Syrian-Americans Press Washington on Syria

BY THE WORLD

The repression in Syria continues and so do the protests. Syrian-Americans are pressing Congress and the State Department to step up the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad. But they do not want the US to intervene militarily. Assia Boundaoui reports. Download MP3

Original post: Syrian-Americans Press Washington on Syria

Syrian-Americans watch from afar as reports of violence grow

By Catherine E. Shoichet and Joe Sterling, CNN

(CNN) -- Videos posted online show tanks in Syrian streets, scrambling crowds and the menacing sounds of sniper fire.

On the other side of the world, Syrian-Americans say they are watching in anguish, haunted by what they see and hear.

"You hear people screaming for help, and you can identify the accent," said Yaser Tabbara, a 35-year-old attorney in Chicago who was raised in Syria's capital, Damascus.

"It's been very traumatizing for me and my family to see all these things," he said. "To see all of that, and to know that you can do very little about it from outside Syria, is a very demoralizing and frustrating position to be in."

Word of a brutal crackdown by government security forces began to trickle out soon after anti-government protests began in mid-March. Since then, human rights groups say more than 775 people have been killed.

CNN has not been granted access into Syria and is unable to independently verify those claims, videos posted online or witness accounts.

Syrian-Americans say they also struggle to find out what's happening, frantically searching for news online and calling family and friends in Syria.

"They're too scared. ...They don't say anything on the phone. You really can't. Phones are monitored. Everything's monitored," said Mohammed, an American of Syrian descent who lives in the Chicago area.

He asked that his last name not be used, fearing his extended family in Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, could face repercussions.

"There's a sense of helplessness. We try to bring the attention of the international community to what's going on. That's the only thing Syrian-Americans can do to deal with the problem," said Mohamed T. Khairullah.

The 35-year-old mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, wrote an op-ed in his local newspaper, criticizing the "violent repression" of Syrian President Bashar al-Ashad's regime. In Syria, he wrote, people can't speak out at government meetings or write letters to the editor.

"The only thing they can do now is protest peacefully. That protest is being documented via social media for the world to see the atrocities of the Syrian forces," he wrote.

Khairullah said the news has sharply divided the large Arab community in the area where he lives, and many people are still struggling to understand the situation.

"People don't know whether to go with or against (the government), and they don't know what the future might hold," he said.

The members of the Syrian American Club in Washington are also split, according to Munif Atassi, the social club's president.

"I've seen people on either side, and I've seen people in the middle. The majority of people are right in the middle, praying for the conflict to end," said Atassi, 57.

Friends and family he's spoken with in Syria also have divergent opinions, he said.

"Frankly, they don't know what to believe anymore. ... The people I talk to, they believe that there is propaganda and lying coming from both sides," he said.

For weeks, it seemed the world's attention was focused elsewhere, said Hosam Hamadah, 47, of Houston. When he couldn't find enough information about the situation in news reports, the small-business owner said he turned to online social networks.

Now Hamadah is glued to Facebook, searching for updates and posting videos of the violence that he receives from acquaintances in Syria.

Even from thousands of miles away, deciding to speak out about the situation was difficult, he said.

"It took me a while before I made up my mind. Then I realized, if I don't do this and the next guy won't do this, nobody's going to say anything," he said. "Somebody has to say something. Me and my family, we're not better than the people that are getting killed in the streets."

Original post: Syrian-Americans watch from afar as reports of violence grow

The World: Young Arab-Americans and the ‘Arab Spring’

By Assia Boundaoui

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Arab-Americans have, understandably, been avid followers of news about the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Many first generation Arab-Americans fled to the US to escape political repression in their home countries.

Now, they see the Arab world changing dramatically. Two dictators have been toppled. Others seem to be teetering.

The so-called Arab Spring is causing Arab-Americans to reconsider their hyphenated identities.

At a recent roundtable in Chicago, second generation Arab-American activists, students and artists discussed the conflicts of identity that revolutions half-way across the world, are forcing them to confront.

Many second generation Arab-Americans have grown up on stories of the home-land their parents fled. They sought political asylum from repression and corruption in countries they loved, but felt they could no longer live in. Waves of Arabs escaping political oppression immigrated to the United States from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1970s and 80s.

Now, nearly three decades later, these young Arab-Americans are being confronted with a fundamentally existential question: “If we’re here because our parents fled repressive, undemocratic regimes … and those regimes no longer exist, well then – shouldn’t we go back?”

“It’s still bizarre, it’s still like a dream to even discuss, ‘can we possibly live there?’” asked Abdullah Fadhli, an artist who was born and raised in the US whose parents fled Libya in 1980 to escape Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
“My father didn’t come here willingly. He was an exile from the get-go. Libyans wanted to live in Libya, these people came here unwillingly, they love their country. My father hasn’t seen his family in over 30 years, I’m sure he’s going to go back.”

Ahlam Said, a Yemeni-American political organizer and activist, said as much as she might want to go back if things in Yemen change; her dual identity actually complicates things.

