Arabic 101

Arabic Word of the Day

Shami and Levantine Dialect

Loading ...

Go top

Education

UC Berkeley reinstates controversial course on history of Palestine

September 20, 2016

By Arab America

Teresa Watanabe LA Times UC Berkeley has reinstated a course on the history of Palestine, just days after suspending it amid criticism that it fostered anti-Semitism and indoctrinated students against Israel. The university’s ethnic studies department has revised the original course description and syllabus, which aimed to examine Palestine through the “lens of settler colonialism,” according to a letter issued Monday … Continued

I Give My Readers Cold Hard Evidence About Palestinians. They Refuse To Believe It.

August 30, 2016

By Arab America

J.J. Goldberg

Forward

It’s becoming more and more obvious that there are some folks out there who simply can’t abide good news. Not just because they’re pessimists and get thrown when things are going well. No, we’re talking about the sort of people who find good news offensive. It outrages them. Their ranks are growing, and so is the level of outrage.

The mood has been in the air for a while now, but for me, at least, it really hit home in the last few days. What’s clued me in is the reader response to my August 26 column in the Forward. The one about that big new survey of Israeli and Palestinian opinion on peace negotiations and the two-state solution.

The survey (executive summary here, full survey here)found that most Palestinians, by a slim margin (51%-48%), and most Israelis by a larger margin (58%-32%), would like to see Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side. Majorities on both sides say they don’t want a single unitary state covering what’s now Israel and the territories. And that’s what I reported.

Well, you’d think I’d just called for Israel to adopt ham as its national food. Angry readers weighed in via comments on the Forward website, posts on Facebook and even personal emails, telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. These four were typical, if somewhat mild:

“What nonsense. Palestinians are totally opposed to any solution which allows Israel to continue.”

“I read your essay about ‘but for this misperception.’ You didn’t mention the most important question of all: the ‘Right of Return.’ Palestinians, almost to a person, believe that the ‘refugees’ living in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza should ‘return’ to their ancestral homes west of the Green Line. There is no deal to be made, there is no compromise here. I could point you to endless links to back this up…”

[Quoting from my column:] “ ‘Formal Israeli-Palestinian negotiations came close to agreement along the same terms in 2000-2001 and again in 2008. In both cases, however, Israelis presented what they called a ‘final offer,’ which Palestinian leaders declined to accept as final.’ I guess if we connect these dots, Israel should get more of the blame for the absence of a deal. Which still leaves this unanswered dot: Did the Palestinians ever make an actual offer, final or not?”

“The Christian prays for his daily bread; the Jew, for his daily illusion.”

Now, the truth is, I’m used to readers calling me names. Comment sections on news websites seem to attract grumps and trolls who like being able to talk trash and remain anonymous, or at least unseen. It’s part of the game, and sort of entertaining. So last week’s negativity was no surprise.

What did catch me off-guard was the nature of the objections. Usually readers weigh in to dismiss my opinions and insult my lineage. This time a fair number of readers wrote to tell me what the Palestinians actually believe. They seemed to think that the survey — conducted by two of the most respected research institutes in Jerusalem and Ramallah — was not a measure of public opinion but an expression of my warped personal outlook. That is, they looked at a piece of scientific research, saw that it doesn’t confirm their own prior beliefs and decided that it’s made up and that they know more than the experts.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s part of a growing tide of anti-intellectualism, anti-empiricism, science denial and conspiracy theory that’s swept the political right in the last decade, with particular virulence in America and Israel. In America it expresses itself in attacks on evolution, in the anti-vaccine movement and especially — and most dangerously — in climate denial. In Israel it’s exploded in the last few years in repeated attacks from the settler movement and religious nationalist right against the military and intelligence command. What the two countries’ denialists have in common is the belief that experts — the scientists who took us to the moon and cured smallpox, the generals who’ve protected Israel for 70 years — are a bunch of phonies.

And what of our critics — the ones who don’t like the new survey?

They raise three main points: First, that the Palestinians will never accept Israel’s existence; second, that they’ll never give up the right of return for Palestinian refugees; and third, that they never negotiate in good faith or agree to any concrete proposals.

It’s important to recall that there have been three rounds of formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The first was in 1995, between Israel’s then-economics minister Yossi Beilin and then-deputy chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas. They reached an agreement (text here) in mid-October. It was leaked to the press on October 28, embarrassing Abbas and his boss, Yasser Arafat, who promptly disavowed it. Whether the talks could have continued will never be known. Beilin never had a chance to show it to his boss, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, because Rabin was assassinated on November 4, a week after the document hit the news. Shimon Peres, who succeeded Rabin as caretaker prime minister, didn’t believe he had a mandate to continue the final-status talks. He insisted on seeking his own mandate by callilng new elections and winning the job in his own right. He faced the voters the following May and lost to Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejected the idea of negotiating a final status agreement with the PLO.

Talks began again in 2000 under Ehud Barak, who defeated Netanyahu for the prime ministership in 1999. He famously met Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 for a two-week summit. As has been discussed endlessly, the summit ended badly when Arafat stormed out on July 25, having refused to accept various proposals that Barak had put forward but offering none of his own.

This version is partly based on a misunderstanding of the nature of diplomatic negotiations. Negotiators like to say that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” A related truth is that there’s no such thing as a final offer. Negotiators present ideas to the other side, which then presents own ideas. Eventually they meet in the middle. The fact that Arafat didn’t accept Barak’s “final offer” simply means they weren’t done negotiating.

