Palestinians: “Hope is all we have”
As the son of a Palestinian woman, I was raised hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Recently, I was given the opportunity to visit Palestine for the first time with Project Hope, to witness, first-hand, the struggles that many Palestinians endure on a daily basis.When I first heard of Project Hope and the annual trip...The Whistleblowers’ Protection Act protects whistleblowers
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article in The Arab American News, regarding the legal fragility of employment, given the at-will employment relationship in Michigan. In short, from a legal perspective, an employee has no expectation of continued employment, unless the employee has an expressed or implied contract, stating...Nelson Mandela, the greatest black man of the twentieth century
My wife, Jane and I had two encounters with Nelson Mandela. Neither was a close encounter, but both were memorable. The first was in 1965. We were teaching in Kenya. Both of us were young and did not have any children, and apparently little common sense as well. We got the crazy idea of driving down to Cape...Why local politics matter
Arab American immigrants have been an essential component in this community and active participants in the areas of economics, business, medicine and law. However, there is one area that can always be improved upon and that is political involvement. As conflicts arise in the Middle East, the interest in international politics...A new president, a new era in Iran
On June 14, 2013, Iranians passionately participated in their presidential election and chose HojjatolIslam Dr. Hassan Rouhani to serve as the 7th president, since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. I have known Dr. Rouhani for 37 years. He is the right man, at the right time, for the right job. He is a man of faith and...Fair Credit Reporting Act requires creditors to report your information accurately
Nearly everyone understands that having good credit is important. Lenders make decisions related to whether they will give a loan and what the terms of a loan will be, in large part, based upon the prospective borrower’s credit rating. Employers increasingly analyze the credit histories of applicants when making hiring...Domestic workers: Modern day slavery in Arab countries
Last night at the hotel lobby of an Arab Gulf country, a family walked in aiming for the westernized café that sells everything but Arabic coffee. The mother seemed distant as she pressed buttons on her smart phone. The father looked tired as he puffed away on his cigarette, and a whole band of children ran around in refreshing chaos...There are legal limits to what banks can do, even if it doesn’t always seem that way
The strength of the economy depends upon the smooth and predictable flow of money. Banks are at the center of economic activity. Not surprisingly, banks enjoy laws that favor them in many legal disputes with non-banks. And when anyone is used to winning, they begin to expect victory. It should be expected,...Whistleblower should not be prosecuted
Millions of Americans learned last week that their government is spying on them and looking at their phone records, via a massive surveillance program that is operated by the National Security Agency. Citizens have one man to thank for these revelations: Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old "geek," who leaked the information about the program...Loaning a car to a friend is a roll of the dice
“Hey buddy, can I borrow your car?” The question seems innocent enough. The answer, more often than not, is “of course you can, my good friend.” However, at the risk of sounding uptight, letting someone borrow your car is like placing the deed to your home on the poker table. It’s even worse than that,...Arab community should seriously address the issue of sexual harassment
Last week, State Representative Rashida Tlaib went public with detailed allegations of sexual harassment by ADC’s Regional Director Imad Hamad against her and other female interns during her time spent at the organization. The ADC has finally agreed to the gravity of the situation and decided to perform a thorough investigation, which...Qusair: Exclusive eyewitness account
QUSAIR, Syria — A city that lies in rubble, where ghosts, dead bodies and soldiers share the deserted streets. Qusair, the Stalingrad of Syria, the revolution's fallen icon and the regime's turning point, from north to south, east to west, is obviously under the regime's full control now. Soldiers can be seen everywhere doing all that...Employment relationship in Michigan is no-strings-attached
An often misunderstood concept is what it means for an employee to be “wrongfully terminated.” Recently fired individuals sometimes seek the advice of an attorney regarding whether their previous employer may have run afoul of employment laws in terminating their employment. Almost always, the answer is “no.”In...Syrian rebels balk at peace talks
Reasonable people can disagree on what to do about Syria, a problem with no good solutions, and particularly about what to do regarding aid to Syrian rebels. There ought not to be disagreement, however, on not letting the United States, a would-be benefactor, get pushed around or have its diplomacy subverted by the rebels, who are the...Evidence does not support fears of Islam in the West
WASHINGTON – While scholarly work has debunked the idea of incompatibility of Islam with Western values, it has not really changed this dominant perception pervading political discourse and policy making. This notion of incompatibility between Islam and the West has actually intensified in the last 15 years, as the perception of Islam......
