Syrian group wants Rep. Dennis Kucinich to apologize for Syria comments

By Sabrina Eaton, The Plain Dealer

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A Syrian American group on Wednesday urged Cleveland Rep. Dennis Kucinich to apologize the Syrian people for making comments it called "political propaganda" and "out of touch with reality" after he visited the embattled Middle Eastern country this week and met with its president and opposition leaders.

Syrian American Council executive director M. Yaser Tabbara of Chicago said in an interview that the nation's president, Bashar al-Assad, has "lost his legitimacy" because he "heads a regime that is engaged in severe and horrid human rights violations against his own people."

More than 1,000 people have been killed since anti-government protests began in Syria, and many more have been arrested.

Tabbara called Kucinich's assertion that people in Syria want Assad to remain in power and reform the government "clueless" and "very misinformed." He said Assad is responsible for atrocities committed by the armed forces, wants to stay in power at all costs, and is using Kucinich for propaganda purposes.

Kucinich met with Assad on Monday, and later told The Plain Dealer that Assad takes calls for change seriously and wants to address his people's concerns. In an emailed response to the Syrian American group's claims, Kucinich said he shares the concerns about violence that the group "rightly decries."

"I went to Syria to meet with as many parties as I could, including leaders in the opposition, people who are directly involved with trying to bring change to Syria," Kucinich said. "I also wanted to learn if President Assad was himself prepared to accept their just demands for freedoms and reforms."

He said "the importance of trying to reach out to obtain as many views as possible cannot be underestimated" and that he would be happy to speak with the group and other interested parties when he returns to the United States.

Kucinich says that a Tuesday report by Syrian's official government news agency, which claimed that he said Assad is "highly loved and appreciated by the Syrians" mistranslated his remarks.

He also said a State Department claim on Tuesday that his trip was arranged by the Syrian government was incorrect. The State Department issued a clarification on Wednesday, which said Kucinich "is traveling at his own instance and at the request of his constituents." His visit is financed by Cleveland's Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services. The group did not return requests for comment on Wednesday.

A Damascus-based participant in Kucinich's Tuesday meeting with political opposition members supported Kucinich's contention that many in Syria want Assad to stay in power and implement reforms.

Ibrahim Hamidi, the Damascus Bureau Chief for the pan-Arab newspaper Al-hayat, said in an email that he told Kucinich that Syria is "very different from Tunisia and Egypt."

"In these two countries, people went down to the street to change their presidents," said Hamidi, who stressed that he is not personally part of the opposition because he is an independent journalist. "But, in Syria, people and many of the opposition want President Assad to lead the reform process."

Another participant in Kucinich's meeting, Damascus engineer Salim Kheirbek, said in an email that Syrians seek "radical reforms to be done by the president," after a "national dialogue."

"After almost four months of demonstrations and violence, the demonstrators couldn't throw out the regime and at the same time the regime couldn't finish with the protesters the matter which led to a national crises," said the email from Kheirbek, who was jailed by the Syrian regime for a dozen years.

Kheirbek said opposition members believe having Assad implement reforms makes sense because he's legally Syria's president, "and this is the only way (until now) to do reforms safely and keep the country far from chaos and unknown destiny."

"We ask to have Mr. Assad to be implementing the reforms in a certain transition period not because this is good for the president but because this is good for Syria and its people," Kheirbek's email said. He said the fact that some people in Syria like Assad "should not neglect the other fact that there are much more people who ask for radical changes which should transfer Syria from its dictatorship regime to democratic, multiple parties, etc . . . Syria with free people."

Original post: Syrian group wants Rep. Dennis Kucinich to apologize for Syria comments

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