Word: arabism
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Panetta's message, however, was greeted with skepticism. Speaking after Panetta, Osama Siblani, spokesman for the Congress of Arab American Organizations, asked the CIA director to take a message to President Obama: "It is time we were treated like Americans." (Read about the CIA's attempts to prevent another 9/11...
Leon Panetta knew it was going to be a hard sale, and so the CIA director dished out some serious hard sell as he tried to drum up support for the agency from Arab Americans in the most Arab city in the country. On Wednesday, the CIA invited 150 community leaders in Dearborn, Mich., to a lavish iftar, the traditional evening feast at the end of each day's fasting during the month of Ramadan. The CIA and the FBI have made strenuous efforts to sign up Arab Americans in recent years, but the suspicions and recriminations since 9/11 have...
Many in the audience, and in the larger Arab American community, gave Panetta credit for audacity. Arab Americans make up more than 30% of Dearborn's 100,000 residents, and few CIA directors have visited here, much less sought to recruit. "If you had told me some years ago that the boss of the CIA would come here and ask for our help, I would not have believed it," said Baha Saad, a local restaurateur. "To do that takes some balls." (See pictures of the adventures and misadventures...
Siblani was referring to the profiling of many Arab Americans by intelligence, law-enforcement and homeland-security agencies. Other skeptics expressed anger with U.S. policies in the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the treatment of Arab and Muslim detainees by CIA interrogators. For these reasons, "there is a big gap between the U.S. government and the Arab community," said Imam Hassan Qazwini, head of Dearborn's largest mosque. "And that gap will not be bridged by formalities like iftar banquets...
...might come not in dollars and cents but in damage to its reputation for honesty, competence and integrity, which, given its status as the world's most formidable organization of guerrilla fighters, is what makes the Shi'ite political party popular not just in Lebanon but in the wider Arab world. Those traits were on display when Hizballah engineers and social-service workers fanned out immediately in the aftermath of the war with Israel in 2006 to assess damage and offer assistance to its supporters who had lost their homes and business. Months later, Nasrallah launched a reconstruction program called...