( Michigan Advance ) – Without equitable data systems, governmental policies will always come up short of fairly representing all of the people they are intended to serve. 

It is with that in mind that we at the Michigan League for Public Policy and many of our partners have long advocated for the inclusion of racial and ethnic groups that are currently left out of data collection, including, but not limited to individuals with origins in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The MENA region includes several countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Yemen; many Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking groups, as well as ethnic and transnational groups.

For far too long, MENA has been excluded as a separate race category in federal data collection — such as the decennial census — here in the United States, but is instead collapsed into the white or “other” categories. This means no federal agency has established an understanding of MENA Americans or their lived experiences. It also means the MENA-American experience has been systemically unaccounted for in federal data and has, therefore, long been excluded from the design and implementation of policies and programs intended to address civil rights and racial equity. 

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This has had significant impacts on many aspects of the lives of MENA Americans and masked many pressing social concerns, like barriers to quality healthcare, limited opportunities for success among MENA small business owners and entrepreneurs, and a lack of understanding by federal agencies regarding health disparities, child well-being, and other social and economic disparities in MENA communities. 

Having complete, disaggregated federal data that provides more visibility for MENA Americans is especially important here in the Great Lakes State, as the state’s population becomes more diverse and the MENA population rapidly grows. 

In fact, Michigan has the second-largest MENA population in the U.S. at 310,087, second only to California, according to data collected through a new write-in option under the white category in the 2020 Census that specifically solicited MENA responses. 

While this data is valuable, it’s incomplete and does not provide a full, accurate and reliable picture of the MENA population. And, the decennial census write-in option continues to fail to recognize that many of the people in MENA communities do not identify as white and have very different lived experiences from white people with European ancestry. 

The good news is that we may soon see MENA added as a minimum reporting category in federal data collection thanks to one of several recently proposed, important updates to Statistical Policy Directive (SPD) 15. SPD 15 was developed in 1977 in order to collect and provide consistent, aggregated data on race and ethnicity in every area of our federal government, including the decennial census, administrative forms and household surveys. It serves as a crucial element in the oversight and administration of policies and programs that address racial and ethnic disparities and, yet, since its development, it has only undergone one update — in 1997. 

Recognizing the need to keep up with population changes and the evolving needs and uses for the federal data collected, a work group was established in 2022 to develop several new, proposed updates to SPD 15. And early last year during the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) public comment period on the initial proposed updates, we at the League were proud to formally voice our support for the proposal to add MENA as a new minimum reporting category.

The League also made sure to include a policy recommendation in the 2023 Kids Count in Michigan Data Book calling for investment in more robust and equitable data systems — specifically pointing to the lack of a MENA reporting category in the U.S. Census.

By ensuring that MENA Americans are included in federal data collection moving forward, we can ensure that they receive the representation, resources and programmatic support they need to thrive, support their families and make a stronger impact in their local communities. Changes to our current data systems are long overdue and must be made in order to lift up and address the needs of racial and ethnic groups that have been long overlooked. 

We at the League are continuing to follow the status of the proposed SPD 15 updates closely and are hoping to see the OMB make changes — including the addition of the MENA reporting category — this year. Community members are welcome to follow the League’s website and social media for updates on this issue as they become available. 

 

Simon Marshall-Shah

Simon Marshall-Shah is a state policy fellow at the Michigan League for Public Policy. He previously worked in Washington, D.C,. at the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), providing federal policy and advocacy support to nonprofit, Medicaid health plans (Safety Net Health Plans) related to the ACA Marketplaces.

 

 

 

Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Joe Biden won the 2024 Michigan Democratic primary, but “uncommitted” ran a spirited campaign.

More than 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, 13% of the Democratic electorate.

Listen to Michigan organized the uncommitted campaign in Michigan, promoting it as a way to express dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s public stance in support of Israel’s actions in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

The group also set a goal of securing more uncommitted votes than the 11,000-vote margin by which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The total was nearly 10 times that number.

Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 154,181 votes.

While there were no exit polls conducted with Michigan primary voters, preelection polling just before the primary showed Biden’s weakness among potential young voters as well as Arab Americans.