Largely lost in the fog of history is the fact that talks resumed in August in Jerusalem. Aides to Barak and Arafat began meeting to discuss how, where and when to reconvene the formal negotiation, picking up where they had left off in July. The reconvening took place at the White House in mid-December. After about a week of talks, on December 23, President Clinton met with the negotiators and presented his own proposal for a peace agreement, the so-called Clinton Parameters (text here). The two sides sat down in January at the Egyptian resort of Taba to go over details and work on a final agreement.

In the meantime, however, Barak was losing his government. On September 20, Arye Deri, the head of Shas, a key coalition partner, entered prison on a bribery conviction. Deri had been a strong ally of Rabin and a key coalition partner. The man appointed by Shas spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to succeed Deri as head of the party was Eli Yishai, a radical rightist who would eventually join forces with Meir Kahane’s disciples. As soon as Deri entered prison, Yishai began organizing to bolt the coalition, leaving Barak with a minority government. Then, on September 30, the bloody Second Intifada broke out.

By the time the negotiators reconvened formally in Washington in December, Barak was hanging on by a thread. He called for a new election February 7, hoping he could present a peace agreement and turn the vote into a referendum. But time ran out at Taba. Talks were suspended on January 27, to be reconvened after Barak was reelected 11 days later. But Barak was in trouble. He was sponsoring historic negotiations while heading a minority government. He was, moreover, negotiating with an enemy while his nation was under fire. Both sides’ negotiators would later declare that they were closer than ever to a full agreement. But on February 7 Barak lost to Ariel Sharon. Once again, negotiations were cut short when the Israeli leader overseeing the negotiations was removed from office.

One of the best, most objective histories of the Camp David-Taba process is this essay by political scientist Jeremy Pressman, director of theMiddle East program at the University of Connecticut. It explains both the sequence of events and the positions of the two sides on the issues being negotiated. It’s only 39 pages and well worth the read.

A year later after Taba, on March 27, 2002, the League of Arab States held a summit in Beirut and adopted the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative (text here). It offered Israel full peace, normal diplomatic relations and a formally declared end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, if Israel would accept creation of a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital, as well as “an agreed, just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees” — that is, a solution that’s agreed on between the two sides. The word “agreed” wasn’t in the original draft, but was inserted at the insistence of the Jordanians, who wanted to make sure the document was something Israel might at least consider.

The document was adopted unanimously by the 22 Arab states, including the so-called State of Palestine, which is a member of the league. The PLO had formally signed an international document accepting the principle of peace with Israel and a compromise on the refugees.

A year later, in 2003, a group of Israelis and Palestinians met in Geneva for an unofficial effort to draft a model peace agreement. The goal was to show that it was achievable. The Israeli delegation consisted of private citizens and was led by former minister, now opposition figure Yossi Beilin. The Palestinian delegation was led by a serving Palestinian Authority cabinet minister and close aide to Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo. The document they drafted (text here), known as the Geneva Initiative (sometimes called Geneva Accord, though that implies some official status it doesn’t have) is strikingly similar to the Clinton Parameters.

During the Geneva meetings, Beilin had a telling conversation over lunch with a member of the Palestinian delegation, Qadoora Faris, a prominent Fatah figure who is close to convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti. As Beilin tells the story, he asked Faris why he was bothering discussing a Palestinian state on 22% of historic Palestine when they could simply wait 20 years until Palestinians were a majority in Israel and the territories. All they’d need to do is demand one-man-one-vote. “Yes, we could wait 20 years until we’re a majority,” Faris said in reply, as Beilin told it to me. “Then we could commence another 100 years of violent struggle until we won our rights. But I have children. I want them to have a life.”

In 2008 there was yet another round of negotiations between Israel and the PLO — this time a series of face-to-face talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Those talks climaxed on September 16, 2008, when Olmert showed Abbas a map of the Israeli-Palestinan border as he proposed drawing it. He also offered to absorb 5,000 Palestinian refugees as a sort of symbolic right of return.

What happened next has been the topic of furious debate ever since. The conventional Israeli version is that Abbas said no, just as Arafat had done at Camp David. In fact, Abbas met with his negotiations committee the next day to discuss how to respond to Olmert’s proposal. The two sides were still divided on several issues, including the settlement-city of Ariel, deep in the heart of the West Bank, that Israel refuses to dismantle and the Palestinians refuse to leave in place.

A larger issue was the refugees. Abbas reportedly told his committee that Olmert’s offer to absorb 5,000 was “a joke.” A leaked document that I was shown later, reliably described to me as minutes of that meeting, indicated that Abbas was going to insist on a formula that would add up to 150,000. To the average Israeli ear that sounds like a frighteningly high number of refugees to absorb, even though Israel would, under the Abbas formula, retain full right to pick and choose whom to admit. It’s also less than the 200,000-odd Palestinians who would be removed from Israel’s population rolls once East Jerusalem became the Palestinian capital. But Abbas never had the opportunity to discuss the number with Israel.

Another document, part of the so-called Palestine Papers leaked to Al Jazeera and The Guardian in 2011, quoted Abbas elaborating on his view of the refugee issue in a March 2009 meeting with the negotiations committee. “On numbers of refugees, it is illogical to ask Israel to take 5 million, or indeed 1 million,” Abbas was quoted as saying. “That would mean the end of Israel.”

The larger issue, though, was Olmert. When he and Abbas held their fateful meeting in September, he was already a caretaker prime minister. He had resigned in August, claiming that the distraction of the snowballing bribery investigation against him was preventing him from giving the job his full attention. He handed chairmanship of his Kadima party to foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who set about trying to assemble her own coalition within the existing Knesset. But she was unable to get the parties in Olmert’s coalition to stay on with her. On October 26 she gave up and publicly called for new elections, to be held the following February.

