Reinvigorated ADC Massachusetts Chapter Hears Pleas for Arab Unity at Home and Abroad

By David P. Johnson Jr.

“I have always defined the ADC [American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee] as the ABC of the Arab Americans,” Ambassador Clovis Maksoud of American University told an audience outside Boston on April 18. “Although other groups [of immigrants] faced discrimination…Arab Americans have a double jeopardy. Every new group was suspect and Arab Americans were targeted for a foreign policy issue.”

A former ambassador of the Arab League to the United Nations and currently director of the Center for the Global South at American University, Maksoud made his comments before the Massachusetts Chapter of ADC. Held at St. John of Damascus Church in Dedham, Mass., the program was designed to raise political awareness among the estimated 260,000 Arab Americans living in Massachusetts.

Maksoud, who is also a lawyer and a former editor of the An-Nahar newspaper in Beirut, told the audience of more than 50 people that, although he deplored the persistent discrimination against Arabs, “there is an improvement, Arab accomplishments are being recognized.”

He called “divisions among Arabs a myth” in order to distract them from exerting organized pressure to change U.S. Mid-east policy.

In reference to highly publicized divisions between Christian and Muslim Arabs in Nazareth, which is inside Israel, Maksoud said, “Up to now, they got along, Christians and Muslims. They always considered themselves Arabs in Israel. The people of Nazareth sustained their unity and their cohesion.”

Allowing deep divisions to emerge among the Palestinians could lead to disaster, he asserted. “If Nazareth goes the way Lebanon went for a little while,” he said, “then there goes Jerusalem.”

He appealed to Arab unity, both in America and overseas. “We are Arabs and we are discriminated against as Arabs,” he said. “Whether in Algeria, whether in Lebanon, whether in Syria, our commitment is to human rights everywhere.”

While he urged ADC to avoid any sectarian splits, Maksoud condemned the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, which have been unpopular in the Orthodox Christian world but are supported by most Muslims.

“NATO is not equipped to take military action and not anticipate the consequences,” he said. “We cannot afford to have these attacks on Yugoslavia.”

He compared the bombing of Serbia to the attacks on Iraq and urged a diplomatic solution.

On the Middle East, Maksoud referred to the relationship between Zionism and the Holocaust. “Israel absolved the liberal West from the guilt of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, if the liberal West absolved Israel for its actions in Palestine,” he said.

ADC national president Hala Maksoud, Clovis Maksoud’s wife, who holds a Ph.D. in political theory and a master’s degree in government from Georgetown University and a master’s degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut, urged those in the room to stay informed and to get involved in politics.

“All other [ethnic] communities in the United States have organized themselves, except us.” she said. “We are the new kids on the block. We have a daunting agenda. Our main work is discrimination.”

She stated that while some anti-Arab discrimination in the United States is deliberate, most incidents spring from misinformation.

“Most of it is ignorance that is all-pervasive,” she said. “There are 12,000 school systems in the U.S. Ignorance starts in schools and is carried on in the media, most of which is local.”

School children teased about being Arab have gone home and asked their parents to change their names, she charged.

As an example of the persistence that went into a successful media campaign, Hala Maksoud cited an Albany, New York radio talk show host who made anti-Arab comments. Initial protests had no effect when they were directed at the station in Albany. But, when ADC learned the station was owned by a Pennsylvania company, the Central Pennsylvania ADC chapter picketed the corporate headquarters and the talk show host was removed.

Another problem she cited concerns the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, which has resulted in the questioning of air passengers fitting certain “terrorist profiles.” She said 98 percent of the complaints on profiling received by the Federal Aviation Administration come from Arab Americans.

She also criticized court rulings allowing legal immigrants to be deported on the basis of secret evidence, which neither the accused nor the accused’s lawyer are allowed to see. She said this Supreme Court decision “sent a chill throughout our community and other immigrant communities.”

She said foreign policy issues which rest on the “dehumanization of Arabs,” such as Palestine and the sanctions on Iraq, are the result of domestic political pressures.“These issues are related and we have to work on every one of them,” she said.

Judith Howard, head of the Massachusetts ADC chapter, introduced the speakers and urged everyone to participate in ADC. Merrie Najimy, a Concord, Mass. school teacher, served as moderator. For more information, contact ADC at P.O. Box 299, Westwood, MA 02090.

