Author Archives: Arab America

Check out what happens when an Arab has to give a confirmation number Facebook Page: http://goo.gl/cP9FTn Kharabeesh Comedy Club proudly presents the very en…

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After a re-vote, #StanfordDivest has passed in a landslide victory. Congratulations @SOOPalestine! 10-1-4

#Victory pic.twitter.com/8sceFzrFAQ

Source: twitter.com

At 5am this morning, Palestine solidarity campaigners shut down a factory in Britain owned by the Israeli arms firm Elbit.

At the time of publication, four of the activists are on the rooftop of the plant – located in the English county of Kent – and others are gathered in front, with one locking onto the fence. Though operating under the name Instro Precision, the factory is owned by Elbit, a leading supplier of drones to the Israeli military.

One of the protesters, Tom Anderson, told The Electronic Intifada over the phone that “no workers have come in.” He said police were stopping and checking cars that wanted to enter the industrial estate the factory is part of, and have apparently told the company not to send its staff in.

He said police had initially stolen some of their water and food supplies, but had later backed off when journalists had arrived at the scene.

Source: electronicintifada.net

Recently, I paid a visit to the Arab American National Museum. Initially, I was extremely excited — as a Sudanese American, I’m not used to seeing my identity represented positively anywhere. I had a few pre-existent apprehensions: there is a strong history of marginalization of Black Arabs and of course racism exists in the Arab world, just as it exists all over the world. So, I knew there was a good chance that the Sudanese experience wouldn’t be represented in the museum and, in any case, I wasn’t even sure whether or not I self-identified as an Arab.

The museum started off with a map of the 22 countries included in the Arab League. Our guide made much of the fact that there were some non-stereotypically Arab countries included, such as Sudan and Somalia.

Unfortunately, this mention of Black Arabs was one of very few in the museum. We watched a video which pretended to show the full spectrum of Arab Americans. The only mention of Black Arabs? An out-of-context clip of a Sudanese wedding, presented without commentary. Every one else was both very white and very enthusiastically American.

The erasure of Africans in the museum is part of the much larger whitewashing that exists in our communities. All of the pictures displayed also showed Arabs who were conventionally attractive by Western standards, women done up like Hollywood bombshells, perfect white skin and, for the most part, all Western dress.

Source: muslimgirl.net

Ahmed Mater’s Magnetism (2012) is emblematic of the vibrant new art scene emerging from the Gulf. The etching print, which exists in several versions, pictures a black cubic magnet neatly encircled by steel dust—a poetic evocation of the pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, and of the pilgrims’ undulating movements around its most sacred building, the Ka’aba.

This didn’t stop watchmaker Omega, part of the Swiss Swatch group, to appropriate Magnetism in one of its latest ad campaigns, replacing the Ka’aba with a Seamaster Aqua Terra watch. The Quotidien de l’Art reports that the artist never agreed to this commercial use and is now suing the group for copyrights and moral rights infringement via a Paris law firm. He has requested €1,337,500 in damages, as well as an injunction to stop using the image in France.

In legal documents quoted by the QdA, Mater’s lawyer, Michel Dutilleul-Francoeur, explains that the artist couldn’t possibly have given the authorization to use his image without an official green light from the Saudi authorities, since blasphemy is a crime in the kingdom. Hinting at early negotiations, he mentions the fact that Mater might have considered a deal if Omega had acquired two editions of the work and donated them to a museum, but this didn’t come to pass.

Source: news.artnet.com

Egypt called Tuesday for a U.N.-backed military operation in Libya after a group of Egyptian Christians were beheaded there, in a sign of the growing willingness of governments in the Middle East to intervene in neighboring states awash in violence.

The appeal came from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in an interview with a French radio station. Sissi said there was “no other choice” but to act in Libya, whose turmoil he called “a threat to international peace and security.” He spoke a day after Egyptian warplanes pounded Islamic State targets in Libya to avenge the group’s grisly murder of the 21 Christians.

Earlier this month, Jordan carried out a flurry of airstrikes in Syria after the Islamic State burned to death a captured Jordanian pilot. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have also participated in strikes on the Islamic State, which declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq last summer.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

The murder of Syrian-American dental student Deah Barakat cast a shadow over the fourth annual Syrian-American Medical Society (SAMS) fundraising conference, held this past weekend in Arizona. Since last summer, Barakat, 23, had been working with SAMS to raise money for a relief trip to Rihaniya, Turkey, where he and 10 other dentists planned to volunteer at one of the group’s clinics for Syrian refugee children.

“When we last spoke on Tuesday, he’d only raised about $15,000. I told him we had to push the trip back to August,” said Mohamad Nahas, who founded the SAMS dental relief programs in Turkey in 2012, speaking from the conference in Scottsdale.

But in the week since Barakat was shot dead in North Carolina at his Chapel Hill apartment — with his wife and her 19-year-old sister — an outpouring of support has seen to it that the trip will be funded, and then some. As of Tuesday, the YouCaring.com fundraising page Barakat set up last year had raised over $441,000. The influx of cash is unprecedented for dental relief, an oft-overlooked dimension of the refugee response that does not command the urgency or fundraising appeal of a food shortage or disease outbreak.

But the need is great. The volunteer dentists of SAMS say that while medical services for Syria’s four million refugees tend to be adequate, there is absolutely no money in tight budgets for non-essential services, which includes most dental work. Major defects like cleft palates that do not fall under the category of “war injuries” often go unrepaired, while nerve inflammation leaves others in severe but not life-threatening pain.