For the Palestinians, all this created a dilemma. Abbas and Olmert were, by both men’s estimates, about two months away from clearing up all the details and concluding a deal. But as a caretaker prime minister, Olmert’s authority to close a deal this controversial was unclear. Moreover, while Livni was still chasing her coalition in September, it was already evident that she wasn’t going to make it. If Netanyahu won the election, would he agree to implement an agreement concluded by a caretaker prime minister? An agreement that he fundamentally opposed in principle?

In the end, of course, Netanyahu did win the February 2009 election, returning to the office he’d left 10 years before. Abbas assumed that he would pick up the negotiations where they’d left off in September. But Netanyahu insisted on negotiating “without preconditions,” meaning without accepting the progress that had been made since 1995, but instead starting all over from scratch. And that’s been the argument ever since.

For a third time, negotiations were cut short when the Israeli prime minister was removed from office.

One of the best summaries of the events surrounding the Olmert-Abbas negotiation is this article by Canadian-Israeli journalist Bernard Avishai, published in the New York Times Magazine in 2011. Avishai interviewed both Olmert and Abbas for the article. It’s well worth a read.

And then you can resume calling me names.

Source: forward.com

College readers combat trend of divisiveness

August 28, 2016

By Arab America

BY DEBRA ERDLEY

TribLive.com

Updated 49 minutes ago
Seizing a moment when the world is rife with division and presidential campaigns highlighting the bitter divide dominate the headlines, some universities are asking students to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes this summer.

This year’s common readers — books universities assigned to incoming freshmen to read over the summer — reflect that challenge at private and public universities across the region that have hewed to the tradition.

Carlow University President Suzanne Mellon said she selected this year’s Carlow common reader — “How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” by Moustafa Bayoumi — with such a challenge in mind.

For millennials who have grown up immersed in the world of social media and candidates’ 140-character tweets, it promises to offer a deeper discussion on issues of religion and ethnicity that are dominating presidential politics this year.

Looking to expand the conversation, Mellon extended the common reader challenge to the entire community at the private university perched in the hills of Pittsburgh’s Oakland section.

The book features seven in-depth portraits of young Arab Americans living in Brooklyn, N.Y. Their experiences range from being a college student to an Arab-American Marine who served the United States in Iraq.

“This is a launching point for a dialogue about people who have been singled out and branded persona non grata. But it also echoes the experience of men and women who persevere through triumphs and setbacks. It’s a topic that will generate a lot of discussion,” Mellon said.

Sixty miles to the east, Kevin Berezansky, associate director of the Cook Honors College at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, chose a tome that could have been pulled from yesterday’s headlines: Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.”

IUP’s Honors College has used Haidt’s book as a common reader for incoming freshmen since 2012.

During orientation, upperclassmen in the honors college lead discussions on the book with incoming freshmen. Part of the goal is to provide a model for an honest exchange of opinion — “how to disagree without being disagreeable,” as Berezansky puts it.

“We picked it the first year partly because it was an election year. But it also seems to present the issue nicely in a way people haven’t thought about. (Haidt) looks at moral intuition and talks about how people seem to arrive at things morally without really understanding where it comes from, and he talks about how that is related to the groups people come from and how that shapes them.

“We attract students from across the social and political spectrum, and it gives them a way to talk about things,” Berezansky said.

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, who directs the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., has studied voting trends among millennials.

Although there’s no research pointing to the impact of such programs on voting habits, she said summer readers that focus on the perspectives of individuals outside the mainstream have a dual impact on students.

Tufts, like Chatham and IUP, assigned a summer reader that asks students to consider the perspectives of outsiders. “Life in Limbo,” the Tufts summer reader for several years, examines the experiences of undocumented immigrants.

“Although young people today are among the most diverse generation of Americans, they are growing up in an echo chamber. They go to school in districts with similar people and access social media that reflects their opinions and that of their friends,” Kawashima-Ginsberg said.

“It’s important to be exposed to new ideas and lives that have never touched yours. That can have an important impact both on the individual and on driving civic development and engagement,” she said.

And engaged voters can make a difference.

While college students traditionally vote in rates among the lowest of any voting age group, they are now part of the largest single voting group in America — millennials, ages 18 to 35, who make up nearly a third of the electorate.

Back in Pittsburgh, officials at Chatham University abandoned the concept of a common reader for new students in favor of a campus-wide book assignment as part of its Global Focus Program.

This year’s selection, “One Native Life” by Richard Wagamese, examines life from the perspective of a Native American, or one of Canada’s so-called First Nations citizens.

Chatham associate professor of history and Global Focus Coordinator Jean-Jacques Sene said Wagamese’s book should spark discussion across the social sciences and resonate with issues that have come up in recent months in the presidential races.

“Our choice was guided by the desire to revisit the dramatic history of First Nations, especially in the current context of discussion about ‘nativism’ in our own country,” he said.

Incoming honors college students at California University of Pennsylvania are reading “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. It will give them a look at how one long-anonymous black woman’s cells taken without her consent became the first to reproduce outside the body and spawned tens of thousands of scientific research projects.

Mark Auen, director of Cal’s honors program, said the program has tapped the non-fiction tome for the last three years. He said the story forces students to think about ethical issues in scientific research.

“We’ve had great discussions,” he said. “Part of what I enjoy is we have art and history and pre-med and a variety of other majors in honors. Everyone has their own thoughts and approach. We always get comments along the lines of ‘They really did this to people?’ or ‘This was acceptable?’ I don’t have to do much other than give them the book and ask them to read it. They do the work and analysis. I look forward to it every year. I learn a lot.”

