The Arab American News
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House demolitions go on
November 19th, 20090 OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM — "Make sure your father gets this," the municipal inspector tells a ten-year-old boy at the gate of the concrete house in an alleyway in the Al-Bustan quarter of Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood right under the shadow of the walled Old City. A Palestinian woman sits next to belongings removed from her...
U.N. investigator probes U.S. housing crisis
November 19th, 20090 UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. body responsible for monitoring human rights violations is investigating why hundreds of thousands — and possibly millions — of people in the United States are condemned to live on the streets. Last month, the U.N. Geneva-based Human Rights Council sent one of its top experts on human rights to find...
School funding cuts put education at risk
November 18th, 20090 DEARBORN - Hundreds of parents, students and educators from districts throughout the state rallied in Lansing on Tuesday, demanding that legislators restore funding to school districts facing debilitating cuts following the state budget crisis. Hundreds of people gathered in Lansing on Tuesday to protest school funding...Abbas resignation may be a stunt
RAMALLAH - U.S. and Israeli failure to take either Palestinian rights or Israeli settlement expansion seriously has placed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA) in an untenable situation, which could seriously damage peace prospects. AbbasOn Thursday, November 5, Abbas announced his...
U.N. affirms Israeli-Hamas war crimes report
November 18th, 20090 UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - A 575-page blistering report by Justice Richard Goldstone detailing war crimes in Gaza last December is refusing to die despite an aggressive Israeli smear campaign to kill it. Mansour The report, which was favorably voted by the 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva last month, received...
Lebanon rivals form unity government
November 18th, 20090 Members of Lebanon's new cabinet pose for an official group photo at the presidential palace in Baabda, November 10, 2009. PHOTO: Dalati Nohra BEIRUT - Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri formed a new unity government on Monday that includes two ministers from Hizbullah. Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri...Feds seize four mosques, New York skyscraper
Federal authorities said Thursday's move to seize the assets of the New York-based Alavi Foundation over alleged Iranian ties should not effect the activities of the organization's many tenants, which include mosques in Maryland, New York, Texas, and California. The forfeiture action, however, is raising concerns about religious...IN BRIEF: Exhibit details growth of Islam in Detroit
DEARBORN — "Building Islam in Detroit: Foundations / Forms / Futures," an academic exhibition that has toured the world, is being put on display by the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The exhibit opened Nov. 13. "Building Islam in Detroit charts the growth of mosques and Muslim...UM silences debate about Palestine
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has long been a haven for political movements, and many times, they've been started at least partly by non-students. But the right for non-students to speak at Michigan Student Assembly meetings has been compromised since the MSA passed a controversial resolution on Oct. 27 that will restrict...I am a proper Zionist Jew after all
Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap, the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas and the one about the death march. I just managed to survive them all. In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that...Right calls Ft. Hood killings “Islamic terror”
WASHINGTON (IPS) — Senior military and Barack Obama administration officials have been on a full-court press to preempt an anti-Muslim backlash since the shooting spree by a Muslim soldier at Fort Hood, Texas, but right-wing pundits have wasted no time in characterizing Major Nidal Malik Hasan's actions as an act of terrorism by a...Engineers, architects hold annual banquet
The Arab American Engineers and Architects Association held its 4th annual banquet on November 6 at the Farmington Hills Manor, awarding scholarships and celebrating the year's accomplishments. Dr. Mumtaz Usmen Interim Dean of Engineering at Wayne State (r) receives an award from AAEA member Awni Qaqish. PHOTO: Nafeh...Dearborn teams flounder in playoffs
DEARBORN — What began as a promising playoff season ended in heartbreaking fashion last Friday night as both Dearborn Public Schools football teams dropped first round games, effectively ending their seasons. Fordson and Edsel Ford, both among the top point-getters in the Michigan High School Athletic Association Playoffs, were...
Arab film fest offers award-winning lineup
November 10th, 20090 DEARBORN — They originated in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria and the U.S.A. They've won dozens of awards in festivals in the Arab World, Europe and the U.S. And they won't be popping up on the marquee at your local multiplex anytime soon. "Dawn of the World" The 2009 Arab Film Festival at the Arab American...Muslim-run health clinic gets BCBSM grant
DETROIT — Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is awarding free clinics throughout the state a total of $1 million in grants that will provide health services to individuals and families without health insurance. With the Michigan unemployment rate currently at 15.3 percent more Michigan residents than ever are going without health......
ACLU tells Detroit schools to stop student abuse
DETROIT — In a letter this week to Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan expressed concerns over reports of unconstitutional mass searches and the indiscriminate use of pepper spray on students by the district's police force. Robert Bobb, Detroit...Need for U.S.-sponsored Arab-Israeli deal
Palestinians and Israelis are locked in a relationship of deep mistrust. A credible outside force must intervene to break an enduring cycle of despair. A Palestinian boy sits outside a tent near his house, which was destroyed during the three-week offensive Israel launched last December, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza......
Truth, human dignity and the Goldstone Report
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement on the House Floor about H. Res 867, condemning the Goldstone Report or the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The resolution later passed. "Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as...Read Goldstone’s report on Gaza
Editor's note: the following oped by Rep. Keith Ellison appeared in Politico.com the morning of the vote in Congress to dismiss the Goldstone report. Who is afraid of Richard Goldstone? No one should be. Not even the U.S. Congress — yet it is poised on Tuesday to condemn the United Nations Human Rights Council's Goldstone report on...No emergency summits for Arab human development crisis
When the first Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) was published in 2002, a star glistened in a vast, gloomy sky. The fact that a UN-sponsored report, authored by independent Arab scholars, would receive so much attention in Arab media, was in itself a promising start. The fact that such terminology as human security, personal...Innocent post 9/11 detainees get $1.26 million
-Press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights NEW YORK — The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has announced that five men who had been living in New York and were ultimately deported won a $1.26 million settlement from the United States government in a case challenging post-9/11 racial profiling, illegal......
Another legal setback for Arar torture case
NEW YORK (IPS) — A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought against a former U.S. attorney general by a Canadian citizen who sought damages for being unlawfully detained by U.S. authorities in New York and then secretly shipped to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and allegedly tortured. Maher...Obama’s outreach to Muslim World teetering
WASHINGTON (IPS) — U.S. President Barack Obama's extraordinary efforts since his first days in office to reassure Muslims in the Greater Middle East about U.S. intentions in the region have suffered a series of setbacks that threaten to reverse whatever gains he has made over the past 10 months in restoring Washington's badly......
Beirut’s Shi’a bastion revives after ’06 war
BEIRUT — The sprawling Shi'a suburb of south Beirut has made a comeback after the destruction wreaked by Israel during 2006 fighting, a symbol of the community's resilience at a time when its political patron, Hizbullah, is seeking a greater voice in Lebanon's government. Women walk in the Dahiyah district. The district,...Loosening of F.B.I. rules stir privacy concerns
WASHINGTON — After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil. Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to......