The Young Turks Video added by IC: ” Arab-Americans FED UP With Biden Vote ‘Uncommitted’ #TYT

Michigan has the largest Arab, Muslim and Palestinian population in the United States, currently numbering more than 200,000.

More than half of the population of Dearborn, Michigan, is Arab, as is its mayor; it is home to the largest mosque in the United States. One of the leaders of the uncommitted movement is U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib from the 12th District, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress.

At time of publication, with 98% of precincts reporting a day after the election, vote tallies from Dearborn, the city with the highest percentage of Arab American voters in the state, show “uncommitted” leading there – 6,290 votes to President Biden’s 4,517.

It’s not clear that all of the uncommitted voters were part of the protest. In primaries, some voters will vote uncommitted if they have not yet made their choice or don’t want to disclose that choice for any number of reasons. In 2020, 19,106 Democratic voters in Michigan selected uncommitted, while 21,601 did so in 2016 – even though no protest was attached to those decisions.

What makes the 2024 primaries different from previous contests is that uncommitted voters are being reported in exit polls and by election officials because that designation actually appears on the ballot in some states.

Besides Michigan, which added uncommitted to its primary ballots in 2012, there are uncommitted lines on the ballots in New Hampshire, North Carolina and South Carolina; Florida has a “no preference” line. In Oregon and Washington, citizens will be able to vote for an uncommitted delegate to the convention.

Selecting uncommitted is a way for voters to express dissatisfaction with the candidates whose names appear on the ballot while still participating in the democratic act of voting.

In my view, this form of peaceful protest is an essential element of American democracy and more demonstrative than staying home from the polls.

It is not an option for the fall general election, where the only alternative to a Biden vote for Democrats will be to stay home or vote for Donald Trump.

Given his past record and proposals to exclude Arabs from immigration to the United States, I don’t believe that will be a realistic alternative for many of Michigan’s uncommitted voters.

Michael Traugott, Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The effort was not only joined by Americans of MENA (Middle East and North African) heritage but by youth voters and some members of other minorities.

NPR notes, “As of 2020, there were over 200,000 registered voters in Michigan who identified as Muslim, and over 300,000 Michiganders identify as Middle Eastern or North African, according to data from the U.S. Census.”

Democracy Now! Video: “”Moral Failure”: Democrats Urge Biden to Change Gaza Policy”

Biden’s campaign thought it would be a good idea to put him on Late Night with Seth Meyers, apparently to appeal to the youth vote. Meyers, however, does less well with the youth audience (the “key demographic”) than any of the three late night shows that precede his, helmed by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

It was not a pretty picture. Biden thought it would be a good idea to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian refugees from Rafah in preparation for yet another Israel ground operation, planned apparently for April after the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Biden’s main concern with the slaughter of innocents in Gaza seemed to be that it would cost Israel support in Europe and around the world, not that 12,450 children have had their lives snuffed out by what Biden admits has been indiscriminate Israeli bombing. There was no emotion in the man, no drop of the milk of human kindness. He bought the false narrative that this destruction of most of the buildings in Gaza, including schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, community centers, and residential apartment buildings was necessary because Hamas was using civilians as a shield. The rate of death among innocent noncombatants in Gaza has exceeded that of any war fought in this century. The Israeli war plan is that of amoral monsters, which is not surprising given that the corrupt Netanyahu brought full blown fascists into his government.

If a terrorist group was operating in Tel Aviv, would anyone in the US or Europe think the logical response was to destroy Tel Aviv?

Then he again delivered himself of his announcement that he is a Zionist and that without Israel, no Jew in the world would be safe.

There are so many things wrong with this wretched sentiment. First of all, the 6.3 million Jews in the United States ought to be assured of their safety by the President of the United States, not by a foreign country. Second, Israel’s militant policies detract from everyone’s safety, including that of Jews.

But third, if it is true that the world’s 15.7 million Jews need a state to safeguard them, then surely the world’s 14.3 million Palestinians deserve a state to keep them safe. But they don’t have one. Of the 14.3 million, some 6 million in the occupied territories and Lebanon have no citizenship at all — they are stateless, without the right to have rights. Even those with citizenship rights in Israel and Jordan are second-class citizens.

