Author Archives: Arab America

Dearborn Police said today they are investigating an alleged bias assault by two white men against an Arab-American Muslim man who was shopping Thursday at a Kroger grocery store in the city.

The incident sparked fears among Arab Americans in Dearborn that they are not safe from bias attacks even in a city that has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the U.S.

Kathy McMillan Bazzi, 60, of Dearborn told the Free Press that two white men at a Kroger near the corner of Michigan and Greenfield avenues attacked the Arab-American man and taunted his daughter, who wears an Islamic headscarf, or hijab. Bazzi said the pair were passing by the man and his family while making insulting comments about ISIS and Muslims.

Source: www.freep.com

DO NATIONS EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN THEIR FOODS? Habeeb Salloum DO nations express themselves in their foods? It is a questi on that I thought would be worth examining . Mulling over this interesting theory i n my mind led me to examine my own experiences during more than a quarter century of travel throughout the world. … Continued

As Muslim-Americans, we constantly reassure ourselves. Get an education. Excel in your fields. Be that Muslim you wish the media could see; be the “moderate” they are looking for. And things will change. People will open up their minds and hearts. They will see beyond ISIS and 9/11; they will realize you are not Boko Haram and you do not stand for the murder of innocents. And they will accept you. They will embrace you.

Dozens at Chicago vigil mourn deaths of three N.C. Muslims
But then a tragedy of the magnitude of the Chapel Hill, N.C., murders occurs, and you realize this may all be a farce. Your worst fear, the one you suppress and relegate to the recesses of your mind, becomes a reality. You realize that you could be the top of your class and give back to your community — be the model citizen. You could even voice your disapproval at every possible act of violence you may or may not be falsely identified with, constantly justifying and rejustifying the legitimacy of your faith, screaming from the rooftops #JeSuisCharlie and #NotInMyName. You could use the hashtags, lead the protests and issue the requested and expected condemnations.

And you could still be a target.

You ask yourself: Are we destined to remain “otherized,” categorically excluded, alienated and repelled from the very society in which we live? Must we constantly assert our Americanness and prove our loyalty, only to be demonized, vilified and caricatured by our media?

It is exhausting to feel compelled to constantly validate your identity. Must Muslims be paragons of excellence, lest there be a motive found for their murder other than sheer hatred? Littering? Running a stop sign? Being too loud?

Existing?

The overwhelming sense of grief many Muslim-Americans felt following the cold-blooded murder Tuesday in Chapel Hill of Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, hit us directly in our hearts. We are them. They represent us, everything we grew up with — our lifestyles, our identities, our faith. They embody what our communities tried to instill, and continue to struggle to instill, in young Muslims growing up in this country — a sense of pride in their faith and a sense of devotion to their fellow man.

The Islamophobia propagated by media — whether in the form of sensationalist news coverage, providing a platform for the rabid hate speech of right-wing politicians, or stereotypical film plots and the lionization of “heroes” such as American sniper Christopher Kyle — is palpable and has very real consequences for Muslim-Americans. It is not a figment of our imaginations; we are not being dramatic, nor are we exaggerating the effects of such rhetoric. It is time for those who rile up the public and fuel virulent racism and Islamophobia with their unfounded claims and ignorant assertions to take responsibility for the consequences of their heedless and insidious speech.

I believe in divine justice, and to me, it is no accident that the three victims of this heinous crime were not just ordinary Americans — they were extraordinary. They excelled academically, were active socially and gave to humanity. There is divine wisdom in having their uplifting stories told, and it is devastating that it took their murders to compel network news to broadcast such inspirational stories of Muslim-Americans.

It was just last week I stood in front of my classroom full of Muslim high school juniors, discussing with them the poetic insight of Walt Whitman, who envisioned an America that was robust and free; a “teeming nation of nations” that encompassed the dreams, ideals and philosophies of those who landed on her shores. We analyzed and dissected Whitman’s prose and poetry, asking ourselves, where do we as Muslims fit into this narrative? Do we belong in Whitman’s America? Are Muslims part and parcel of this nation? Can we ever be?

I didn’t have a definitive answer for them then. And I certainly don’t have one now. But I do know that Whitman also said, “The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.”

Deah, Yosur and Razan were those citizens. And we will never forget their legacies.

Freelance journalist Deanna Othman lives in Oak Lawn.

Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune

Source: www.chicagotribune.com

President Barack Obama released a statement Friday on the shooting of three members of a Muslim family in North Carolina.

