Organizing Arab-American professionals: AAUG and me.

AuthorJreisat, Jamil
PositionAssociation of Arab-American University Graduates - Organization overview - Essay

THE CONTEXT

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARAB-AMERICAN University Graduates in the late 1960s was an outcome of historic events, and the general context of the time, particularly the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Arab-American professionals: academicians, lawyers, engineers, physicians, journalists, and supporters recognized their marginalized status, particularly in the policy making process of their society, the USA. Thus, organizing a professional association such as the AAUG seemed as a necessity, even a responsibility, if they were to be interconnected with their setting.

The birth of the AAUG was not stimulated only by official policies and actions of the U.S. government, but, also, was deeply influenced by the general malaise of the Arab world. Widespread misinformation in the U.S. about the Arab world, its people, cultures, history, and aspirations, and prevalent half truths about the occupation of Palestine and other Arab lands, caused the movement over to activism by many Arab-American professionals. Arab-American intellectuals, and supporters, were aware of the menace of controlling the message within the U.S. They hoped for an opportunity to expand the sources of information and to have their views heard.

Cheryl Rubenberg points out: "Public opinion, particularly in the area of foreign policy, is largely created and molded by elite perceptions." (1) Such perceptions are principally formulated by education and mass media information. Therefore, Arab-Americans could not hope for significant improvements in understanding between the people of the U.S. and those of the Arab world without having alternative messages, with more diverse sources of information dissemination. The AAUG embarked on an ambitious program of research and publication, sponsoring a variety of public discussions grounded in realities of the region. The overall effect of the various activities was exceptional. In a short time after its establishment, the AAUG attained wide recognition and gained an undeniable presence, despite many handicaps and unrelenting criticisms of its opponents.

The "extreme make over" of facts and realities in the formulation of U.S. policies and behaviors toward the Middle East is better illustrated by examples:

  1. The Israeli invasion of 1967, and the occupation of Arab lands in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, was one of the most far-reaching events in the past century of Arab history. This invasion shocked the Arab people, sidelined their governments' public policies, and left an indelible impact on Arab psyche and culture. Politicians and mass media in the U.S. and Israel, steadily promoted the claim that the neighboring Arab countries attacked Israel, and the little state of Israel was merely defending itself. The rest of the world, including the United Nations, found the American-Israeli story suspect. Subsequently, the UN passed resolutions validating principles of international law, and proclaiming the "inadmissibility of acquisition of land by force."

    Numerous investigations in the aftermath of the 1967 war established, convincingly, that Israel planned the attack long time earlier, and carried it out while Arab governments slumbering in their state of un-preparedness and rulers' ineptness. Despite official denials, the following specific documentation of the Israeli planning and execution of the 1967 war, and the U.S. government duplicity, is provided by A. Cockburn and L. Cockburn, in their book: Dangerous Liaison: the inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship.

    This exchange is from an interview by Brian Lamb on C-Span, 1 September 1991:

    Lamb: Can you give us an example of something that you learned that was in Hebrew that we never saw in English?

    Andrew Cockburn: Sure. The '67 war, for example. The people's general view of the 1967 war was all the Arabs sort of ganged up on Israel and may even have attacked Israel and the Israelis fought them off and won the great victory....

    In fact, we found a book of memoirs written by a guy who was the military aide to then-prime minister of Israel ... called Israel Lior. He gives an account in this book which has never been translated into English. It's available only in Hebrew ... a bestseller there. He gives an account how on 3 June 1967--two days before the war broke out---he was at the home of the prime minister and they were waiting for the head of Mossad to come back from Washington. The head of Mossad had been sent to Washington to get permission, to get the green light, to launch the war. He explains, "We knew we could win.... The generals were hot to go. They weren't really scared of the Egyptians or anyone else, but they wanted to go ahead with this and the prime minister had been saying ... We can't attack until we have American permission."

    He gives this very vivid description of how Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, comes back into the room at midnight. The high command is sitting around ... Amit walks back in and they say, "Well, what is it? It is war or no war? Will they let us go?" Amit says, "Well, I've been given to understand, the Americans have told me that they will bless us if we crush Nasser, and that's it." They started the war on Monday morning. He'd been to Washington and he'd seen Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and a very few other senior officials, also including, certainly, James Jesus Angleton ... [a senior CIA official known for his close association with Mossad, who has a park named after him in Israeli. (2)

  2. During the late 1960s, I was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburg. In 1967, I was elected president of the local chapter of the Arab Students Association (OAS). The coverage of Arab news in the American mass media illustrated vividly the adage that "the victor writes the history." Representing the student association, I had organized lectures and seminars and invited prominent scholars to address Arab-American relations and other aspects of Middle East politics. There was enormous desire in the community to hear a different interpretation of events of considerable consequences to Arab-American relations. The University, I thought, is the most appropriate forum, may be the only forum, where other views are heard and debated. But for Arab students, even the university setting was restrictive. Arab students, for example, could not get heard, or have anything published even in the Pitt News, the student newspaper at the University of Pittsburg. At one point, I went to their offices to see the editor, and to seek an explanation to his refusal to allow Arab students the same access like all other student organizations on campus. No satisfactory change or explanation was forthcoming.

  3. Another example was a telephone call by a staffer at the University of Pittsburg to an editor of the Pittsburg Press, whom she knew, to thank him for an editorial titled something like "The Truculent State of Israel" that questioned the wisdom of an Israeli attack on a Palestinian village that resulted in the murder of several civilians, including women and children. The attack was condemned by the UN Security Council. The editor's answer to the caller was that he regretted publishing the editorial for the trouble it caused. The chair of the Board of Directors of the Kaufman Brothers, the largest department store in Pittsburg, had just called the paper to convey that if one more criticism of Israel appeared in their paper, they could forget about any more adds from his corporation. He threatened to take his business to the competing paper, Pittsburgh Gazette. This would mean loss of huge annual revenue for the Pittsburg Press, and possibly bankrupting it. As a student of public affairs, I thought censorship was mainly practiced by authoritarian regimes in poor developing countries. This event was a harsh lesson about the reality of mass media in the U.S.

    The list of illustrations can be lengthy. But, in structuring my thoughts and recollections about events to articulate what may appear as a meandering in seemingly unrelated subjects, these observations inevitably build up to an intensely relevant and powerful conclusion. The control of the message that I experienced as a student motivated me, or made me more receptive to greater involvement and a more participatory mode in public affairs. As Cheryl Rubenberg noted, in the U.S. "the media have transmitted and buttressed official policies on U.S.-Israel relations, reinforced commonly held Western stereotypes of the Arab world, idealized Israel and exempted it from criticism, and suppressed information and open debate on critical issues--in effect ensuring that public opinion on the Middle East remains consonant with the official perception, and ultimately allowing the American government to pursue completely unchecked, and unbalanced, course of action in the region." (3) These conclusions were valid over forty years ago, and remain more so today.

    Hence, responsible activism, I concluded, was essential in order to attain balance and fairness of ideas and actions on issues of Arab-American relations. This is why when Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, while at Northwestern University, called me and invited me to join a newly organized group named Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), I was happy to comply. I was in my first year of a faculty appointment at the University of South Florida. Soon after, I authored one of the earliest "Information Papers" published by the AAUG. Also, I wrote to Ibrahim, in the early 1970s, after he asked me what should be a high priority activity for the AAUG, suggesting establishing a scholarly journal. He confirmed that...

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