Late Night with Seth Meyers Video: “President Joe Biden Addresses Concerns Over His Age and Shares His 2024 Agenda”

Biden has given billions of dollars to Israel on his theory that it is necessary to the security of Jews, including apparently American Jews. But he has done no more than pay useless lip service to the achievement of a Palestinian state. His State Department’s main project in the Middle East has been to entice Saudi Arabia to join Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” which completely marginalizes the Palestinians.

In fact, when the Israeli parliament voted last week to never, ever allow a Palestinian state, Biden was completely silent on it.

In its Middle East policy, the Biden administration has been Trump 2.0, from the continuation of the economic and financial blockade on Iran to the “Abraham” scam.

You understand how MENA Americans find it difficult to vote for this. The argument that Trump is worse is true and most of them would admit it. But voting is an intimate, personal, act wrought up in a person’s identity, and you can’t expect people who view someone as a genocidaire to vote for that individual– in their eyes they’d be complicit.

There is an argument that Biden has been an unexpectedly effective domestic president, with good economic performance and advances in green energy. That is also true. But if you’ve lived the Gaza genocide with video on social media for nearly 5 months, it throws those things into the shade. A man who would permit that butchery just isn’t a good man.

Some are already blaming MENA Americans for a potential Biden loss and a return of Trump to the White House. That is ridiculous. Over a third of Americans don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections. In 2020, the World Population Review notes, “the number of eligible voters in the US was over 231 million people. Of these, approximately 168 million registered to vote, and 154 million actually cast a vote in the 2020 presidential election.”

So instead of blaming 4 million Muslim Americans, maybe Democrats should try to get some of those 63 million unregistered Americans registered and bring them, and the 14 million non-voting registered voters to the polls with policies that someone might be enthusiastic about rather than policies that make you want to throw up every morning when you see the news.

(The Conversation) – Dearborn, Michigan, is a center of Arab American cultural, economic, and political life. It’s home to several of the country’s oldest and most influential mosques, the Arab American National Museum, dozens of now-iconic Arab bakeries and restaurants, and a vibrant and essential mix of Arab American service and cultural organizations.

The city became the first Arab-majority city in the U.S. in 2023, with roughly 55% of the city’s 110,000 residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African ancestry on the 2023 census.

One of us is an author and historian who specializes in the Arab and Muslim communities of Detroit, and the other is a criminologist born and raised in Dearborn who conducts research on the experiences and perceptions of Arab Americans. We have paid close attention to the city’s demographic shifts.

To understand Dearborn today, we must start with the city’s past.

Ford and Dearborn are in many ways synonymous

Dearborn owes much of its growth to automotive pioneer Henry Ford, who began building his famous River Rouge Complex in 1917. Migrants from the American South alongside immigrants from European and Arab countries settled Dearborn’s Southend neighborhood to work in the auto plant.

While most early 20th-century Arab immigrants to the United States were Christians, those who moved to Dearborn in the 1920s were mainly Muslims from southern Lebanon.

“Only In Dearborn” | Square Video

Life downwind of the world’s largest industrial complex proved challenging. But the real threat this diverse population faced in the 1950s through the 1970s was from a city-led rezoning campaign designed to turn the Southend over to heavy industry.

Most of the white ethnic groups in the neighborhood had churches and business districts scattered around Detroit, which facilitated their departure from the Southend. But for Arab American Muslims, this community, with its mosques and markets, was indispensable as they began to welcome distant kin from the Middle East after U.S. immigration laws relaxed in the 1960s.

Fleeing civil war in Yemen and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, these new Arab immigrants breathed new life into Dearborn. In 1973, they filed a class-action lawsuit against the city that eventually saved their neighborhood.

When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, the Southend again welcomed a new generation of refugees and migrants. By the 1980s, this mix of first- and second-generation Arab Americans had begun to spill into other neighborhoods in East Dearborn. New mosques began opening in the 1980s, and Arab entrepreneurs began investing in neglected commercial corridors.

But Arab Americans frequently faced discrimination in the housing market and in the public schools, which struggled to address the needs of a large cohort of English language learners.

