Arabs and Muslims have no excuse for America’s pro-Israeli stance
By Ray Hanania – Both of the presidential candidates and the vice presidential candidates in each of their first round of debates emphasized their commitment to “change.” But when it comes to America’s blind support for Israel and failure to stand up for human rights and justice for Palestinians, there is no change. And it again makes this presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain another difficult and unsatisfying choice for Arab and Muslims Americans. Not all of the blame falls on the shoulders of the candidates or on the American people who dissect to minutia heady issues like the nation’s economy and alleged threats from Iran and North Korea but seem to be missing in action and intelligence when it comes to understanding the fundamentals of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Most of the blame really falls on the shoulders of the Arab and Muslim community itself, a blame that the community’s leadership dodges and refuses to discuss because it exposes the shallowness and ineffectiveness of the Arab and Muslim organizations in America.
The fact is that for all of the Arab and Muslim American bluster, rhetoric, protests, ego-feeding conferences and narrow-focused writing, Arab and Muslim Americans have failed when it comes to the most important skill required in championing human rights and justice. Communications.
Arabs and Muslims don’t know how to communicate.
Oh, they know how to talk but never when to shut-up. But talking is not always communicating.
They can speak English, many very well but often with those annoying, affected British accents and accents of the elitist aristocracy that evolved out of the brutality of the Ottoman Empire.
But they can’t speak “American.”
They understand the fundamentals of the rights of the Palestinians but they lack a fundamental understanding of how to separate those issues from their emotion-driven activism.
We know the truth but resist the reality that perception is often more important than the truth and how you communicate issues is more important than the issues themselves.
In America, the acceptable and popular perception is more important than the complex and hard to understand truths.
But one truth is easy to recognize about the Arab and Muslim American community. Arab and Muslim Americans pretend that they are effective because we hate to admit that we have failed.
Pride is more important than justice and we never acknowledge that failure of our efforts to convey the truth the Americans and we especially refuse to ever acknowledge the failure of the leadership in our community. Instead of addressing the lack of leadership by our so-called community leaders, we defend that failure as if it were our most precious possession.
We never admit fault. We never admit mistakes. We never admit that impotency and the emptiness of our so-called leaders has been a major contribution to the inability to return the Palestinians to their homes.
Israel’s brutal and vicious policies have made it easy for Arabs and Muslims to blame everything on Israel and never feel compelled to recognize their own real failures, failures that have taken Israel’s achievements in this conflict and turned them into generations of oppression that continue to expand not regress.
Arabs and Muslims as a culture have never learned how to hold their own leaders accountable.
I’m not saying they don’t criticize our leaders. They do. But only the leaders they disagree with. We never as a community criticize, question or challenge the leaders we support. And that failure to challenge our leadership is the single-most important reason for our failure.
Criticism is what makes public officials and leaders accountable. And we have no accountability in the Arab and Muslim American leadership, just as we have absolutely no accountability in the leadership of the Arab World.
We have the pomp and ceremony of our traditions and culture, but lack the substance of achievement, creativity, ingenuity and strategy.
But most of all, Arabs and Muslims do not understand professional communications and how in address failure they can overcome defeat.
When individuals stand up and criticize, they are attacked by the community, which prefers to beautiful lies to the ugly truth.
We would rather live in continued occupation and suffering than to admit that we have failed not in our principles but in our ability to apply those principles.
We have failed to recognize that more important than our own individual feelings and emotion is the need to properly and strategically educate the American people who believe, naively, that they are educated on the issues of the Middle East, when they are not.
But Americans easily see the failures of our Arab and Muslim societies that Arabs and Muslims refuse to recognize and it engenders a distrust that plagues every attempt to convince them otherwise that the Palestinians have rights and that Israel is the aggressor.
You can’t that to an Arab or a Muslim.
It will make them angry. Emotional and motivate them to spend all their energies denouncing you, far more effort than they will ever put into helping Americans understand the Middle East conflict the right way.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist and morning radio talk show host in Chicago. He can be reached at
www.RadioChicagoland.com.)
RAY HANANIA writes for The HuffingtonPost.com. He is a political columnist based in Chicago with the Southwest News-Herald Newspaper, and publisher of the National Arab American Times Newspaper. Named Best Ethnic American Columnist for 2007 by the New America Media, Hanania is the host of Radio Chicagoland, a morning talk show (Mon-Fri, 8-9:30 am) on WJJG 1530 AM Radio. He is an internationally acclaimed standup comedian. He authors a Comic Strip called Ray Hanania's World. View his complete Bio?
ANISA MEHDI is an Emmy Award-winning journalist specializing in religion, the arts, and people. For over 20 years she has reported, written, directed and produced television news and documentary programs for major American media outlets, including National Geographic, PBS, ABC News, and CBS. Her commentaries have been heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Ms. Mehdi is founder and president of Whetstone Productions, a New Jersey-based production and consulting company. She is adjunct Professor of Communications at Seton Hall University. She writes a twice weekly for the Newark Star-Ledger Newspaper blog. View her complete Bio?
SAFFIYA SHILLO is a peace activist, communications specialist and community editor for the National Arab American Times Newspaper. Ms. Shillo serves as a Board Member of the Palestinian American Women's Society. Her activism is extensive, having served as the former President of the Palestinian American Congress-Chicago Chapter, as a National Board member of the American Task Force on Palestine, and as Director of the Arab American Institute's Chicago office. Active in Jewish/Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, Ms. Shillo gives presentations to national organizations on strategies and methods to achieve peace through dialogue. Ms. Shillo also served as Director of Ethnic Affairs for the State of Illinois' Office of Lieutenant Governor, and worked as a domestic violence/sexual assault counselor serving Chicago's Arab community. She can be reached at smshillo@yahoo.com
ALADDIN ELAASAR is an award winning Arab American journalist and author of several books including Silent Victims: The plight of Arabs and Muslims in Post 9/11 America. Elaasar is also a member of the National Arab American Journalists Association. Email him at omaraladin@aol.com. His latest book is The Last Pharoah: Mubarak and the Uncertain Future of Egypt in the MidEast.
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I agree with some of this, but you can use the title of “aggressor” for Israel in only a broad, B&W structural sense. That’s a main reason for a communications breakdown between most Americans and a variety of Arab-American POVs on Israel.
Israel is not a traditional aggressor. At this point, the occupation would be over if Israelis were not scared of different potential forms of aggression, from missiles to mortars. The idea that there would be virtually no aggression after a unilateral pullback is, at best, part of an Arab utopian fantasy.
But I’d like to read Ray about how specifically merica can be more “even-handed.” A sensible way would be to pressure Israel through withholding aid to eject people from the new settlements they’re trying to set up. But if you’ve been paying attention to Israeli news, the settlers have gotten more violent. The settlers are determined not to have a repeat of the Gaza pullout. Israelis are getting scared of them.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Israeli government has been trying to negotiate a solution to this, offering the Palestinians control of the Jordan Valley, 98% of the West Bank and more land next to the Gaza Strip to make up for the 2%. Americans have an idea that Israel is willing to make these concessions to a 2-state vision of the former British Palestine (minus Jordan). You won’t convince your fellow Americans of much until you can tell them that the Palestinian Arab players are sincerely trying to find realistic concessions for that vision as well.
Instead, Aras seem to be trying to convince their fellow Americans that Israel is not sincere with these hypothetical solutions. But that does not seem to be working. It makes Arab-Americans look untrustworhty on this issue or out of touch.
Comment by dailywatch | October 4, 2008 |