Divinity Student Wages Personal War for Peace

Andrea Anderson is a series of contradictions. She is a Jew who grew up in the Bible Belt in a family of sharecroppers and now studies at Harvard; a divinity student who does not plan to enter the clergy; and a would-be filmmaker and writer whose objective is to ensure that everyone’s point of view gets told.

Those seeming contradictions are also probably why she is such a successful peace activist, moving easily from one community to another in the Middle East, always seeking to understand everyone’s point of view and find common ground.

The 24-year-old Anderson’s modest farming family in Little Rock, Arkansas, were virtually the only Jews in their area, which was still being rocked by the civil rights movement during her childhood.

She credits that background with helping her later on, when she lived on the West Bank, befriend members of both Hamas and the Gush Emunim, the Jewish religious settlers who have been the most aggressive in seizing Palestinian lands.

Not surprisingly, Anderson sees plenty of resemblances between the situation of the blacks with whom she grew up in the days of racial segregation in the U.S. and the plight of the Palestinians today.

“I lived in an African-American neighborhood and had friends there,” she explained. “That’s why I see these connections.”

What is even more unusual, however, is that Anderson’s best friend growing up in Arkansas was a Palestinian immigrant, Rania Abdin, with whom she retains close ties today. That friendship also personalizes for her the suffering of the Palestinian people. “It doesn’t seem right that I can go there [Israel] and my best friend, who was forced out, can’t go,” she explains.

Anderson also said the deep racial divides and the intensely religious atmosphere of her childhood have striking parallels in Israeli life today.

Now studying for a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard University Divinity School, Anderson is researching the role of religion in the Middle East, with emphasis on fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism on all sides.

Her extensive travels and her natural curiosity about people have prepared her well for this mission. After receiving a BA in peace and conflict studies, a major she designed herself at Hendrix College in Arkansas, Anderson went to Russia for an extended visit with her sister, who was studying there. Anderson immersed herself in the social changes sweeping Russia in the early 1990s. She also became aware of how persecuted many Russian Jews felt under the former Soviet regime.

Anderson said that atmosphere is directly relevant to what goes on in Israel, because when Jews arrive in their new home in the Middle East, they often bring with them a lifetime of resentments and repressed anger. It becomes all too easy to vent their grievances on the nearest available victims, the Palestinians.

“The recipe for disaster is there already,” she explained. “All this [resentment] transfers to Israel, all of this comes out in a kind of disgusting group therapy.”

In 1994, Anderson returned to Europe, this time to spend a semester at the American College in Budapest, Hungary, studying economics, politics and the history of Eastern European ethnicities. Her travels took her to Croatia, itself torn apart by ethnic warfare, and to Poland and other nearby nations.

Anderson said that from Eastern Europe she went directly to Israel, which is, ironically, a favored itinerary of Zionist tour organizers. By taking visitors to the former Nazi concentration camps first, then to Israel, thoughts of the Holocaust often erase any potential sympathy for the Arabs.

“Lots of synagogues in the states take young Jewish people to Germany and Eastern Europe and then take them straight to Israel,” Anderson said. “You don’t see any of the other people [Palestinians] who are being suppressed.”

During her four trips to Israel and Palestine, Anderson discovered that, regardless of their point of view, people on both sides were anxious to talk. “Every person said, ‘tell my story.’”

She said the goal of her project is to answer the question, “How can people be humanized? The conflict is so deeply personalized because of losses.”

Even the Israeli settlers, for whom she feels little sympathy, have a point of view, Anderson said. She believes many of them are American immigrants who feel as if they are early American settlers advancing across the frontier.

She said, however, that the situation is not totally religious-based. “I don’t think this is a religious conflict at heart,” she adds. “It’s people’s agendas.” She adds that Western imperialistic values are being imposed on the Middle East, with heavy segregation between European and Middle Eastern Jews and between secular and Orthodox. The class tensions among Jews affect the Arabs, she notes. “You have Russian Ph.D.s sweeping the floors. They have resentment. They take it out on the Palestinians,” she explained.

Anderson also stated that each side must acknowledge the fears of the other. While on the one hand, she endorses restitution for Palestinians whose property was taken, she said the Arabs must also understand the Jewish fears of another Holocaust.

Anderson welcomes both cooperation with and funding for her various projects. Anyone interested is welcome to contact her via electronic mail at: AAnderson@HDS.Harvard.edu

David P. Johnson Jr. is a Boston-based free-lance writer specializing in international relations.