Author: Alia

Invisible Arab-Americans

SEPT 23, 2010

In 1921 heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, starring in the black-and-white film The Sheik, introduced Americans via the big screen to the Arab—the progenitor of today’s loosely defined, hysteria-inducing, mosque-building, uppity enemy. In the movie, Arabs were portrayed as exotic, temperamental, prone to rape and having small hands.

Those were the good old days.

Today’s Islamophobic rapture, with its equally absurd extremes of Koran bonfires and public service announcements in which Muslims have to remind their fellow Americans that they are (good) Americans too, should not come as a surprise. Arabs and Muslims have a long history of being perceived and portrayed as utterly foreign to America.  [full story]

Ground Zero mosque as wedge issue: Muslims vs. ‘real’ Americans

AUG 17, 2010

NEW YORK — Like today’s other hot-button issues including gay marriage and illegal immigration, at the heart of the uproar over Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center located in lower Manhattan, is generally a struggle to define what makes an American truly, authentically American. And specifically underlying the Cordoba controversy, the fear of the radicalization of Muslim-American youth, and the growing Islamophobia spreading through the US (a Florida church is hosting “International Burn a Koran Day” on Sept. 11) is a suspicion that a Muslim cannot be a real American.  [full story]

American Jihadis: Blame violence-prone boys, not Islam

APRIL 2, 2010

NEW YORK — The recent arrest in Yemen of Somali-American Sharif Mobley, accused of being a member of an Al Qaeda affiliated group, raises the question: Why are young American men abandoning this country’s promise and opportunities to pursue jihad in foreign countries with groups rooted in anti-Americanism?

From concerned citizens to journalists to think tank panels to Capitol Hill, everyone seems to think that the key to understanding “why” these men have turned against America lies in the pathology of Islam. But they’re missing something big.  [full story]

When did we become like Syria?

NOV 14, 2007

When visiting my grandmother’s house in Damascus a few years ago, I never could have imagined sitting one day in a U.S. court, listening to the U.S. government defend its covert transfer of a Canadian citizen to Syria to be tortured.

Yet, that’s precisely what happened last Friday in a U.S. circuit court in New York, with the beginning of Maher Arar’s appeal of a decision last year by a district court to throw out his suit against the U.S. government. Arar’s case was the first to challenge in court the Bush administration’s use of rendition — the process of secretly handing over people to other countries where torture is used during interrogations.  [full story]

Bush civil rights nominee under fire

JULY 28, 2007

A deal that would see David Palmer, a Bush administration nominee, quietly confirmed to the powerful Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appears to be faltering. Momentum against Palmer’s confirmation has been building since former Department of Justice employees took the unprecedented step of formally accusing him of having an abysmal professional and personal record on workplace discrimination issues.  [full story]

Soldiers’ Stories

MAY 2007

Gina Cavallaro had drifted away from the soldier escorting her, wanting to take a picture of the Iraqi children trailing them as they patrolled Ramadi. She heard a lone gunshot and turned around, disoriented, trying to see where the shot had come from and where it had landed, when she saw him–Specialist Francisco Martinez–lying on the ground, his limbs spread as if he were making an angel in the sand. Cavallaro screamed. Martinez had been her escort on patrol a few days earlier and again that day. They had become fast friends, trading stories about the neighborhoods of San Juan and the never-ending Christmas celebrations of his native Puerto Rico, where Cavallaro, too, had grown up and begun her career in journalism.  [full story]

Bush’s Long History of Politicizing Justice

MAR 30, 2007

The current U.S. attorneys scandal shows that the Bush administration was mistaken in its belief that it could politicize the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, with impunity. The attorney general‘s chief of staff and the director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys have both had to leave their jobs, and Congress has begun grilling DOJ leadership. But having decimated another entire sector of the DOJ in plain sight for six years with little consequence, is it any wonder the Bush White House figured nobody would miss a few prosecutors?  [full story]

Beyond the Cartoon Controversy: Q & A with Flemming Rose

MAR 2007

It’s been fifteen months since the publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad, and the resulting furor in the Muslim world over what was considered a blasphemous violation of a central tenet of Sunni Islam—the prohibition of visual representations of the prophet. Though the riots have stopped and the flames coming from Danish flags and embassies have been extinguished, the controversy over where to draw the line between free speech and criticism of Islam persists. In September, Pope Benedict XVI quoted from a fourteenth-century text that referred to some of Mohammad’s teachings as “evil and inhuman,” touching off more riots. Later that same month, the Deutsche Opera postponed a performance of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” because of a scene that depicts the severed heads of Mohammad, Jesus, Buddha, and Neptune. Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, claimed he solicited the cartoons to assert freedom of speech and to resist the self-censorship crippling the West when it came to “accommodating Muslim sensitivities.” In January, CJR ’s Alia Malek interviewed Rose by telephone about the cartoons and their consequences.  [full story]

In Memoriam: Hrant Dink (1954-2007)

JAN 25, 2007

Friday’s murder of Armenian-Turkish editor and columnist Hrant Dink — though not the only instance recently of a foreign journalist brutally silenced — was different in that for those who follow global events or the media, Dink’s name was familiar even before his death.

At a time when Turkey continues to struggle to join the European Union, his prosecution (and arguably his persecution) under Turkish penal code 301 that criminalizes insulting “Turkishness” — a law that stinks of suppression of speech — had already made him a cause celebre.  [full story]

Al-Alam’s Game

2007

After confessing to the world on camera that she and her British crew had trespassed into Iranian waters this past March, sailor Faye Turney pressed a cigarette to her lips and took a long, deep drag. The way she immediately reached for the fix and inhaled its relief seemed to belie everything she had just been prompted to say by her Iranian interviewer, from her admission of guilt to how her captors were friendly, hospitable, thoughtful, and compassionate.  [full story]