Source: triblive.com

From Refugee to Graduate with an Online Degree in Criminal Justice

August 25, 2016

By Arab America

By Joe Cote
SNHU.edu

Bara Alkafil ’16 was just five when a relief organization flew her family out of the Middle East and to America, but she has a few clear, strong memories of that time. Some of them are even beautiful.

She remembers the sky. Having fled Saddam Hussein’s reign in Iraq, her family was eventually housed in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia along the Iraqi border. The mud building had thin metal roofs over the bedrooms, but what served as a common room was open to the sky. Alkafil sometimes slept there and recalls too many stars to even remember which ones she had already counted. “I was old enough to remember certain things. I would remember some of the good moments,” said Alkafil, now a Dearborn, Mich., resident. “The sky was unbelievable. The atmosphere was so clear. It was not polluted.”

But the good moments were few. “There was nothing else that was beautiful about living as a refugee,” she said.

Her family’s journey from being a target of the government, because they were Shia Muslims in Hussein’s Iraq, to Southern New Hampshire University and the completion of her online degree in criminal justice almost defies logic. But Alkafil’s journey isn’t over. Right now, even she doesn’t know where it ends.

Flight

By Alkafil’s estimation, families like hers were at war with Hussein and the brutal dictatorship he imposed on the country for three decades by the time she was born in 1989. Anger at Saddam helped fuel an uprising against his government in the northern and southern regions of the country, according to a policy brief issued by the Migration Policy Institute in 2003, ahead of America’s second invasion of Iraq. In March 1991, Saddam appointed his cousin, Ali Hasan Majid – who was already reviled for his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish citizens – to be in charge of the government’s response in the Shi’ite-dominated south of Iraq.

“The revenge was characteristically brutal with public executions, bombarding of city centers, and wholesale destruction of homes and mosques,” according to the policy brief. Some estimates put the number of southern Iraqi killed from March to September 1991 at 200,000, according to the brief.

Alkafil’s family lived in Basra in the country’s southeast region near the Persian Gulf and the borders of Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The family found itself on what she described as a government-maintained kill list. When an uncle was killed, the rest of the Alkafil family fled with the tens of thousands of other citizens. The rebellions were crushed. Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 Shi’ites escaped to Iran. Another 37,000 were displaced to Saudi Arabia.

Alkafil was 2 years old in 1991 when her family made its way, on foot, to neighboring Saudi Arabia, which for the Shi’ite Alkafil family was something akin to jumping from the fire to the frying pan. The Saudi army first brought the refugees to a government building where they were detained. Alkafil doesn’t remember the trip, but her mother and others told stories later – how city residents spit and cursed at the refugees and threw their shoes at them, a sign of great disrespect in many Middle Eastern cultures. “It was just complete hate,” Alkafil said.

Eventually it was decided the refugees, thousands of them, would be housed in an encampment in the desert along the border of the two countries called Rafha, where they spent the next four-and-a-half years. A collection of mud houses was erected and, in time, neighborhoods of sorts formed. The Red Cross brought food and water but conditions were still horrible, Alkafil said. There wasn’t enough to eat. She remembers her mother picking lice out of her hair and then killing them with kerosene. “It was just a desert. Nobody lived there,” she said. “It’s not a life anyone wanted to live.”

American workers began to come to the camp. It was then the young Alkafil began hearing about America. Compared to her life up until then, it quite literally sounded like heaven, enough that when a Baltimore-based relief organization, World Relief, arranged for the Alkafil family to immigrate to the United States, Alkafil thought she was escaping hell. “I was like, ‘I’m getting out of hell and getting into heaven,'” she said. The family flew into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on June 20, 1995. Alkafil was 5 and not only remembers the family’s arrival but still can’t adequately describe it. “The feeling, I can never even begin to explain it. Just – life was different,” she said.

Adjusting

It’s difficult to overstate how much life improved for Alkafil and her family after leaving the Saudi desert. As she put it, it was when they were able to begin dreaming of something more than the next good meal, to plan for something other than basic survival. “Life is just – I can’t even explain it. I was living in fear, like we were going to die,” Alkafil said. “Now we start dreaming. We start going to school. We start living like human beings.”

Workers from World Relief continued their support of the Alkafil family as they settled into life in the United States. The agency helped the family apply for government assistance, helped them get necessary immunizations and walked them through enrolling the young Alkafils in school. She remembers two women in particular, a woman named Claire and another named Lisa, who would visit the family often and bring them food and share meals with the extended Alkafil family. One of them still works for the organization and stays in touch with family members who remained in the Atlanta area, Alkafil said.

But there were still many challenges. Alkafil wasn’t used to even basic aspects of life in Western civilization, especially indoor plumbing. The language, of course, was foreign as well. Her mother and sister were stared at and questioned for wearing hijabs in the Southern heat. It sometimes felt like a third rejection, Alkafil said. Her family had fled for their lives in Iraq, clawed a basic level of survival in the Saudi refugee camp and felt adrift in a foreign land in America. “We struggled because it was just a different kind of lifestyle. It was a good one, but it was so hard,” she said. “Sometimes we felt like there was never a place for us. When I get emotional, it’s because it’s so hard living in a world where you feel like you don’t belong because you’re different.”

Dearborn

Somewhere along the way, Alkafil’s father, Jafer Alkafil, learned about Dearborn, which has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the country, along with the largest mosque in the United States. About one-third of the city’s roughly 95,000 residents are Arab, Muslim or both.

