UCLA Focuses on Arab World

By Pat McDonnell Twair

One of the best-attended courses in UCLA Extension history was an April 13 seminar entitled "The Arab World," on the Westwood campus.

Professor Afaf Marsot, who teaches Middle East history at UCLA, discussed "Who are the Arabs?" with 110 participants. Dr. Jack Shaheen, a professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and author of The TV Arab, gave a humorous account of "The Arab Image in the Mind of America. " Filmmaker and anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi showed her film, "El Sebou': Egyptian Birth Ritual."

Marsot stressed there are 21 Arab countries and each has its own national policy. Even though their borders were artificially carved by the colonial powers, individual governments have vested interests in remaining separate. She believes the Arab people desire unity based on the European Economic Community model and not as one state.

El Guindi explained to the audience that the Arab individual identity is that of his or her family. "Discrimination exists on a family level," she said. "It is the father who frees or controls the individual, while socialization of the children is up to the mother."

With the exception of one "monitor" who asked hostile questions, the audience exuded enthusiasm to learn more about the Arabs and their culture. During a lunch break, an elderly participant commented to this reporter: "If more courses like this were taught, maybe we wouldn't have had the Gulf war."

UCLA Extension agreed the course was a success and plans to offer more such programs in coming quarters.

PAS Reaches Taxpayers

April 15 is the annual tax deadline dreaded by 80 percent of American taxpayers who mail their checks to the Internal Revenue Service in the final hours. And so it was that members of the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Palestine Aid Society decided to let last-minute filers know where some of their tax dollars are going.

PAS members stood at mailboxes at Los Angeles' busy downtown post office and handed flyers to motorists that were headlined: "Did You Know Your Hard-Earned Tax Dollars Finance the Oldest Occupation in the Middle East?"

The flyers were accepted by the motorists who hopefully read some of the statistics cited. An example: "The US government has given Israel over $80 billion, that's $4 billion of your tax money each year for the past 23 years, to finance Israel's brutal occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza."

ADC Stages Annual Dinner

A noteworthy feature of the April 13 annual dinner of the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) was that the Los Angeles Times reported it, and reported it accurately.

Not even in the aftermath of ADC Regional Director Alex Odeh's assassination did the Los Angeles daily bother to report the annual ADC banquet proceedings. LA Times staffer Kenneth Reich quoted key speakers Father Elias Chacour and Jeremy Levin in a three-column story.

Father Chacour, a Melchite priest from the Galilee, arrived only the day before from Israel. He urged Arab Americans to follow the examples of Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and get their hands dirty for peace.

Father Chacour said he prays often for President Bush, Secretary of State Baker and Israel's Yitzhak Shamir. "All of you have a huge responsibility and I pray that God can change their hearts from stone into flesh, " he told ADC members. Father Chacour was introduced by the Rev. Mary Jenson, who co-authored with him a book entitled We Belong to the Land. Film rights to the book were signed with producers the day before.

Former CNN Beirut correspondent and hostage Jeremy Levin warned the US does not intend to allow the Palestinians to have an independent state. "All Baker is aiming for is limited self-rule—a homeland a la Bantustan—so that when the Palestinians have 'free' elections, they are free to vote for a dogcatcher or garbage collector."

Commenting that policies of Bush or Reagan can't solely be blamed for US blindness to Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights, Levin said, "Congress is a mirror image of our public opinion. Why expect Congress to rise when American voters don't demand a halt in aid to Israel until it trades land for peace?"

Iraqi POW Rests in Glendale

After being held as an Iraqi prisoner-of-war for 76 days, Shant Kenderian is resting and telling war stories to his family in Glendale, CA. Shant was born in Baghdad to Iraqi-Armenian parents in 1963. After his parents divorced, his mother took Shant with her when she immigrated to the US, where he completed high school.

He was visiting his father in Baghdad in 1980 when the Iran-Iraq war broke out and the Iraqi government obliged him to remain. After earning an engineering degree in 1985, Shant had no choice but to enter the Iraqi armed forces. After the end of the Iraq-Iran war, he again was negotiating to return to the US when Iraq invaded Kuwait. This time he was inducted into the Iraqi navy.

Assigned to a ship that hit a mine Jan. 23 while resupplying Iraqi troops on a Kuwaiti island, Shant and 11 other crew members were taken prisoner by US Marines. Astounded to find an enlisted Iraqi speaking Americanese, the Marines subjected him to tough interrogation in isolation (which was just as well, since the Iraqis were suspicious about what he was saying to the Americans). He had neither toothbrush nor a change of clothing for 20 days.

Once the war was over, the treatment changed for the Green Card-holder (a preliminary stage toward full US citizenship). On April 13 he was told to collect his gear, and within a few hours he was flying to the US. Now he's attempting to recover identity documents lost when his ship went down.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.

Both books mentioned above are available from the AET Book Club. Father Elias Chacour's We Belong to the Land is listed on page 74 of the book catalog. Jack Shaheen's The TV Arab (not yet listed) is available at $11.95 for one, $13.95 for two.