Saturday, April 26, 2008
Arab-American "Courage"
Today "Arab-American courage" means having the bravery to check "Arab" on the census, buying hummus using a credit card and hanging an Arab flag from your rearview mirror.
That's what happens when you reduce our cause, our pain and our struggle to a cultural circus. I went to a Kathim Al-Sahir concert in 2006 and saw dozens of Iraqi flags in the audience. I was like, why didn't I see you people and your flags protesting when over a million of our people were massacred, when soldiers defiled our humanity in Abu Ghraib, when the world's only superpower demolished our children's dreams, when the uncivilized terrorized the cradle of civilization. At best, Arab-Americans were watching aljazeera and at worst they were holding wedding-like celebrations in the streets. That's what Arab-Americans were doing while the Arab world was mourning the occupation of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 and flattened Falluja in April and November 2004 and ... you know the rest of the list.
Keep up the cultural events. Culture alone, in absence of political organizing, does not prevent genocide. Native Americans still have cultural events, you know.
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