Nakba: 65 years later, and we’re winning
May 17th, 20130 Well, it’s that time of year. It’s the day when we Palestinians commemorate the establishment of the State of Israel. They call it “independence,” and we call it “Nakba,” which basically means “catastrophe,” or “calamity.”There are still many people living today who suffered the catastrophe of 1948, were...Who are the war criminals in Syria?
Last week, several polls came out assessing U.S. public opinion on intervention in Syria.According to the Huffington Post poll, Americans oppose U.S. air strikes on Syria by 3-to-1. They oppose sending arms to the rebels by 4-to-1. They oppose putting U.S. ground troops into Syria by 14-to-1. Democrats, Republicans and independents are......
Fighting racism after Boston: A Dearborn resident’s view
After 9/11, my high school cafeteria split in half: Arab-Americans on one side, everybody else on the other. I don't know why, but I felt like I had to choose a side. I chose to sit with nobody. Growing up in Dearborn, Michigan, I lived in a city where 40 percent of the population is from the Mediterranean and many are of the Muslim...What we did to Iraq
The U.S. public was always carefully protected by its media from full knowledge of what the U.S. government did to Iraq. The networks had a rule, of never showing blood. They almost never showed wounded Iraqis with bloody bandages. Of course, they never showed dismemberment (bodies blown up, unlike in Hollywood movies, don’t just pile...Challenging your property tax assessment in Michigan
Metro Detroit — It’s that time of year again — local residents and business owners are receiving their property tax “notice of assessment.” After five years of a battered real estate market, many suspect that they are being overtaxed on inflated values or properties. Although data suggests that residential home prices are...U.S. housing market threatened by changes to short sales
DETROIT — As lenders continue to see rising default rates and a backlog of foreclosures and bad debt piling up, short sales have been extremely attractive to sellers, banks, buyers and realtors. Instead of having a house sit vacant for months at a time, mortgage servicers have successfully used the short sale process to determine which......
Weapons of Mass Distraction: The big, long lie about Iraq lingers still
The Iraq War remains with us as long as the lies continue and those responsible avoid accountabilityTen years ago, on October 10, 2002, the United States House of Representatives made one of the most calamitous mistakes of a generation. Congress, with willful blindness, voted to attack, invade and occupy a sovereign, oil-rich nation in...Did Romney ‘win’ the debate?
In the presidential debate that I watched on Wednesday night, Republican challenger Mitt Romney was shiftier than Dick Nixon in 1960 and less coherent than George W. Bush in 2000, but the TV pundits, including on MSNBC, overwhelmingly declared him the winner.When I tried to follow Romney’s logic, I couldn’t. Somehow the federal......
Managing Mideast’s anti-Americanism
September 14th, 20120 Reactions to the deadly incident in Benghazi and the less lethal protest at the U.S. embassy in Cairo have been part of a swirl of grief, anger, bigotry, diplomacy, politics and much else. We should keep a few essentials in mind.What took place was not a single type of phenomenon, executed by a single type of perpetrator. We are seeing...
Reflecting on 9/11, faith and American ideals
September 14th, 20120 On September 13, 2001 our campus at the University of Michigan-Dearborn held a community event to reflect on the attacks of two days earlier. We were still reeling from the trauma of what had happened. I was one of three speakers (including Chancellor Little and Associate Dean Anderson-Levitt). These were my thoughts on that day. I......