Overcoming discrimination

Tensions came to a head in 1985, when Michael Guido won a mayoral race in which the “Arab problem,” as his described it, pitched the interests of the white working class against new Arab migrants.

Arab American activists responded by pushing for more city services in East Dearborn and running for office. Republican Suzanne Sareini was the first Arab American elected to the City Council in 1990.

But with at-large elections, those with more Arab-sounding names were at a disadvantage. It took another 20 years, when Arabs became the plurality of the population, before other Arab Americans joined Sareini on the council.

Following the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Dearborn became a target for anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, government surveillance, and harassment. The city became a fixation of national media seeking to make sense of its growing Muslim American minority.

Anti-Muslim activists regularly staged Quran-burnings, paraded around ethnic festivals with the heads of pigs on spikes, and threatened to bomb local mosques.

Nevertheless, the Arab American community continued to grow and diversify. Iraqi and Syrian refugee populations began to arrive in the 1990s and 2010s, respectively, following wars in their homelands. They settled in Dearborn and on its periphery in Detroit and neighboring suburbs.

Together, this new cohort of Arab Americans joined the established community in fighting back against president Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and other policies that discriminated against refugees, migrants and Muslims by building alliances with Democrats and engaging the broadening civil rights coalition, represented by groups such as Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s landmark election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 as the first Palestinian American woman and one of the first two Muslim American women reflects this growing progressive political base for Arab Americans. Her district includes Dearborn and parts of Detroit and other suburbs.

New leadership

Reflecting the increasing demographic and political clout of the Arab population in Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud became the city’s first Arab American elected mayor in 2021.

Hammoud’s priorities have included creating the city’s first Department of Public Health, introducing Narcan vending machines to address the opioid crisis, fighting for clean air in the Southend, and hosting Ramadan festivities and an Eid al-Fitr breakfast. He’s also shown outspoken support for the LGBTQ+ community.

Hammoud objected publicly to the congressional censure of Tlaib in 2023 following her remarks about the violence in the Gaza Strip. He also called for an unequivocal cease-fire in Gaza at a time when other Democratic leaders were silent.

Dearborn often becomes a topic of global media interest during election years or at times of conflict in the Middle East. That has certainly been true during the ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an editorial labeling the city as America’s “jihad capital,” which led to public threats against the city that forced Hammoud to increase police patrols.

Public officials, from local leaders to President Joe Biden, have rallied around the city and asked the paper to rescind the editorial and to apologize.

So far, it has not.

The more interesting story about Dearborn, however, is what happens when the national spotlight is turned off. Then, as we have witnessed decade after decade, the city’s residents, Arab and non-Arab, new and old, work to make their home a better, safer, healthier place to raise their families and their voices.

Sally Howell, Professor of History, University of Michigan-Dearborn and Amny Shuraydi, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Michigan-Dearborn

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mayor slams op-ed as ‘bigoted’ and ‘Islamophobic,’ calls for increased police patrols in city

By: Jon King –

( Michigan Advance ) – Reaction to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about Dearborn intensified through the weekend, as President Joe Biden and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joined the chorus of condemnation. 

The WSJ op-ed, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,” alleged thousands of residents in the predominantly Muslim city, including “imams and politicians” are siding with “Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.”

The op-ed was written by Steven Salinsky, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a group critics say often produces selective or inaccurate translations to negatively portray Muslims and Arabs. 

By Saturday morning, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a former House member, took to social media to lambast the piece.

“It’s 2024 and the @WSJ still pushes out this type of garbage. Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic,” said Hammoud, who called Dearborn “one of the greatest American cities in our nation,” noting that not only was it the home of the Ford Motor Co., but the fastest-growing city in Michigan, as well as  among the most diverse.

But within about two hours, he came back to X to note the negative impact the WSJ piece was having. 

“Effective immediately –  Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points,” said Hammoud. “This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn. Stay vigilant.”

Requests for comment on the nature of those threats were sent by the Michigan Advance to both Dearborn Police and Michigan State Police, but have yet to be returned.

Click On Detroit | Local 4 | WDIV | Video | –
“Dearborn police on high alert after WSJ opinion article”

CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid said the group welcomes “the proactive approach taken by Mayor Hammoud to protect the Muslim community from potential attack based on the false claims in this inaccurate and inflammatory commentary.” The Washington, D.C.-based CAIR reports that the groups received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023 — a 178% increase compared to a similar period in 2022.