“Going back to Yemen, when you told people you were American-Yemeni, they’d sort of like smirk at you and go ‘emm, okay, yeah,’ Said said.

“I wasn’t raised in Yemen, I was born in Yemen, and I came here at the age of two, and now all of a sudden I’m beginning to enter into a world where I want to be closer to my Yemeni identity, I want to understand what’s going on, I want to be involved. But you know, I know there’s going to be a struggle if I go back, because now my identity is going to be challenged.”

’Arab-enough?’

This question of being “Arab-enough” quickly transforms into a conversation about identity. In a room of nine Arab-Americans, every one has handles their hyphenated status differently.

Yaser Tabbara, a Syrian-American, was born in Chicago and grew-up in Damascus before returning to the US as a teenager. He said that politically, Syrian and American identities are perceived to be in conflict.

But they’re not.

“After all Syria has been classified as one of the Axis of Evil by America for a long time,” Tabbara said. “But I truly don’t feel a schism between the two identities. As an American, I’m very comfortable supporting the pro-democracy movement in Syria and in the Arab World, after-all that is a fundamentally American value.”

Iraqi-American Laith Saud said he’s not especially torn about his hyphenated status. In fact, he no longer considers himself an “Arab-American.”

“I’m beginning to look at this in a totally different way. I’m beginning to consider myself an American Arab. I was born in Baghdad but I grew up here, for me to be as Iraqi as an Iraqi, is absurd. I’m an American. But I happen to be an Arab one,” Saud said.

Ahmed Rehab, an Egyptian-American activist who flew to Cairo last month to participate in the Egyptian revolution, wants to get rid of the hyphenation all together. He said he is fully American and fully Arab, and that hyphenating those two identities is unnecessary.

“I can be an American, I can be an Egyptian, I can be an Arab,” he said. I have the capacity of being all three, they’re not hyphenated. One does not qualify the other. When I go vote as an American I don’t chisel hieroglyphics on my ballot card. And when I’m in Egypt, chanting in Tahrir Square with everybody else, I’m not saying, “Yeah Freedom.” I’m chanting in Arabic, the same slogans. I fully relate to these people there and they relate to me.”

A sticky situation

Yemeni-American Ahlam Said said that beyond just a categorization, her hyphenated identity has complicated the question of who she represents when she wants to speak her mind. She calls it a sticky situation.

“Am I speaking on behalf of America, or am I speaking on behalf of Yemen?” Said said. “And what are Yemenis going to be thinking about this, are Americans going to basically challenge my allegiance to America? I myself, after I send out a tweet, I’m like ‘oh crap what are people going to think?’ Because I’m not there, and I don’t know what’s really going on. At the end of the day it’s my passion to see people living dignified lives, you know that’s what I want, that’s what I can identify with.”

Khalil Marrar, a Palestinian-American professor and writer, said his hyphenated identity is associated with a feeling of guilt.

“I feel guilty, as a person of Palestinian descent, who lives in America and enjoys the relative freedom we enjoy here,” Marrar said. “I feel really guilty about my Palestinian brothers and sisters living under occupation. I feel really guilty about my Egyptian brothers and sisters that live(d) under the Mubarak regime.”

Whatever their feelings on being “hyphenated-Americans,” all of these men and women agree that they want to play a role in the wave of change taking place in the Arab world, whether or not that means actually moving there. But in a generational twist of poetic justice, some will make the leap and return to the countries their parents were forced to abandon, decades ago.

Original post: The World: Young Arab-Americans and the ‘Arab Spring’

Syria update: Yaser Tabbara, City-By-City Update

MIDEAST REPORTS | MONDAY, MAY 2, 2011 AT 03:34PM

Below is Part II of the Mideast Reports interview with Yaser Tabbara last Friday. The first part can be found here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK-9Pe2VCgM&w=480&h=390]

Mr. Tabbara grew up in Damascus and is now a lawyer at Zarzour, Khalil, & Tabbara LLC. In law school he was research assistant to Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, International Law Scholar and Noble Peace Prize Nominee. Mr. Tabbara is a prominent member in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). To follow his latest activities including media appearances and publications, visit his blog.

City-by-City Update:
Here are notes that I took while talking with an opposition organizer yeseterday (not direct quotes):

Dara’a- the siege in Dara’a is being escalated. Roughly 300 more troops, including tanks and armed personnel carriers, moved from Damascus on Saturday. A mosque that was a symbol of the resistance was taken afterextensive shelling.

Dair Alzour- security forces started to showed signs of besieging the city. Water and power is starting to be cut, and communication is getting hard.

Latakia- it may seem quite here, but that is probably because communication network is weaker. The city has essentially turned into a military zone, and has been divided into about the three “cantons.” There is a bit of a standoff going between the army and the opposition.

Original post: SYRIA UPDATE: YASER TABBARA, CITY-BY-CITY UPDATE