Craig Stephen Hicks was arrested Tuesday on charges of first-degree murder, accused of killing Deah Barakat, 23; Barakat’s wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21; and Yusor’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19. The shooting occurred late Tuesday at the family’s home near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Police said the murders may have been prompted by a dispute over parking, according to WNCN.

Obama called the killings “brutal and outrageous.” See his full statement below:

Yesterday, the FBI opened an inquiry into the brutal and outrageous murders of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In addition to the ongoing investigation by local authorities, the FBI is taking steps to determine whether federal laws were violated. No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship. Michelle and I offer our condolences to the victims’ loved ones. As we saw with the overwhelming presence at the funeral of these young Americans, we are all one American family. Whenever anyone is taken from us before their time, we remember how they lived their lives – and the words of one of the victims should inspire the way we live ours.
“Growing up in America has been such a blessing,” Yusor said recently. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. There’s so many different people from so many different places, of different backgrounds and religions – but here, we’re all one.”

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Have you seen that vigilante man?
Have you seen that vigilante man?
Have you seen that vigilante man?
I been hearin’ his name all over the land.
—Woody Guthrie
Let’s try to imagine that Craig Stephen Hicks, who massacred three of his neighbors in a Chapel Hill condominium on Tuesday, really did it for no other reason than to settle a difference of opinion about parking-lot etiquette.

That’s how the police are explaining Hicks’s decision to invade the home of the twenty-three-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Yusor Mohamad Abu-Salha, and her younger sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, and shoot them repeatedly—in the head, according to their family members.

That’s Hicks’s wife’s story, too. She held a press conference yesterday to counter the popular perception that her husband killed the neighbors on account of their religion. His victims were observant Muslims (the two women wore head scarves) and Hicks, who called himself an “anti-theist” on Facebook, had expressed a passionate loathing for all faiths and their followers. His wife wanted everyone to believe that these facts were irrelevant. “Parking dispute,” Mrs. Hicks said: that’s all there was to what she called “this incident.”

“Isolated incident” was the preferred verbiage of Ripley Rand, the local U.S. attorney. Rand said that he saw no reason to treat the targeting and assassination of these three Muslims as “part of a targeted campaign against Muslims”—as if a broader conspiracy were needed for Hicks’s crime to have broader significance.

So there you have it. Some people are sensitive about parking. One such person stood his ground. Now three young innocents are dead, and he’s being held without bond in the county jail. A lamentable affair, but, told like that, shorn of all context, it’s not unlike a song on the radio, folkloric. Our imaginations are primed to grasp it.

What’s hard to get one’s mind around is that everyone who’s singing this tune—the police, the wife, the prosecutor—seems to think that it’s reassuring. Getting blown away by a neighbor just because he’s pissed off at you for some ridiculous reason has become the equivalent of a natural disaster in our country, with our gun culture. It’s got nothing to do with the killer’s ideology, or with the victim’s identity. That’s the thinking. And, with this “parking” alibi, we’re being asked to imagine that these killings are a private tragedy, not some big public deal—not terrorism, not even like terrorism. We’re being told to believe that the vigilante killing of three young Americans is socially and politically meaningless.

It seems we are also supposed to be relieved by the fact that Hicks, who carried a gun to earlier confrontations with his neighbors, was not a religious fanatic. Are we then supposed to ignore the fact that he was an anti-religious fanatic, who was said to have taunted the women he later killed for dressing according to their traditions and beliefs? We are told that he was in favor of gay marriage, as if that negated his militant intolerance of others. He spent most of his time on Facebook heaping contempt on Christians, who are more numerous by far in Hicks’s neck of the woods than Muslims. And yet with law-enforcement sounding like Hicks-family spin doctors, we are being urged to consider this murderer as a figure of all-embracing American assimilation—a man who did not care who they were but hated them as he would hate anyone and everyone, equally and without fear or favor, for the way they parked.

Far more Americans are killed each year by the shooters in our midst like Craig Stephen Hicks than have ever been killed by all the jihadist terrorist outfits that have ever stalked this earth. That’s the price, or so the rhetoric goes, of our wild freedom. But maybe to understand the Chapel Hill murders better we need to imagine how it would be playing out if it were the other way around—if some gun-toting Muslim, with a habit of posting hate messages about secular humanists, took it upon himself to execute a defenseless family of them in their home.

Oh, why does a vigilante man,
Why does a vigilante man
Carry that sawed-off shotgun in his hand?
Would he shoot his brother and sister down?

Source: www.newyorker.com

When UC Davis student leaders voted last month to seek divestment from businesses that aid Israeli military efforts, it marked the latest formal victory for a movement that has steadily grown on elite campuses across the nation.

