repeating terms like “Islamic extremists” as much as possible raises a possibility that ought to trouble the GOP: There’s a strain of anti-Muslim sentiment within their party that is growing stronger; what we don’t know yet is whether there’s anyone in the party with the guts to arrest its progress.

Obama doesn’t dismiss such language choices as irrelevant; he has made clear his position that if he uses terms like “Islamic extremism” or “Islamic terrorism” he would be implying not just that groups like ISIS are motivated by their religious beliefs, but that there’s something inherently Islamic about this particular brand of violence. He worries that we would be doing ISIS’ work for them, validating their claim that there is a clash of civilizations going on, with Islam on one side and the west on the other.

I haven’t seen conservatives address this argument directly enough. Do they really think that using the word “Islamic” more to talk about threats to the United States would make those threats easier to defeat? Who knows? What’s apparent, though, is that they want Obama to admit and proclaim exactly what ISIS is trying to convince every Muslim of: that this is indeed a clash of civilizations.

Let’s look at what we’ve been hearing lately. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is now calling on American clergy to preach “holy war” against the Muslims who threaten our way of life. “President Obama is flat-out wrong in not describing the terrorist threat accurately,” he says. “Muslim fanatics want to kill us. And there are millions of them.” He offered this under a headline reading, “Judeo-Christian Values vs. the Jihad.”

“When I hear the president of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me,” says Lindsey Graham.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

In “Looking for Jesus,” an entertaining, philosophically intriguing, 70-minute video by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra, the camera follows Ms. Kozyra in Jerusalem, where she finds and interviews men who believe they are Jesus. She’s looking for people with a condition known as Jerusalem syndrome, characterized in part by delusional over-identification with characters from the Bible.

Source: www.nytimes.com