"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" (1): an assessment of the AAUG as an example of an activist Arab-American organization.

• Author: Suleiman, Michael W.
• Position: Association of Arab-American University Graduates - Essay

IN A VERY REAL SENSE, I WAS involved in AAUG-type activities long before that organization was established in 1967. Indeed, in 1956, my first year of undergraduate study at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, I found myself being invited to give my views about developments in the Middle East and on Palestine/Israel in particular. I was majoring in engineering at the time and did not know much about these issues. However, I knew for certain that the U.S. media portrayal of those events was either inaccurate or biased against Arabs, or both. I also knew that American policy toward the region was hurting U.S. interests. But I was surprised (and pleased) that the American public was interested in hearing different points of view on such critical issues. Having had a most positive experience the first time I gave a presentation (at a Rotary Club meeting approximately two weeks after my arrival in Peoria about my impressions of the U.S.!) and having lost interest in the specialty I first selected, I began to switch majors from Engineering to Mathematics to Psychology and finally to Political Science/International Relations. I was driven there by my commitment to a balanced view of a troubled region of the world about which I cared greatly, and by an American public interested in fairness in media coverage and U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. While my disciplinary program of study was situated in the political science department, the focus of any research papers I did was mostly on the Middle East. For example, the topic of my Master's thesis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1962, was An Evaluation of Middle East News Coverage in Seven American Newsmagazines, July-December, 1956--one of the earliest such attempts at a scholarly study of the subject.

Two major incidents greatly reinforced my belief in the fairness of the American public, in addition to reaffirming my realization of the complexity of American society. In December 1960, on a trip to Florida, as a passenger in a car with five other students, I experienced several incidents of ethnic/racial discrimination. Specifically, at a restaurant in southern Indiana, our waitress took orders from the other five men and was about to leave our table when she was reminded that she forgot to take my order. Her response was, "Oh, we don't serve him!" A more serious incident took place in central Georgia. While I was using the restroom at a store we stopped at, I heard a lot of shouting and commotion outside. The owner of the store kept shouting, "Get that nigger out of there!" My fellow passengers assured him that I was not a Negro, but an Arab. His response was not much different: "Get that A-rab out of there!" The frantic knocking on my bathroom door alerted me to potential trouble. As I walked out, my fellow passengers surrounded me and ushered me out--to protect me, I realized to my horror, from the store owner who stood there with a shotgun pointed at my head. This and other similar, though minor, incidents were my initiation into the racist environment and ugly experiences suffered by those of darker skin. When I arrived at my destination in a small town in northern Florida where I was visiting a friend I had recently met at the Institute of World Affairs in Twin Lakes, Connecticut, I must have displayed some signs of being disturbed by the discrimination that I experienced. After much prodding by my friend, I told her what happened. She then reported this to her father, a Republican who was at the time the chairman of County Commissioners in his area. His response was clear and swift as he telephoned all the media outlets in the town (a newspaper and two radio stations) and suggested that they might want to interview me and report about my unhappy experiences. All three outlets interviewed me and offered apologies for what some Americans had done to me, saying "This is not America, we are the true America and we strive for equality and justice for all." It was an experience that I have cherished greatly.

The other incident which reinforced my belief in the fairness of the American people occurred the week following the 1967 war. As I later wrote in my analysis of American media coverage of that war, "American coverage of the 1967 war was clearly among the worst, if not the worst, and most biased reporting of any period since WWII." (2) Indeed, the American media practically celebrated the war as if the United States was involved in the fighting and won a decisive victory against the Arabs. Hardly any attempt was made at objective reporting. This depressing picture was modified at the local level when our campus radio station invited me for a half hour presentation to discuss the war and its consequences. Then, unknown to me, one of my colleagues in the History Department called the main radio station in Topeka, the state capital, and suggested that they interview me to get a different perspective--a suggestion they accepted without hesitation. I, therefore, appeared on the 3-hour program, which was a call-in show, and provided a corrective to the news reports.

It was shortly thereafter that I went to Ann Arbor to take a postgraduate summer course offered by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. It so happened that the International Congress of Orient lists had its meeting in Ann Arbor, August 12-19. The occasion provided an opportunity for a "group of professors and professionals of Arabic extraction to discuss and exchange their views concerning problems arising out of the recent developments in the Middle East," (3) i.e. the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war and the frustration of Arab Americans consequent upon that defeat, as well as the extensive anti-Arab rhetoric in the U.S. media. The 14 individuals who met at the invitation of the two main organizers, Rashid Bashshur and Abdeen Jabara, constituted themselves as an Ad Hoc Committee and called for a general conference which coincided with the meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in Chicago on December 9, 1967. (4)

It is worth noting that, because of the accidental nature of the Ann Arbor meeting, only five of the 14 participants ended up being actively involved in the AAUG. Some were obviously not interested. Others were fearful of the consequences of such involvement. I recall distinctly the trepidation with which most of the participants approached this matter. In part, the anti-Arab atmosphere during and after the 1967 war had dampened their spirits and caused the members to be fearful. Indeed, when I was preparing to send out a survey to university students and professionals of Arab background in the U.S. in order to assess their views about a variety of issues related to the Arab world and Arab-American relations, I asked the fledgling AAUG for the names and addresses of its members and potential members to include in my survey roster. (5) The request was denied because, "We have to be extremely careful not to upset or threaten the position of many of our potential members. There are many who have communicated their fears regarding their affiliation with this organization vis-a-vis their institutional affiliation. There are many who feel vulnerable in their institutions should they become identified even as being pro-Arab Arabs." (6) Another possible reason for not joining was the lack of experience of political activity in a democracy. In any case, some saw it as the better part of wisdom not to join an organization which seemed to them to favor political activism on behalf of the Arab-American community.

WHY DID I GET INVOLVED IN AAUG?

Under such circumstances, why join? As previously indicated, I was already involved in giving lectures, participating in seminars and appearing on radio programs as part of the normal activities of any informed specialist on the Middle East. The proposed organization was established to provide a service in educating the public about an issue of national and international importance. Indeed, the objectives of the AAUG, as spelled out in its (1968) by-laws, were distinctly educational and not political:

The Association aims at promoting knowledge and understanding of cultural, scientific, and educational matters between the United States and Canada, and the Arabic-speaking countries, to create a climate for mutual understanding through cultural and educational programs which will enhance the appreciation of the values of the Arabic-speaking countries in the United States and Canada and vice versa. As such, the Association is a non-profit, nonpolitical, non- sectarian Association, and is not affiliated with any other body or organization. (7) The AAUG was to be educational and to provide information about many issues pertinent to greater Arab-American understanding. One of the main issues, of course was and is the Arab-Israeli conflict--which the AAUG proceeded to highlight and on which it focused many of its activities and talents. At first, my own contribution was in the area of American media coverage of the Middle East. My studies, as well as many others, showed a distinct pattern of viewing the Middle East through Israeli eyes. Particularly disturbing was the widespread presentation of negative stereotypes of Arabs and Arab Americans. (8)

In the early 1970s, I began to wonder how it might be possible to really change American views of the Middle East and the negative stereotypes of Arabs in particular. For some time, the feelings on the part of many, including myself, was that once those involved in the American media realized that there was bias, there would be a definite and nearly immediate move to change the situation and provide more balanced and fair writing, reporting and broadcasting. Similarly, movies would cease to stereotype and producers would begin to put out some movies which present Arabs and Arab Americans in...