Nahas, a Syrian-born dentist in Florida, launched the SAMS program in 2012 with a mobile chair and some suitcases filled with supplies that he used to perform emergency extractions and other urgent pain-relieving procedures for Syrians in Turkey. Due in part to volunteers like Othman Shibly, the program has since expanded its services to include 24 fully functional dental clinics in refugee camps and host communities in Turkey and Jordan, each of which treats up to 60 patients per day.

Shibly, the associate director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for Dental Studies, first got involved in the SAMS effort after visiting a camp in Turkey in July 2012. “People were showing us infections in their mouths, teeth that were broken when the army invaded villages, or when they were hit in the mouth by the butt of a gun during demonstrations,” Shibly said. He has since managed to raise tens of thousands of dollars in his community and from a Canadian NGO and set up clinics in southern Turkey and in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp.

Source: america.aljazeera.com

The treasurer of the United Kingdom Jewish Board of Deputies, the representative body of British Jewry, has stepped down saying he “could not contemplate another three years of not being able to speak freely,” the Jewish Chronicle reported.

Laurence Brass, an asylum judge, had been tipped to run for board president in the May election after being twice elected as treasurer. But he told a plenary meeting of the executive on Sunday that “I decided that to be true to my principles and beliefs was more important than seeking office.”

Brass said he had been “bursting to criticize the Israeli administration” for six years and took the board to task for preventing honorary officers from expressing personal opinions.

“I felt constrained not to have been able to speak out on subjects that are close to my heart, such as the treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the discrimination still being suffered by Arab citizens of Israel,” Brass said.

Source: www.haaretz.com

Today marks one week since 23-year-old Yousef Abu-Salha’s younger sisters — Yusor, 21, and Razan, 19 — were murdered by their neighbor. Yousef told The Electronic Intifada over the the phone from North Carolina that he has no doubt their murder was an anti-Muslim hate crime.

The women were executed along with Yusor’s husband, 23-year-old Deah Barakat, in the newlywed couple’s condominium. 

All three were remarkable individuals devoted to helping the disenfranchised at home and refugees abroad. As their social media posts demonstrate, the plight of Syrian and Palestinian refugees were particularly near and dear to their hearts. In fact, Razan and Yusor were of Palestinian descent, which has been largely glossed over in the media coverage of their deaths. 

Originally from the port city of Jaffa, the Abu-Salha family was driven out of historic Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948. Yousef’s father was subsequently born in Jordan and raised in Kuwait. His mother, whose maiden name is al-Azzeh, was born in al-Bireh, a city in the occupied West Bank. 

Yousef and Yusor, both born in Jordan, are dual Jordanian-American citizens. Their parents immigrated to the United States when they were little. Razan was born in 1993. The family was living in Virginia Beach at the time. Soon afterwards, the Abu-Salhas moved to North Carolina, eventually settling down in Raleigh, where the children spent most of their lives.  

After learning there had been a shooting, Yousef said his parents immediately suspected that Yusor and Deah, who weren’t answering their phones, had been shot by the neighbor they had on so many occasions expressed fear of. The families rushed to the apartment complex for confirmation of their worst fears. But for five grueling hours, police refused to tell them whether their loved ones were shot and if so, whether they were alive or dead. 

The agonizing suspense was captured in a video report by the local news station WNCN, in which Deah Barakat’s father is seen pleading with officers to tell him whether his son is dead or alive. 

It came as “a huge shock” when Yousef learned that Razan had also been killed. “I had no idea that my youngest baby sister was visiting,” he said. 

By Wednesday morning, the police declared that the shooting was motivated by an ongoing parking dispute, a conclusion that appeared to be based almost entirely on the killer’s account. 

Source: electronicintifada.net

Former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stopped by Morning Joe on Monday, presumably to promote his new children’s book, Stealing the Game, but the hosts also asked him to discuss a recent column he wrote for Time about the role that Islam does or does not play in terror attacks like the one against Charlie Hebdo.

“Another horrendous act of terrorism has taken place and people like myself who are on media speed-dial under ‘Celebrity Muslims’ are thrust in the spotlight to angrily condemn, disavow, and explain—again—how these barbaric acts are in no way related to Islam,” Abdul-Jabbar, who converted to Islam in the late 1960s, wrote last month.

Source: www.mediaite.com

When Mark Michail of Birmingham heard that 21 Egyptian Christians had been beheaded on a Libyan shore, “the first thing I felt was utter sadness,” he said Monday. “They were basically butchered for their religious beliefs.”

It’s a feeling felt by many in metro Detroit’s Coptic community, who were devastated to find out over the weekend that ISIS had murdered 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, where the Christians had migrated for jobs. Copts are native Egyptian Christians, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

“These are young guys from small villages just wanting to work to provide for their families,” Michail said of the victims. “They weren’t there to cause any problems. To have them butchered like that is very sad.”

At St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Troy, religious leader the Rev. Mina Essak said that while the deaths were sad, the 21 men will “reach the highest levels of martyrs in heaven. … It’s a mixed feeling between tears and rejoicing because they are going up to heaven.”

Source: www.freep.com

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to influence the nuclear negotiations with Iran by addressing Congress is worth the price Israel will pay in its relations with the U.S. administration, Ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer has told Israeli envoys working in America.

Dermer made the argument at a meeting in Jerusalem last Wednesday with the heads of Israel’s consulates in North America.

Three Israeli diplomats, some of whom were briefed subsequently on the details of the meeting, told Haaretz that Dermer tried to downplay the crisis with President Barack Obama’s administration. He admitted that Israel would pay a price for Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, they said, but denied that this would deal a mortal blow to the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

“There have been such things in the past; you shouldn’t blow this out of proportion,” one diplomat quoted Dermer as saying. “It’s possible to isolate the current dispute from the totality of our relations with the U.S.”

Source: www.haaretz.com