Deep-pocketed institutions with ivy-covered walls have seen more activists, professors and students call for such divestment in recent years. But it is primarily at University of California campuses where student leaders have formally voted to condemn Israeli actions and ask that billions of dollars in endowment funds be removed from companies with identifiable ties to the country’s military.

Seven UC student governments have approved resolutions to support divestment, which proponents contend is a peaceful way to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. On Sunday, the systemwide UC Student Association jumped into the fray, voting 9-1 for the measure, with six abstentions.

UC administrators continue to reiterate that divestment from Israel will not happen. But the string of student political victories across UC campuses has nonetheless become a symbolic victory for the pro-Palestinian movement.

Source: www.sacbee.com

“In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.” These were the words from 13-year-old Mohammed Saleh Tauiman when he was interviewed by the Guardian last September about the deaths of his father and older brother by a US drone. He described the drones as “death machines” that gave children in Yemen nightmares, “They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”

ON JANUARY 26, 2015 Mohammed became the third member of his family killed by drones. His killing was justified by the CIA (and the New York Times) because he was a suspected al-Qaeda militant. But as one of his brothers said, “He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.” According to the rules of the war on terror, however, this doesn’t really matter. The Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” 

These self-written rules, the secrecy by which they are applied, and the distortion of language to disguise the resulting violence are indicative of drone warfare. Describing Mohammed as a “terrorist” shuts down debate about whether he was an insurgent or an innocent teenager living in an impoverished area of Yemen where only al-Qaeda forces had offered his family any support after his family’s breadwinners were killed by drones. Even the barest suspicion that he may have been affiliated with terrorism is enough to ensure that his death does not matter. How we choose to name things gives us the illusion of ethics, and as a consequence those like Mohammed and the hundreds of other civilians killed by US drones are covertly deprived of their humanity, their deaths another contested statistic.

Source: www.yourmiddleeast.com

RAW VIDEO: Family of Chapel Hill shooting victims speaks

Source: abc11.com

“East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet,” Rudyard Kipling wrote. Nonsense! The two have been meeting for centuries, leaving their mark on both Arabic and the languages of Europe. Here are 40 English words that you never knew came from the Arab Middle East. Arabic words generally didn’t enter … Continued

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reproached U.S. President Barack Obama and other senior officials for not speaking out against the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina this week.

Erdogan said during a news conference in Mexico Thursday that the U.S. administration should take a stance against the killings, saying their silence was “meaningful.”

His words were carried by Turkey’s state-run news agency early on Friday.

Erdogan said: “I ask Mr. Obama: where are you Mr. President?”

An atheist with a reputation for bullying his neighbors has been charged with murder.

Police say the killings may have been over a parking dispute. But they are also investigating whether religious or ethnic hatred may have motivated the suspect.

Source: www.statesman.com

Israeli leaders are bent on imprinting in our minds that Israel seeks peace while our enemies’ fanaticism keeps forcing us into war. But perhaps Israel has been a willing agent in inflaming conflicts with its enemies Hezbollah and Hamas. How? By escalating the level of violence when retaliating against their attacks, rather than pursuing a strategy that’s more disposed to managing the conflict.

Israel could learn a thing or two from Hezbollah on this front. Two weeks of silence since the latest round of fighting have proven that Hezbollah’s strike on Har Dov was a textbook example of retaliation without escalation. That is, it demonstrated how two enemies can end a round of conflict without negotiation, mediation or a cease-fire agreement.

In the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the militant group followed to a fault the proscription of scholar Robert Axelrod on how to employ a “tit for tat” strategy to induce cooperation without the need for negotiation or written agreements. Axelrod’s theory suggests striking back without escalating while communicating that one will cooperate if their opponent cooperates and respond in kind if their opponent cheats.

Hezbollah had avoided incursions into sovereign Israeli territory for a year prior to the strike attributed to Israel on a convoy in Syria that killed Jihad Mughniyeh and others. Hezbollah responded in measured kind with the Har Dov attack. After that incident, it immediately communicated to Israel that it considered the matter of the Mughniyeh killing over. Finally, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah announced that the group would retaliate should Israel continue to attack its positions.

Source: www.haaretz.com

Sign this petition to join the Campaign to TAKE ON HATE in calling for U.S. Department of Justice Attorney General Eric Holder to open a full and rigorous federal hate crime investigation into the tragic killing of three vibrant young American Muslims in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Source: www.takeonhate.org