Almost exactly 24 hours after Hammoud’s post, Biden also posted to social media his criticism of the WSJ op-ed.

“Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong,” said Biden. “That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn – or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms.”

State Rep. Alabas Farhat (D-Dearborn) said he’ll be introducing a resolution in the House on Tuesday condemning “vile rhetoric.” 

“Glad to see the President condemning the hateful bigoted piece published by @WSJ,” he wrote. “Let’s not forget that dehumanizing words and policies lead to the rise in hate crimes we’re seeing.” 

Whitmer also issued a post on Sunday.

“Dearborn is a vibrant community full of Michiganders who contribute day in and day out to our state. Islamophobia and all forms of hate have no place in Michigan, or anywhere. Period,” she said.

Residents in Dearborn have organized and held multiple protests of the war against Hamas by Israel, jointly condemning the administration, and Biden specifically, for not embracing a cease-fire in Gaza, where more than 27,000 Palestinians have died since the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas that killed as many as 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians.

Most recently, groups held a rally last Wednesday at Fordson High School in Dearborn, protesting the ongoing Israeli military action. It took place on the eve of Biden’s campaign visit to Michigan — which also drew protesters, as the Advance previously reported — and about a week after several Arab American leaders, including Hammoud, declined to meet with Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

While Biden administration officials have affirmed Israel’s right to respond to the attack, they have increasingly demanded more attention to minimizing civilian casualties.

“Israel must do more to stop violence against civilians in the West Bank and hold accountable those responsible for it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last Thursday on sanctions levied by Biden against four Israeli settlers in the West Bank, part of an effort to curb civilian casualties in the region as the Israel-Hamas war continues. Negotiations on a ceasefire continued Sunday.

Critics of the WSJ op-ed said that protesting against American foreign policy, and even an American president, should not be used to indict an entire community, especially on ethnic or religious lines.

“Bigotry.  Hatred.  Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim.  If the headline was about any other minority — with the worst stereotype of that group — it would have never gotten through the editors at the WSJ,” said U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly), who is Jewish.

Fellow Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Ann Arbor), who lived in Dearborn for nearly 40 years, called it “another example of hate directed at a community that is already hurting, resulting in fear, vitriol, and threats of violence.”

Dingell said her “neighborhood and friends were supportive, caring, and dedicated, and concluded by stating that “We cannot let hatred of any kind, Islamophobia, antisemitism, destroy people. We must stand up to hate everywhere and anywhere we see it.”

 

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

 

Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

( Michigan Advance ) – As a symbolic gesture and demonstration of solidarity with the people in Gaza, Hamtramck’s all-Muslim City Council has decided to rename a stretch of Holbrook Street to “Palestine Avenue,” between Buffalo Street and Saint Aubin Street.

A resolution posted online before the council meeting on Dec. 12 says that Mayor Amer Ghalib and Hamtramck’s City Council “acknowledge the profound impact of the recent and ongoing events in Gaza resulting in the loss of almost 20,000 people since October 7, 2023, comprising mostly of completely innocent women and children,” referring to Israel’s military campaign there.

The renaming will not have any impact on official postal addresses or other legal designations and is solely a show of “solidarity, remembrance, and compassion for the lives lost in Gaza.”

Council members approved the resolution 4-3, according to Michigan Radio.

One council member who voted “no” said he was against the resolution because of Hamtramck’s controversial “neutrality flag resolution,” which banned LGBTQ+ pride flags from being flown on city property. The policy also prohibits the display of religious, ethnic, racial, and political flags and states that the city won’t provide “special treatment to any group,” though critics say the resolution, which was voted on unanimously, was mainly rooted in homophobia.

Click on Detroit | Local 4 | “Hamtramck to rename part of Holbrook ‘in gesture of solidarity’ amid Gaza war ”

“It’s not anything against Palestinians. I just want to stand on the same point when we decided no other flag would fly,” council member Muhith Mahmood said. While Hamtramck’s resolution allows the flying of “nations’ flags that represent the international character of our City,” Palestine is not recognized as a state by the U.S.

