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- DATE: JAN. 24, 1991 17:00 REPORT: 1
- TO: SPL
- FOR:
- CC:
- BUREAU: NEW YORK
- BY: KATHLEEN ADAMS
- IN:
- SLUG: ARAB AMERICANS
-
- Take 1
-
- How is loyalty measured? For many Arab Americans and
- those in the Arab community, questioning their loyalties
- and the strength of their ties to the Middle East is akin
- to promulgating yet another myth about Arabs.
-
- ``Where else is my loyalty going to be?'' asks Kay
- Al-Askari, the northern New Jersey representative of the
- American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Her
- husband is an Iraqi American whose family is still in
- Iraq. Al-Askari and others I spoke with dismissed
- questions of divided loyalty and harrassment as insulting
- or irrelevant. ``There is no pull of conflicting
- loyalties,'' she says. ``That never comes up because
- we've been here 35 years.'' Brenda Murad, a
- second-generation Lebanese-American and the New York ADC
- rep. agrees. ``I am not dealing with the conflict as an
- Arab- American,'' she says, ``I just see it as very
- wrong. When we went into Panama I felt the same way. For
- most Arab-Americans, they approach it the same way.''
-
- Ed Alvarado's family owns the Near-East bakery on
- Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a major shopping district
- for the Arab community. He is of is of Lebanese and Irish
- extraction. His grandfather was born in New York and his
- mother came over from Lebanon to marry his father. He
- says that he and the friends he grew up with in the Arab
- community ``are divided on whether we should go in...
- just like every one else.'' But he emphasizes, ``we are
- American so there is no question where our loyalty
- lies.''
-
- The issues of the FBI and general harassment against the
- Arab community also seem to be more an irritant than a
- real threat. According to Alvarado there hasn't been any
- harrassment yet ``because there haven't been a
- significant number of lives lost.'' But the memory of an
- incident during the oil crisis of the seventies was still
- fresh in his mind and brought home the image of Arabs in
- America. At that time, he said ``my grandfather was
- working in the bakery and some kid, blond hair and blue
- eyes, about seven years old yells into the store `why
- don't you go back to where you came from?' My
- grandfather, who was born in this country, had tears in
- his eyes,'' he recalled. ``I had never seen him react so
- strongly to anything.'' Alvarado mentioned that the FBI
- had recently visited the clothing store of a Cuban friend
- across the street, asking her if she was Arab. He said,
- ``But they've been coming around since 1948 when the
- problems with the Palestinians began. They did the same
- thing to the Germans and the Japanese in America.''
- Harking back to the Japanese internment camps in America,
- he added, ``if they tried to come and take me to a camp,
- I'd get a shotgun.''
-
- The FBI also recently visited the restaurant of Salam
- Al-Rawi, an Iraqi immigrant who has lived in New York for
- five years. In their notoriously subtle manner the FBI
- asked Al-Rawi if he was aware of any terrorist
- activities, if he knew any terrorists or if he was a
- terrorist. He said he wasn't and he didn't. Like many
- others, Al-Rawi sees the FBI investigations as incidental
- to the main issue. He is vociferously against the
- fighting in the Gulf. He said that others in the
- community ``have different opinions on Saddam Hussein but
- they are all against the fighting. The issue is the
- massive bombing and destruction that is going on.
- Anything is better than war.''
-
- Kay Al-Askari agrees: ``People don't talk about Saddam
- Hussein, they talk about this insane war. Never before
- has so much high explosive landed in one place. Each day
- the amount is equal to one atomic bomb. Why? The
- community is totally flabbergasted.'' Most are vehemently
- against the conflict in the Gulf but like many other
- Americans, don't equate dissent with disloyalty. Divided
- on details, unified about the big picture, ``this is just
- vengeful, ugly murder,'' says Al-Askari.
-
- The Gulf issue is obviously more important to many in
- the Arab community especially the first generation and
- recent immigrants with relatives living in the Middle
- East. ``The pressure we feel here as Arab-Americans comes
- from the newspaper and television accounts of the gleeful
- bombings or our families in Baghdad,'' says Al-Askari.
- ``My friends are so worried because there is relentless
- bombing and they just assume that their relatives are
- affected. No water, food, electricity and no one to dig
- you out. That is what we think about.''
-
- Al- Askari believes that the effort has always been to
- dehumanize Arabs. She asks, ``what kind of a generation
- have we raised where our soldiers say things on
- television like: `I can't wait to kill me some
- Iraqis.'?'' She adds, ``what did the Iraqis do to deserve
- this? I can't sleep at night for thinking about it.''
-
- Brenda Murad blames the negative stereotypes on
- ignorance. ``Painting Saddam Hussein as evil is very
- simplistic. I find in political conversations, that my
- American friends see one side of the story. That they see
- Arabs only as terrorists. I come up against a lot of
- stupidity. After I came back from a trip to Gaza, I tried
- to explain what was happening there but it's difficult to
- talk to my friends because they wouldn't understand. They
- get limited information.''
-
- Murad sees a positive side to the conflict in the Gulf
- however. ``For the first time Americans are having to
- take a look at what is going on in the Middle East and I
- hope a lot of myths will be dispelled. It's inevitable
- that attitudes will change because this conflict will tie
- the U.S. to the Mid East in the same way that WWII tied
- us to Europe and Japan.'' Nevertheless, she adds, ``the
- downside is that I see tremendous destruction.''
-
- To others, it is less the issue of Iraq's invasion of
- Kuwait than the hypocricy that the U.S. government has
- shown in pursuing armed confrontation. Many in the Arab
- community believe that Bush failed to pursue all the
- diplomatic options available to him and that the price of
- victory is too high.
-
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