January/February 2001, Pages 59-61

Southern California Chronicle

International Action Center Observers Describe Situation in Palestine

By Pat and Samir Twair

On Nov. 4, the day after they returned from visiting Palestinians living under Israeli military siege, Richard Becker and Preston Woods of the International Action Center showed film footage at their Los Angeles office of the new intifada. Arriving in Jerusalem on Oct. 28, the two brought with them $15,000 worth of antibiotics, pain-control pills and bandages.

“It would have been impossible to move through the area without the people waiting for us,” stated Becker. He described how Palestinian population centers, including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Dheisha refugee camp, Nablus and Khan Yunis, which are under Palestinian control, are encircled by Israeli military outposts and roads.

Becker and Woods were dinner guests Oct. 31 of activists living in Ramallah.

“Our host received several phone calls that something was going on,” Becker said. “We ran to the roof and watched an Israeli drone, then saw a flare and heard a large explosion. We jumped into our host’s car and drove about a mile to see that the Israelis had hit a Fatah office and, in the bombing, had knocked out all the windows of apartments surrounding it.”

He praised the local TV station, which immediately notified Palestinians. Marches were called for midnight in Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinians are not intimidated by the preponderance of Israeli gun power, Becker remarked.

“When clashes start, ambulances don’t wait for a call, they head for the action,” he said. “Hundreds of Palestinians have been trained in how to carry the wounded on stretchers.

“There is no aspect of life that is not a struggle for Palestinians living under military occupation,” Becker continued, “whether it is going to school, trying to run a business, even get food on the table. The Israelis are exerting unrelenting pressure to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they will leave.”

Woods noted that, even though its cameramen are targeted by snipers and soldiers destroy their expensive cameras whenever possible, the Palestinian TV station is carrying on bravely to record Israeli atrocities.

“Still,” Becker interjected, “not all the Israeli travesties are reported. For instance, in Tel Aviv, the right-wing settlers—who are nothing more than the Zionist Ku Klux Klan—invaded a posh Tel Aviv restaurant, kicked out the Israeli diners, locked the Palestinian employees inside and tried to burn down the building. Yet, it was never reported here.”

Both described what they had witnessed as a revolutionary situation, a struggle against military occupation. The question, they said, is whether it will be a victorious revolution.

Ending on a hopeful note, Becker noted that, while many other indigenous peoples have vanished, the Palestinians are determined they will remain.

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decimation of Iraq,” Becker said, “the U.S. and Israel decided to create a Palestinian entity that is not a state. They sought pacification, not peace.

“Nonetheless,” he concluded, “we have never seen such massive protests as those that have been taking place in the U.S. since Oct. 1. Furthermore, there is a lot of resentment in the Arab countries over how Israel can break all the U.N. resolutions calling for equitable treatment of the Palestinians. It is time for many coalitions to be organized.”

American Muslim Achievement Awards Presented

Proponents of the energy of the sun and the energy of the information superhighway were honored at the 8th annual American Muslim Achievement Awards banquet of the Islamic Center of Southern California.

Recipients of the prestigious award for the year 2000 were Sohaib Abbasi, senior vice president of Oracle Corp., and Prof. Mohamed Abdou, chair of the international steering committee of Fusion Nuclear Technology.

As he welcomed more than 450 guests gathered in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel, Dr. Maher Hathout commented that the purpose of the achievement award is to send a message “to ourselves and our youth that we Muslims are productive and creative contributors to American society.”

In introducing his longtime friend, Mohammed Mahboob Akhter commented that the Lahore-born Abbasi kept applying to American universities after being rejected by his top two academic choices. Perseverance paid off and, after completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Abbasi joined a small software company and then launched his own company, Outlook Software, Inc.

He joined Oracle Corporation in 1982 and, as manager of Oracle’s Application Tools since 1984, he developed the e-business portal, application development and business intelligence tools. He also has played a key role in establishing the Oracle Academic Initiate (OAI) in Pakistan that is training hundreds of professionals.

In accepting the award, the Oracle executive specified two reasons for his accomplishments: “The first is luck, in that I joined Oracle at the right time. The second is inertia, because I haven’t left Oracle for 18 years.”

Stressing that he has been enriched by experiencing the best of the Islamic and American ways of life, Abassi said he grew up with strong Muslim family ties and was challenged by the U.S. approach to innovating and investing in information technology.

“The first generation of information technology was IBM,” he explained, “the second generation was Microsoft and the third generation is the Internet.

“We’re only at the beginning, we’re at the dawn of the information age,” he continued. “India and Israel are the only other countries on a par with the U.S. Can the Muslim countries keep up?”

Abassi has tried to answer this rhetorical question by asking Oracle to replicate its OAI Pakistani program in Egypt and Malaysia. The gap between developed and developing countries can be narrowed, he theorized, if villagers in the Third World are hooked to the Internet and can get their master’s degree, and even start a global business, on their computers.

More than 20 scientists from Japan who have been working with Professor Abdou’s research in fusion technology were on hand to witness his award presentation. A short film explained his research objective of creating nuclear fusion (not fission), which would produce an inexhaustible, clean and safe energy source.

Born and raised in Egypt, Dr. Abdou received his master’s and doctoral degrees in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He is the director of the Fusion Science and Technology Center at UCLA and has cooperated in research projects with Japan, Russia and China.

Upon accepting his award, Dr. Abdou noted that scientists often are reluctant to discuss religion.

“My religious training as a child instilled in me the need to be compassionate, respectful and honest,” he said. “Regardless of where I lived, these values helped me, and when I didn’t observe them I found myself in trouble.