Others expressed the same concern, including a Reddit post that asked: “Is this casual political gesture any different than the gay pride flag?”

The new resolution was almost removed from the council meeting’s agenda due to a vote by four members, according to an article by the Detroit Free Press. However, it was brought back following complaints from the public as well as Ghalib, who didn’t want to disappoint residents.

There is no timeline yet for when the new name will be implemented, but signs to mark Palestine Avenue are reportedly currently being made, Metro Times reports.

This story first ran in the Detroit Metro Times. Follow them: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

Layla McMurtrie

Layla McMurtrie is the digital editor of Detroit Metro Times. She’s passionate about food, music, art, and Detroit’s culture and community. Her work has been featured in the Detroit Free Press, Between the Lines, Metromode, and other various Michigan publications.

Michigan Advance

Published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Israel’s total war on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, has roiled higher education in the United States. The atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel two months ago have reverberated on many U.S. campuses, deeply traumatizing many Jewish students. But so too has Israel’s massive military response in Gaza, which has been equally shocking to Palestinian-American, Arab American and Muslim American students, among many others.

In the heated atmosphere prevailing since then, questions have arisen about the limits to free speech in the classroom, among student and faculty organizations, and on the social media accounts of university members, from professors to administrators. Often, these charged debates reflect the advent of significant numbers of minority students on university campuses, some from the post-1965 immigration wave, who view the Israel-Palestine conflict very differently than the white majority on many campuses, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates. These controversies also reflect the efforts of special interest groups and outside organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to discipline campus speech and brand some of it as support for terrorism.

Some of these campaigns have attempted to silence Palestinian-Americans and their perspectives outright. In October, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered all public universities in the state to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campus. The move came after the organization issued a “toolkit” for understanding the context of the Oct. 7 attacks, in which they characterized Hamas as a resistance organization. The SJP insisted that its student members are part of the resistance, not merely in solidarity with it. DeSantis’s order immediately provoked threats of civil lawsuits that would personally name university officials participating in the shutdown. Emma Camp at Reason magazine reported that as a result, the Chancellor of the University of Florida system, Ray Rodrigues, announced that he was backing off any action against SJP, though he did hold out the possibility that the university would require the group to pledge nonviolence and disassociate itself from Hamas. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group, immediately pointed out that that requirement would also be unconstitutional.

Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

But that did not stop the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law from taking up DeSantis’s program, writing a letter to university presidents pressuring them to close down SJP chapters on the grounds that the group gave material assistance to terrorism (a charge the letter does not substantiate). Under U.S. law, “material assistance” involves training, expert advice or assistance, service and personnel. Given that the SJP is not hosting training camps for Hamas fighters or actively advising the organization on tactics, the letter is nonsensical and, in a just world, would be found libelous.

Hateful anti-Palestinian feelings almost certainly are implicated in the shooting of three Palestinian-American students in Burlington, Vermont, this weekend. Of the three, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed, two are American citizens, and the third is a legal resident. Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University, has a bullet lodged in his spine and may never walk again. He and one other are still in critical condition. One student has been released, but his identity has not be revealed for the sake of his own safety.

That’s right. This young man is not safe in America even after surviving a gunshot wound. Sounds like hate to me.

All three of these young men were graduates of a Quaker high school in the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah. They were taught by people who believe in nonviolence.

They were visiting their aunt and their uncle (Rich Price) and had just been to a party for Price’s 8-year old sons. They went for a walk in the neighborhood and then were shot down. Two were wearing kuffiyehs, scarves typically worn by Palestinians though not exclusive to them, and they were speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English.

Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said, according to Kathy McCormack at AP, “In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime. And I have already been in touch with federal investigatory and prosecutorial partners to prepare for that if it’s proven.”

Although the alleged shooter, Jason J. Eaton, 48, has not yet beeen charged with a hate crime enhancement, prosecutors are seeking the information that would allow them to apply that enhancement to the charges.

The families of the three young men said in a posting to X, “We are extremely concerned about the safety and well-being of our children. We call on law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation, including treating this as a hate crime. We will not be comfortable until the shooter is brought to justice.”

