Karim Battuta, a child of the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948, who tells me in a recent e-mail that he reads this column regularly, has a bone to pick with me: I’m relentless in my criticism of the US and, hey, that ain’t nice.
Battuta came to America in the late 1970s. He found work in real estate in Arlington, bought a house there on a street with an Anglo name — Brightmore Street — and genteel surroundings. He watched his four kids learn to play baseball, and the oldest, Saleem, join the Air Force. Abu Saleem, as he’s known, is no different from the roughly two million Arab Americans who have migrated to the United States and prospered in it. These folks have begun, along with six million others from Muslim countries around the world, to stir as a political voice.
Last week in Detroit, the auto capital of America and home to the largest concentration of Americans of Arab descent, saw a two-day meeting sponsored by the Washington-based advocacy group, the Arab-American Institute, where panelists discussed the issue of voter registration drives and “mobilizing the Arab American vote” to make it count in presidential, state and county elections. Candidates for office will, in effect, be asked, “What’s in it for our community if we vote for you?”
During the last week of September, Detroit was also host to the United States Arab Economic Forum, sponsored by the American-Arab Chamber of Commerce. The event brought corporate leaders together with high-ranking ministers from the US and the Arab world. Secretary of State Colin Powell and the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, addressed the 1,000 delegates and 140 journalists in attendance.
And if you live in the Washington area, how could you miss the various annual conferences put on by Arab-American organizations, such as The Arab American Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC), that typically attract people from all parts of the country, where speakers, activists, academics, political organizers and ordinary folk meet to discuss how best to mobilize their community?
It wasn’t long ago when Arab-Americans were timid about their identity or acting, in the true American political tradition, as a pressure group. But the United States is a nation of immigrants — whose population is made up of people from every country in the world — and celebrating ethnicity is as American as, well, Okay, apple pie. Soon you realize that to be American and ethnic at the same time is not mutually exclusive.
True, the Africans, the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, the Japanese and now the Arabs have at one time or another experienced awful prejudice, but with education, upward mobility and engagement in the political process, these immigrants’ kids have become engineers, doctors and lawyers, as well as mayors, senators and presidents.
In the old days, they arrived at Ellis Island, separated from the Statue of Liberty by a few hundred yards of water, poor, tired and starved — that was very much so for the Irish, during the massive immigration wave that followed the potato famine in their country in the late 1840s. And today America remains the only country in the world that welcomes, actually welcomes, immigrants to its shores, to live, work, prosper and become American.
So I meet with Battuta in order to mollify him and to set the record straight.
No, I said, the relentless criticism that he has been reading in my column over the years is of American politics — or more accurately American foreign policy — not the American political system. When he began to carp about “Jewish power” on the Hill, I explained that when Arab-Americans, along with Muslim Americans, one day become smart enough, organized enough and influential enough to exercise their constitutional right to lobby Congress effectively, as the Jewish community is doing today, which is what the whole shebang of “Jewish power is about, then I’ll take my hat off to them.
There’s nothing sinister or arcane about the process. Organize your community, get the votes out, and lobby your leaders, demanding that they represent your interests. Then sit back and see how the system will work for you.
Only in America, folks.
— Arab News Opinion 30 October 2003