“The city is just amazing, honestly,” Alkafil said. “It’s exactly who we are. We are Arab-Americans and this was the perfect place to grow up.”

Where once Alkafil’s life consisted of no more than surviving the day, she now is able to create goals – and she speaks passionately about what she hopes to achieve. They’re goals that she’s held for a long time, nearly as long as she can remember. While Alkafil isn’t exactly sure what she will do next, in some ways her goals haven’t changed – and now with her online degree in criminal justice, she can begin making them a reality. Alkafil has a drive to help people, particularly those who have been displaced as she was. Watching the current refugee crisis in Syria and Europe is difficult. She wants to become a lawyer some day, though law school is not in the cards for now with three young children. “You always want to give something back. I want to give back to someone like me who struggled in the Syrian war,” she said. “I got to live the American dream, and I wish everyone gets to live their dream. I never gave up on my dream. I wanted to finish school.”

Alkafil said one of her “biggest opportunities” was the chance to enroll at SNHU, which was able to accept all of the 90 undergraduate credits she had already earned and finish her online degree in criminal justice. “The school was exactly what I needed to finish my degree,” she said. “The flexibility of attending class whenever I wanted was the highlight of my whole degree and it was the reason behind what kept my momentum going.”

Alkafil said one of the most positive experiences she had at SNHU were classes taught by active-duty and retired police officers. “Whenever they discussed what happens in the real world, it made me want to learn more about law enforcement,” she said. “Every time I had an officer as a teacher, I knew it was going to be a ‘good’ semester.”

She chose criminal justice, she said, because it will allow her to help people the way she and the rest of her family were helped so many years ago. “It is because of people’s ability to help one another and serve justice (that) I am no longer a refugee and (am) a citizen of the greatest country in the world,” she said.

Having earned her online degree in criminal justice, Alkafil said she wants to earn a graduate degree and someday work for the United Nations, perhaps as a human resources officer in Iraq. “I would love to improve Iraq with the help of the UN. I know that is very difficult but not impossible,” she said. “It is because of the efforts of the United Nations that refugees are protected. The UN serves as the court of the world, continuously striving to protect (human) rights.”

It was SNHU, Alkafil said, that gave her the opportunity to begin down the road to that dream, starting with her online degree in criminal justice. “I knew I needed to go to school.” she said. “The school really provided me with an opportunity no school could have. The instructors, the timing, just everything.”

Now, sometimes Alkafil thinks about just how drastically her life has changed. Thousands of miles from the refugee camp where she spent such difficult years as a young child, on a recent Sunday she was outside the home she owns with her husband of eight years gardening with her three daughters.

“I’m so, so grateful. I can’t even explain to you. I’m just blessed. I’m just blessed to have this lifestyle and it makes me want to help so many people and not just work for the paycheck,” she said. “It just makes me think that life has so much more to offer. I believe that in some way, you should give back.”

For Alkafil, an online BS in Criminal Justice was one part of her path to doing just that.

Source: www.snhu.edu

Ancient Egyptian works to be published together in English for first time

August 23, 2016

By Arab America

Dalya Alberge

The Guardian

Ancient Egyptian texts written on rock faces and papyri are being brought together for the general reader for the first time after a Cambridge academic translated the hieroglyphic writings into modern English.

Until now few people beyond specialists have been able to read the texts, many of them inaccessible within tombs. While ancient Greek and Roman texts are widely accessible in modern editions, those from ancient Egypt have been largely overlooked, and the civilisation is most famous for its monuments.

The Great Pyramid and sphinx at Giza, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel have shaped our image of the monumental pharaonic culture and its mysterious god-kings.

Carved text from pyramid. Photograph: Dalya Alberge
Toby Wilkinson said he had decided to begin work on the anthology because there was a missing dimension in how ancient Egypt was viewed: “The life of the mind, as expressed in the written word.”

The written tradition lasted nearly 3,500 years and writing is found on almost every tomb and temple wall. Yet there had been a temptation to see it as “mere decoration”, he said, with museums often displaying papyri as artefacts rather than texts.

The public were missing out on a rich literary tradition, Wilkinson said. “What will surprise people are the insights behind the well-known facade of ancient Egypt, behind the image that everyone has of the pharaohs, Tutankhamun’s mask and the pyramids.”

Hieroglyphs were pictures but they conveyed concepts in as sophisticated a manner as Greek or Latin script, he said. Filled with metaphor and symbolism, they reveal life through the eyes of the ancient Egyptians. Tales of shipwreck and wonder, first-hand descriptions of battles and natural disasters, songs and satires make up the anthology, titled Writings from Ancient Egypt.

Penguin Classics, which is releasing the book on Wednesday, described it as a groundbreaking publication because “these writings have never before been published together in an accessible collection”.

Wilkinson, a fellow of Clare College and author of other books on ancient Egypt, said some of the texts had not been translated for the best part of 100 years. “The English in which they are rendered – assuming they are in English – is very old-fashioned and impenetrable, and actually makes ancient Egypt seem an even more remote society,” he said.

In translating them, he said, he was struck by human emotions to which people could relate today.

The literary fiction includes The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a story of triumph over adversity that Wilkinson describes as “a miniature masterpiece”. It is about a magical island ruled by a giant snake – his body “fashioned in gold, his eyebrows in real lapis lazuli” – who shares his own tragedy in encouraging a shipwrecked sailor to face his predicament.

“I was here with my brothers and my children … we totalled 75 snakes … Then a star fell and they were consumed in flames … If you are brave and your heart is strong, you will embrace your children, you will kiss your wife and you will see your house,” it reads.