Awartani, from his sickbed, issued a statement on the shooting for a candlelight vigil held at Brown University:

“It’s important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict.

Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine.

This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as proud member of a people being oppressed.”

“Anti-Palestinianism,” Juan Cole, Digital (LunaPic), 2023.

Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are the last groups that it is all right to hate in the United States. The leader of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump, has tried to gain popularity by defecating on these groups with his big mouth. President Joe Biden has contributed to the demonization of Palestinians by purveying misinformation about the current conflict in the Mideast. He devalued Palestinian lives by baselessly and falsely calling into question the validity of the Gaza Ministry of Health professionals’ careful estimates of Palestinian deaths under Israeli bombardment. He erased the dead bodies of over 5,000 Palestinian children and over 10,000 noncombatant women and men. For all his citation of his Irish heritage and culture, Biden’s instincts are to side with the equivalent of the British in any anticolonial struggle.

American Zionists of whatever religious persuasion (Biden is a Catholic) have also played a role in the diminution of Palestinian humanity. Their line has been that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, though that isn’t a talking point into which Biden buys. This line seems to conflict with their other frequent assertion, that there are no innocent Palestinian civilians, which recognizes the Palestinians’ existence only to configure them as a terrorist people whose children are also terrorists and who all deserve to be killed or driven into the desert. That seems like a lot for people who don’t even exist in the first place.

My colleague Margaret Somers in her seminal book Genealogies of Citizenship discussed how the Nazis deliberately took citizenship away from German Jews so as to turn them into human flotsam and jetsam, unloved and unlovely on the world stage. The Nazis taunted their critics who decried state Antisemitism in the early 1930s, asking who now would take in these stateless people. The answer: almost no one. Certainly not Roosevelt’s America, where Washington officials feared riots if they let in large numbers of refugees at a time when 25% of Americans were unemployed. And virtually no one else stepped up, not even Brazil. Those Jews who were able to flee were dumped in a poor, dusty Third World British colony, not admitted to so-called “the civilized world.”

The Israelis are nothing like the Nazis in most respects. But they also have a policy of keeping the Palestinians in the Occupied territories, including Gaza, stateless. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just argued to his Likud Party that they should not dump him as leader because he is the only one who can handle Biden and fend off international demands for a Palestinian state– i.e. that he is the only one who can keep the Palestinians stateless.

Statelessness makes people look suspicious. Many Romani suffer from the same problem. The settled, rooted, citizens are afraid of those uprooted and made stateless. Somers quotes Hannah Arendt and Justice Earl Warren to the effect that citizenship is the right to have rights.

Because the Israelis ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, who have grown into millions of descendants today, they lost everything — their property, their crops, their homes, and their right to have basic human rights. Some 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are from such dispossessed families, and they have now been ethnically cleansed for a second time, in 2023 — a million and a half of them, which Biden and Tony Blinken say is just hunky dory. In the West Bank, Israeli squatters steal Palestinians’ land at will, as the Israeli army looks on or even actively helps.

Some Palestinians turned to violence (a remarkably small minority given what has been done to them) as a result of the injustices the Israelis visited on them. Their very violence was used to further impeach them as worthless specimens of humanity, as though the Zionist movement had not spawned violent terrorist groups and militias who killed thousands and expelled hundreds of thousands of people, who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and engaged in assassination. Once the Zionists had a state, they gained the legitimacy of statecraft, and state terror is almost never punished. The exception is where, as with the US struggle against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the terrorism of a state can be deployed against it for geopolitical purposes by a rival.

Americans have painted their anxieties on the Palestinians. In the Cold War, conservative burghers like Yasser Arafat and his PLO were painted as Communists. Hollywood’s favorite villains have been Arabs and Palestinians. In George Burns’ comedic film “Oh God, You Devil” (1984), when images of the satanic are flashed on the screen, Yasser Arafat’s face was one of them. It is difficult to distinguish Arafat’s and the PLO’s motives, however, from those of George Washington and the insurrectionists against the British in the eighteenth century (except that the British hadn’t done anything to the colonists like what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians).

