Mitchell Kaidy

A lot of young Americans who turned 18 in 1943 didn't live to see their 19th birthdays. Like many of them, Mitchell Kaidy, the Brooklyn-born son of immigrants from Beirut, found himself in the infantry headed into the bloodiest Western European battles of World War II. When the army found he was nearsighted, it gave him a machine gun instead of a rifle.

Because his unit was in so many battles, his company commander asked his help writing citations for valor. For the remainder of his army service, Mitch alternated between writing citations and spraying German strong points with machine gun fire. In a way it set the pattern of the rest of his life. He has enlisted in a variety of causes, has never been deterred by unfavorable odds, and when faced with resistance, he blazes away with every weapon at his command.

Readers of the Washington Report are familiar with his articles on how to obtain a meeting with a Member of Congress, how to get a letter to the editor printed, and how to use the Fairness Doctrine to ensure that all points of view are adequately presented on local radio and television. All of these columns were based upon 20 years of professional media experience in upstate New York, where members of newspaper editorial boards, radio talk show hosts, and television interviewers greet his frequent visits with wary admiration.

Although he is a member of the board of the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), and has given media workshops at national conventions of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Mitchell Kaidy's activism is not confined to Arab American causes. He and his wife, Jean, a psychiatric counselor, have a long history of political and social activism as founders or active members of the Rochester chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, ADC, the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and Americans Working for the Arab Refugee Effort (AWARE).

Three years ago, in one of his successful efforts to invoke the Fairness Doctrine, he wrote and moderated a program on Arab contributions to Western civilization that has been aired several times on the Rochester CBS channel. Two years ago he founded a coalition to oppose local use of nuclear energy and, after a number of pronuclear advertising spots were aired by local utilities, he secured the equivalent of $50,000 in free television and radio time which he and his wife used to videotape answering spots.

"My abiding disappointment," Mitch explains, "is that more Americans aren't aware of the Fairness Doctrine and are not willing to write and speak up about the Middle East. For the past 20 years I've written hundreds of articles and letters to newspapers and have also used the broadcast media to counter one-sided propaganda' I'm crushingly disappointed in the feeble information efforts of the Arab nations in the U.S. and the world," he adds. "I feel strongly—having done it—that American public opinion can be influenced if you know how and work at it. If the Arab nations bought time just to tell of Arab cultural contributions to Western society, the image would start changing.

With a journalism degree from New York University and as a contributor to a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize, Mitchell Kaidy knows how to prepare media material that cannot be rejected on qualitative grounds. The fact that he is now a self-employed free-lance writer also provides some immunity from economic pressures. However, the odds have not always been in his favor:

"I've felt the sting of anti-Arab prejudice. I was warned to desist from writing in favor of the Palestinians because I was being perceived as 'pro-PLO'," he says. "As a result, I had to retire early from the New York State Legislature where I wrote speeches for 15 years."

None of this discourages Mitch and Jean Kaidy, who in addition to their activism and earning a living have managed to raise a son and a daughter and to renovate a comfortable old farmhouse that now is surrounded by parkland in suburban Rochester. When the Washington Report recently asked readers to send in names of potential subscribers whose letters and comments indicated informed interest in the Middle East, Mitch Kaidy sent in a file of 600 such names compiled through years of talking to groups and individuals and reading media letters and reports about the Middle East.

Recently, at a Middle East program he helped to organize at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a speaker remarked that if there were only one person like Mitchell Kaidy in every city in the United States, U.S. public opinion might revert to open-mindedness and even-handedness about the Middle East.

Mitch shrugged off the compliment, explaining:

"I can't remember when I didn't feel that my life's mission was to improve the order of things and to set things right that were wrong or unprincipled. I want to feel before calling it a day that there is another day for my kids and for the world."

—Richard Curtiss