Letters written by a farmer called Heqanakht date from 1930BC but reflect modern concerns, from land management to grain quality. He writes to his steward: “Be extra dutiful in cultivating. Watch out that my barley-seed is guarded.”

Turning to domestic matters, he sends greetings to his son Sneferu, his “pride and joy, a thousand times, a million times”, and urges the steward to stop the housemaid bullying his wife: “You are the one who lets her do bad things to my wife … Enough of it!”

Other texts include the Tempest Stela. While official inscriptions generally portray an ideal view of society, this records a cataclysmic thunderstorm: “It was dark in the west and the sky was filled with storm clouds without [end and thunder] more than the noise of a crowd … The irrigated land had been deluged, the buildings cast down, the chapels destroyed … total destruction.”

The number of people who can read hieroglyphs is small and the language is particularly rich and subtle, often in ways that cannot be easily expressed in English.

Wilkinson writes: “Take, for example, the words ‘aa’ and ‘wer’, both conventionally translated as ‘great’. The Egyptians seem to have understood a distinction – hence a god is often described as ‘aa’ but seldom as ‘wer’ – but it is beyond our grasp.”

Words of wisdom in a text called The Teaching of Ani remain as true today as in the 16th century BC: “Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Metro Detroiters Bring Community History To Life Through Arab Museum’s Oral History Projects

August 23, 2016

By Arab America

Press release: Arab American National Museum In an effort to document and preserve the stories of metro Detroit’s past and present for future generations, the Arab American National Museum (AANM) has launched two new oral history projects. Through Many Stories, One City: Dearborn Community History Series and Digital Detroit Stories, AANM and its partners are … Continued

How a casino tycoon is trying to combat an exploding pro-Palestinian movement on campuses

August 22, 2016

By Arab America

Teresa Watanabe

Los Angeles Times

Robert Gardner rarely heard anything about Israel growing up in South Los Angeles. But at UCLA, he started learning about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and seeing parallels with conflicts close to home.

The African American senior likened Israeli crackdowns on Palestinian protesters to police violence against black Americans. So he joined Students for Justice in Palestine and an international movement known as BDS, which advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against companies deemed players in Israeli human rights violations.

Earlier this year, though, he was shocked to see — on a poster outside a Westwood market — his name listed as one of 16 UCLA “Jew haters” and terrorist allies.

Since then, he says, “I’ve received death threats online, and people have followed me.”

The poster was part of a multimillion-dollar effort to combat the BDS movement, led by Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam. While this kind of attack campaign is one tactic, a key aim is to win back hearts and minds for Israel via social media pushes, cultural fairs and subsidized trips to the Jewish state.

Our goal is to change the younger generation from neutral, if not opposed to, Israel to support of Israel.
— David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force
The effort kicked off this last semester at six California campuses, including UCLA, UC Irvine and San Jose State University, and will expand to 20 more college campuses this fall.

The Adelsons and other supporters of Israel are alarmed by the precipitous growth in young Americans’ support for Palestinians. A Pew Research Center poll in May found that 27% of millennials now sympathize more with Palestinians, up from 9% in 2006 — while their generation’s support for Israel has declined in the same period from 51% to 43%.

A main cause, Israel supporters say, is the mushrooming BDS campus movement. In the last four years, student governments at eight of nine UC undergraduate campuses have voted to support the campaign.

“It’s the No. 1 nonmilitary threat to Israel and the Jewish people,” David Brog, executive director of the new Adelson-funded task force, said of BDS. “Our goal is to change the younger generation from neutral, if not opposed to, Israel to support of Israel.”

The Maccabee Task Force — named after a small Jewish rebel group who prevailed over the Greeks two millennia ago — mainly aims to beef up positive education about Israel with such methods as hosting “peace tents” for dialogue during anti-Israel campus events and Israel cultural fairs — complete with free falafel and iced coffee.

But Brog said the campaign also will target what he called “lies” about Israel perpetuated by Students for Justice in Palestine and BDS.

Sheldon Adelson speaks to students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2014. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Pro-Palestinian protests on campus regularly compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with South Africa under apartheid and oppression against people of color — and activists are using such comparisons to broaden their base, forging links with other campus movements.

The posters were one element of “Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus,” a task force-funded campaign launched in February by the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles. Horowitz declined to disclose the size of the grant he received but said it helped him wage what he called a “guerrilla” campaign this spring, with posters of “Jew haters” on five California campuses.

The posters were condemned by some Jewish student groups, including J Street U and Jewish Voice for Peace. Jerry Kang, UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, criticized them as “thuggish intimidation” and accused the effort of promoting “guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear.”

Gardner called the poster’s accusations false, saying he does not support terrorists or hate Jews. His group, he said, explicitly condemns unlawful violence by anyone.

But the 25-year-old says that he’s “worried about people coming to campus to attack me.”

Horowitz, however, defends what he’s done and said he is planning more posters, speaking engagements and actions at 17 campuses, including six in California, this fall. “What the Maccabees are doing is an important service not just to Jews but to all Americans,” he said. “It’s the one hope we have. I wish there were more.”

The Maccabee Task Force has not disclosed how much cash it plans to disburse. But Brog said initial reports of a $50-million investment were inaccurate. This year, he said, the task force has spent less than $10 million on pilot projects mostly aimed at making a “proactive case for Israel.”

One organization that accepted such money was Hillel at UCLA, though Rabbi Aaron Lerner said the Maccabee grant was a “tiny fraction” of Hillel’s $2-million annual budget.