Then in the era of Bush’s War on Terror, the Palestinians were scooped up under that label, even though by that time the PLO had recognized Israel and had been screwed over by the Israelis as a result.

There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian-Americans, who deserve the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as all other Americans. They also have a right to wear a kuffiyeh, to speak the beautiful and divine language of Arabic in public, and to critique the colonialism that has impelled their diaspora.

Anti-Palestinianism is real. It is, as Beinart remarks, a commonplace of the discourse of US members of Congress. It must cease. Michael Connelly’s tough as nails detective, Hieronymous Bosch, has as his motto, as a fierce defender of victims, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” That’s what Hisham Awartani was saying from his hospital bed. He, tragically, has likely lost the use of his legs. His plight, of being shot for walking while Palestinian, however, is all too common in Occupied Palestine itself. Americans have to care about Palestinians both here and there, because if they don’t they make hollow the ideals of the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They create a situation where nobody counts, really. Because someone, the one with the kuffiyeh, doesn’t count.

The absence of Palestinians and their advocates from news coverage isn’t just unfair. As a Jewish American, I think it’s harmful.

By Sarah Gertler |

( Otherwords.org ) – Like many of us, I’ve been glued to media coverage of the terrible violence in Gaza and Israel.

I was deeply shaken by the brutal killings of over a thousand Israelis on October 7. The families of Israelis killed and taken hostage deserve justice for these crimes. But instead of justice, all I’ve seen from the far-right Israeli government is more death.

Palestinians have already endured 75 years of displacement and oppression. The 2.2 million Palestinians living in the cramped Gaza strip have lived for 16 years under an Israeli siege that chokes their access to food, water, electricity, and movement.

Now Gazans’ access to these necessities has been cut off completely. Nearly half of the population’s homes have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombings, and well over 6,000 civilians have been killed. All with no end in sight.

As a Jewish American, I don’t feel safer when the Israeli government breaks international law to bomb families sheltering in refugee camps or cut off electricity to children in hospitals. I especially don’t feel safe knowing my U.S. tax dollars are funding these crimes.

And I’m not alone. Recently, I joined a march in Philadelphia calling for an end to the violence and freedom for the Palestinian people.

An estimated 10,000 of us showed up — including parents pushing strollers, friends holding banners together, and elderly couples arm in arm. We marched against what hundreds of scholars have warned is genocide.

It was a historic community call for peace. Yet it was noticeably absent from local news coverage. Days afterward, the only evidence it happened was one small news clip noting that “dozens gathered” — a comic misrepresentation.

Sky News: “Israel-Hamas war: Palestinians feel ‘unseen’, says ambassador”

“This is not only media suppression, but an erasure of history,” said Philadelphia organizer Nour Qutyan, who helped assemble the rally.

Just the previous week, a smaller rally in support of the Israeli government was covered by a swath of local news outlets. This eye-opening double standard reflects a much broader silencing of Palestinians and their advocates in the media.

During these weeks of Israel’s bombing campaign, leading Palestinian commentators including Noura Erakat, Omar Baddar, and Yousef Munayyer have had cable news appearances cut or canceled. Jewish American author Nathan Thrall had ads for a new book simply about Palestinians pulled from NPR and the BBC.

Equally noteworthy is the U.S. media’s passive treatment of Palestinian deaths. While headlines note when Israelis are “killed,” they often say that Palestinians simply “die,” without saying how.

According to a 2019 study on 50 years of coverage, U.S. headlines are also more than twice as likely to cite Israeli sources — including documented disinformation — than Palestinian sources.

This bias isn’t only unfair — it’s harmful.

Polls show the vast majority of Americans across party lines agree that our government should call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In Israel, even the siblings of people killed by Hamas are calling for peace, not war. Instead of uplifting these voices, many media outlets are inciting more violence.

By “silencing any criticisms of Israel,” Qutyan warns that “editors who are meant to uphold journalistic integrity, truth, and the so-called ethics of news media” are instead “co-signing genocide” in Gaza.

In the coming weeks, I will remain glued to the coverage of the violence that my tax dollars are funding. As a Jewish American, I demand life and freedom for Palestinians — and coverage which reflects that.

 

Sarah Gertler

Sarah Gertler is the Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Otherwords.org