“I am a scientist with faith, not a religious scholar,” he continued. “A few years ago when I began to seriously study the Qur’an, I arrived at a new peace of mind as I read many verses that talked about the planets, the sun and universe. I found new dimensions of God and of science. This led me to believe in the power of a Creator and how he created enormous stars that work so well—yet we still are trying after all these years to replicate fusion.”

Afaf Marsot Honored at UCLA

Professor Afaf Lutfi Marsot has been recognized over the years as a top scholar at UCLA and a professor who truly encourages her students to excel. The Cairo-born scholar, who was the first Egyptian woman to receive a Ph.D. degree from Oxford University, has spent much of her professional career at UCLA, where she developed many programs dealing with the Near East.

UCLA took a bow, however, when Professor Marsot was named the recipient of the Mentoring Award at the annual Middle East Studies Association convention in Orlando, FL in November. The award is one of the most prestigious presented in the field of Middle East Studies.

The mentoring award nominating committee was chaired by Prof. Nancy Gallagher of the University of California at Santa Barbara. She forwarded all nominating letters to MESA headquarters in Tucson, AZ, where a second committee selected the recipient.

Professor Marsot has been affiliated with UCLA since 1968 and, even after her retirement in 1992, has continued to work in an advisory position with the Near East Studies Center.

Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Rise

When tensions increase in the Middle East, mosques often are the target of hate crimes in the U.S. On Oct. 26, as the intifada entered its fifth week, the pillars of the Islamic Center of Southern California were defaced by two swastikas painted in black. Three days later, a rock was thrown through the glass door of the center’s main entrance while people were gathered inside for prayers. On Oct. 31, a guard station in the center’s gated parking lot was kicked open and ransacked. A can of paint in the station was opened and vandals smeared paint on the guard’s window and on a van donated to the center.

Police are investigating the incidents as hate crimes against the Islamic Center, which also serves as a school for 105 students ranging from preschool to the sixth grade.

A more menacing threat occurred Nov. 19, when the home and work addresses of Dr. Maher Hathout, the center’s official spokesman, were posted on a Yahoo! message board under the heading, “Come Visit the Arab Nazi Center.” The sham message was signed Adolf Hathout.

A signature tactic of the terrorist Jewish Defense League is to announce the home addresses of individuals they target. In the cases of Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad and political activist Stanley Sheinbaum, the JDL left dead pigs in the front yards of both men, who had been critical of Israel. JDL members are prime suspects in the 1985 bomb death of Alex Odeh, then California director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

On Nov. 30, these reporters opened our computer and, instead of seeing the opening page, were greeted by an Israeli flag on the monitor with the message, “You’ve Been Hacked.”

Scrolling down, the ungrammatical invective expressed “revange” (sic) against Russian agents and individuals who had attacked the IDF’s sensitive computers. The message closed with the image of a woman and the expression, “Death to All Arabs.” It also named the “mOsad” (sic) as the sender.

On Dec. 4, the Islamic Center called a press conference to protest hate crimes directed at Muslims. On hand was Mike Gennaco, the highest civil rights officer for the western region of the U.S. government.

“Efforts to isolate our community and intimidate us are failing,” stated Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, “as a partnership is being forged between local Muslims and law enforcement to find the individuals spreading hate against religious and ethnic groups and to prosecute them.”

Israa Miraaj Observance Focuses on Jerusalem

More than 1,500 Muslims gathered at the Sequoia Center in Anaheim for an Israa Miraaj observance of the night the Prophet Muhammed rose to heaven at the site in Jerusalem commemorated by the Dome of the Rock. This year’s observance focused on the suffering of Palestinians trying to survive under brutal Israeli military occupation.

Keynote speaker Dr. Maher Hathout stated: “It is a crime to make al-Aqsa a real estate issue. Al-Aqsa is a symbol. If it falls, we all are gone.”

Dr. Hathout eloquently pointed out the false statements made by Israel that are accepted as truth in the U.S.

“Israel portrays itself as the only democracy in the Middle East,” he noted, “while it actually is the only apartheid state in the region.

“Israel says it is besieged,” he continued. “[Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright has the audacity to say Israel is under siege, while Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships attack civilian populations within Palestinian cities and Israeli citizens sip cappuccino in Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem.

“Israel claims it is the strategically of the U.S.,” Dr. Hathout concluded. “What has it done to deserve the title of ally? During the Gulf war, the U.S. begged and pleaded with Israel to stay out.”

New Horizon School Celebrates 16th Year

“ I feared that perhaps in two generations, my descendants would no longer be Muslim—that is, until we built New Horizon School.” So said Dr. Gasser Hathout at the Pasadena school’s annual dinner.

“Why should we send our children to New Horizon?” he asked rhetorically. “There are more than one billion Muslims in the world, but New Horizon offers a specific vision of Islam in the United States. Secondly, our teachers offer a high standard of academic excellence. Lastly, we parents have an emotional peace of mind that our youngsters are growing up in an environment encouraging them to remain Muslim and the acceptance of a reality that God exists.”

Emcee Salam al-Marayati introduced Congressman-elect Adam Schiff, who addressed the group and remained for the entire dinner program.

Hala and Doug Burpee presented a slide history of New Horizon School, which today educates 250 students from kindergarten through middle school. In 1984, New Horizon started as a preschool for 20 children in South Pasadena. This was expanded to grades one through four in a small house.

In 1992 the school purchased property at the prestigious Pasadena intersection
of Orange Grove Blvd. and Cypress Ave., near the Rose Bowl. A lower school was opened the following year. By 1995, New Horizon had been accredited by the California Association of Independent Schools and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. In 1999 CAIS and WASC re-accredited the school for a six-year term.

At New Horizon’s anniversary celebration parents and graduates took the podium to express their pride and enthusiasm for the school, which has earned a reputation for turning out students who earn straight A’s in the high schools to which they matriculate. More information is available at the school’s Web site, www.newhorizonschool.org.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.