The grant, Lerner said, helped Hillel send 40 students — most of them non-Jews — to Israel. They were able to meet activists from both sides trying to work together, learn about Israel’s past peace overtures and experience the country’s vibrant diversity, Lerner said.

“The facts on the ground are very different from apartheid and genocide,” said the rabbi, “but you can get away with lying if people are not educated.”

Hillel also used some of the money to stage a more elaborate annual Israel Fest — complete with a DJ and free food — and expand its programs during Israel Independence Week in May. The organization, which aims to enrich the lives of Jewish students, hosted a campus dinner to promote U.S.-Israel ties.

Such activities will change campus conversations about Israel from “black and white … to one about complexity, nuance and dialogue, which is better suited to a university,” Lerner said.

They also are in keeping with the new Principles Against Intolerance, which were passed by the University of California Board of Regents in March. The policy urges university leaders to combat anti-Semitism and other bias primarily with “more speech” to preserve 1st Amendment freedoms.

And more speech — or perhaps a war of words — is exactly what both sides plan.

Gardner said new support for the Palestinian cause by 50 African American organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives has galvanized students of color and their allies. The network recently unveiled a platform that mostly addresses domestic criminal justice, economic and political issues but also supports the BDS movement, calling Israel an “apartheid state” committing genocide against Palestinians.

That language provoked scathing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and others.

But supporters of Israel acknowledge the significant challenge posed by growing alliances between communities of color and pro-Palestinian groups.

“It’s very worrisome, and Jewish students then get shut out of dialogues about social justice,” said Lisa Armony, who directs Hillel programming at UC Irvine. “We are looking at that situation very carefully to create greater understanding.”

Brog says the Maccabees are just warming up in their fight to turn the campus tide toward Israel. In the spring, they took South African students to Israel, then to San Jose State University to speak to Black Student Union members about what they had seen on their trip. The message: Israel is not an apartheid state as South Africa once was.

“We will invest, we will maintain our presence and we will have the persistence to defeat it,” he said of the BDS movement.

Miguel Olvera, a UC Irvine student of Mexican descent, said his evangelical Christian upbringing instilled reverence for Israel as “God’s country,” and his conversion from “unquestioned loyalty to Israel” to support for Palestinians came slowly. Friends in an Arabic class, a course on Third World cinema and his own research eventually swayed him to regard Zionism as an oppressive ideology rather than a liberation movement.

Olvera also began making connections with his own heritage. Israel’s West Bank separation barrier seemed to him akin to Donald Trump’s vision of a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Palestinians, he said, seemed to be stereotyped as terrorists just as Mexican immigrants often are cast as criminals who take jobs from Americans.

“I was almost scared about talking bad about Israel because I thought I’d be struck by lightning,” said Olvera, 21, who is studying comparative literature and Spanish. “But the [West Bank] wall was a very strong visual representation of the occupation, one I could connect to as a child of immigrants.”

His Chicano student group works with Students for Justice in Palestine. In May, they co-sponsored a controversial protest against a documentary about Israeli soldiers.

Gardner, a political science and urban planning major, said his interest in the Middle East was first piqued by the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. He began researching and concluded that both Palestinians and African Americans suffered from “racialized state violence” and “mass incarceration.” Segregated housing in Israel, he said, reminded him of Jim Crow laws.

Despite his initial fears about the poster, Gardner plans to keep protesting.

“At the end of the day, he said, “I feel passionate that I’m on the right side of history, and I’m fighting for justice and equality.”

Source: www.latimes.com

Iraqi artist finds home in Pittsburgh

August 18, 2016

By Arab America

By Libbie Katsev

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When artist Thar Sayegh fled Iraq in 1999, he left his home, his possessions, his education and the promise of a bright career teaching art. But moving to Anaheim, Calif., after living as a refugee in Jordan for 14 years, brought a new kind of loss — He had to stop painting.

Mr. Sayegh, who moved to Pittsburgh last fall, lives in Greenfield with his family and works as a driver for Uber and Lyft while taking classes at the Community College of Allegheny County. But before moving to the U.S., he worked for more than a decade to build a successful career as an artist. Now, he’s painting in class and working toward following his calling to again be a full-time artist and art teacher.

“I feel that I have more energy or power when I can do something [with] deep meanings or with a message,” he said.

In his paintings, a man washes himself by a stream, women lean down to harvest wheat, and a whirl of faces surrounds a pair of lovers — their vivid expressions both realistic and blurred by the swirls of color. While working in the Middle East, Mr. Sayegh said, he liked to paint “anything related to humans, to people … to ignore everything else, like nationality, like religions, like traditions.”

Often, he painted simple scenes in daily life, trying to capture moments in the way photographers do.

“I want to show how people are suffering, respect others, sacrifice others,” he said. “How people have love for other people or … the place that [they] belong to, [where] they’re born and raised.”

Mr. Sayegh spent more than a decade developing his technique of using oil paints in such a way that the oil is “light and sensitive” like watercolors.

“I want to do something special in my art. I don’t want to follow the others,” he said. “And I swear, if I couldn’t get anything new I would never show people my art.”

Mr. Sayegh realized he was skilled at art as a young boy when his friends asked him to draw trees, cars and other pictures for them. At first he mostly drew to show off, he said, but it came to be the way he thought and expressed himself.

“Little by little, day by day, it start[ed] to be everything in my life,” he said.

He studied art at the University of Mosul, where he was at the top of his class. There, he met his wife, another talented art student. His teachers were waiting for him to graduate so he could join their ranks, but Iraq was becoming increasingly dangerous. In 1999, when Mr. Sayegh was just one year shy of getting his degree, his family had to flee to Jordan.

It was a “very dangerous and weird” journey, he said. It was illegal for people to leave the country except for short periods if they left money in the bank to ensure their return.

Mr. Sayegh’s family was counting on the fact that his father, a former politician, had a diplomatic passport. But when his father got his passport renewed, he found he no longer had diplomatic travel privileges: There was no guarantee he wouldn’t be recognized, stopped or even jailed. His father went anyway and made it into Jordan without incident.

“I don’t know how he got out,” Mr. Sayegh said. “Nobody knows.”

The rest of the family followed. It was a painful departure — especially for his wife, who cried, saying she couldn’t imagine never seeing her parents or siblings again. Claiming to be going on vacation, Mr. Sayegh took a taxi into Jordan. He never returned.

“We lost everything,” he said. “We lost our home. The government … took everything we own.”

In Jordan, the family went immediately to the U.N., where they received refugee status. That protected them from deportation, but because he was in Jordan illegally, he couldn’t own a home, travel or complete his studies. Despite those hurdles, he attained success as a professional artist after friends connected him with the management of the Orfali Art Gallery, a prestigious private gallery in Amman.

“When they saw my art they said, ‘Wow, that’s what we need. Even if you don’t have certificates, we don’t care,’ ” Mr. Sayegh said.

Orfali gave him a trial period as a teacher and then a full-time job and eventually put him in charge of designing the curriculum. He became known for his work in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and had his work shown in Manhattan with that of other Iraqi refugee artists. And his family grew: He and his wife had four children, who now range in age from 6 to 16.

Then, in 2013, the U.N. told them they were to move to California.

“We had just five days to wrap up everything that we had for 14 years,” Mr. Sayegh said.

In the U.S., Mr. Sayegh was finally legally able to complete his studies. But life in California was a “very tough situation,” he said. At first, he continued to exhibit his art, but he couldn’t find buyers. With a family to support, he had to look for other work.

“It was very hard to start seeking … any kind of job outside of [the] art field,” he said.

Driving required few skills and little English. At the time, he had just started taking English as a second language classes. Although Mr. Sayegh lived in Anaheim, he drove and worked in Los Angeles, 40 minutes away, coming home every three to five days to get some rest. Most of the time, he ate and slept in his car.

“I had to spend all my time and energy just for work. I couldn’t paint or study,” Mr. Sayegh said.

So, a little less than a year ago, he, his wife and children, mother and sister started over for the third time. The family of eight piled into three cars and drove across the country for nine days until they reached Pittsburgh. He chose Pittsburgh for its affordability and proximity to the New York art world, Europe and the Middle East. It’s still too dangerous for his family to visit Iraq, but he hopes to return someday.

“It’s not very easy to start from zero, but now we are happy that we are here and we have this opportunity, and I think I will be successful here,” Mr. Sayegh said.

He and his family like Pittsburgh’s slower pace and high-quality educational institutions. The lower cost of living enabled Mr. Sayegh to enroll at CCAC in the spring. Despite his experience in the field, he needs a degree to teach art. Every time he leaves for class, his wife — who hasn’t been able to paint in years — reminds him how lucky he is and tells him she’s happy for him.

“Through classes I came back to my brushes,” Mr. Sayegh said. “I missed my brushes a lot, been away from them for about 2½ years.”

Mr. Sayegh also finds the city’s natural beauty inspiring. For the time being, though, he’s sticking to class assignments.

“It’s refreshing my mind and my hand to come back to my skills,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to have more time and opportunity to paint.”

He hasn’t had time to make connections in the Pittsburgh art world or find sponsorship to allow him to paint independently.

“[Starting over three times] cost me a lot of time and effort, but I still have determination,” he said. “I’m 46, but I still have determination to continue my study and to obtain my degrees, and to do everything that I ever want to do.”

Source: www.post-gazette.com

Arab Influences In The Balearic Islands

August 17, 2016

By Arab America

BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing Writer As we wandered along the tiny streets in the ancient Arab quarter of Palma, capital of the Balearic Islands, every once and a while we would peer through wrought-iron gates and heavy wooden doors fascinated with glimpses of one magnificent patio after another, attracted by their stone staircases, galleries and arcades. … Continued

Arab American National Museum seeks to reflect broader range of immigrants

August 16, 2016

By Arab America

Associated Press

The Arab American National Museum is updating permanent exhibits to boost representation of immigrants and refugees from a broader range of countries.

The museum based in Dearborn says it’s making the changes with a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The facility aims to document recent migration from places such as North Africa that aren’t represented in exhibits and programming.

Museum officials say they want “to give recent arrivals a more proportionate voice in Arab American history.” The effort will start with research and planning, and then the museum will seek another grant to build and install the updated exhibits.

The museum’s grant is among nearly 300 projects and programs nationwide receiving a total of $79 million from the federal agency.

Source: www.freep.com

Arab America Ambassador Network

August 15, 2016

By Nisreen Eadeh

To be an Ambassador, please go to this link and apply: ARAB AMERICA AMBASSADOR NETWORK For Immediate Release Arab America Launches Ambassador Network Empowering Arab Americans through digital media (WASHINGTON, DC) August 15, 2016 – Arab America, the leading provider of digital media to the Arab American community, announced today the launch of the Arab America Ambassador Network. Arab America is … Continued

Arab America Poll: For whom would you VOTE for president?

August 8, 2016

By Arab America

Are you engaged in the presidential campaign? Are you looking to sound-off your support or frustration for a particular candidate? This is your chance! Arab America wants to know who you support for president. Just click the link below and VOTE! CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

374 Results (Page 19 of 32)