"ArabSong: Letters & Lovesongs from a Trashtalking Arab"

My grandparents were born in Lebanon, my father was born in Ohio, my mother was born in West Virginia, seven of my uncles fought in World War II, my brother is a policeman, I was born, baptized and circumcised in Detroit, I spent three years in the Army, a year in Sweden, I live in New York and for the last several years I have felt like a Jew in Nazi Germany.

That is what this book is about.

Many of my friends are Jewish but I don't have as many Jewish friends as I once had because when I tell them that it is largely their fault that I feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany they get grouchy and go away.

That is what this book is about.

Understanding the Middle East used to be something you did out of curiosity, now it's a matter of life and death for everyone in the world). The conflict between Israel and the Arabs isn't confined to the Middle East, it spills over onto everyone and everything in America. It devastates our economy, it deforms our elections, it distorts our media and although none of our politicians will admit it, it suckers us into wars that don't benefit us and it kills Americans. If we understood the Middle East we would not have wasted our resources on two useless wars and we wouldn't be in mortal dread over where and when the next terrorist attack will be.

That is what this book is about.

But what this book is about above all else is what it's like to be an Arab in America.

Being an ARAB in America =1

(...During the 1950s & 60s...)

Arabs are a truly unique people: We are the only people in America that started out as full-fledged human beings and managed to work our way down to being the most despised ethnic group in the country. In it’s own twisted way, that’s quite an accomplishment. (We can’t take all the credit. We had an enormous amount of help. I promise you, we'll deal with that later.)

The point I’m trying to make is simple: A few years ago we were considered real human beings in America. During the 1950s, Danny Thomas was the best-known Arab in the U.S. His TV show, like most TV at that time, was corny. His 'Uncle Tonoose' was a funny old-country Lebanese eccentric and on other shows there were funny old-country Italian eccentrics, Irish eccentrics, Jewish eccentrics—all kinds of ethnic eccentrics. Either you were Dick and Jane WhiteBread American or you were ethnic. (Unless you were Black, then you were screwed.) Arabs, Greeks, Italians were all ‘Mediterraneans’—and what lovers we must have been to have "Sheiks" and "Trojans" named after us! (Imagine walking into a drugstore and saying, "I'd like a dozen lubricated Englishmen.") In 1950s American pop culture, Arab also meant swashbuckler movies with exotic names like Sinbad, Ali Baba, Baghdad, Persia (often starring good looking Jewish brothers like Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler); the ghost of Valentino (the Italian Sheik) still hovered over the universe; the Arab fortune cookie wisdom poems of Omar Khyaam.

In 1961, the inflated British ‘epic’ film Lawrence of Arabia took America by storm by disguising British colonial arrogance as both real history and as insight into what those racist bozos call "the Arab Mind." The typically British premise of the film was that those po’ li’l childlike Ayrabs need a Nice White Englishman to ‘unite’ them. (You obviously weren’t supposed to wonder why the Arabs were the ones in dire need of ‘uniting’ when it was England and Europe that were fighting two World Wars!)

(Rumor has it that the esteemed Arab filmmaker Spike Lee is making a sequel— Abdul of England.) Peter Paleface Paternalistic O'Toole who played Lawrence was a fine actor but he wasn't any hormone-driven young hero’s role model. (Brother O’Toole was also Irish, so he knew exactly what the British mean by ‘uniting’ a country.)

Role Model? Did somebody say Role Model?

Every aspiring young love-machine that I knew—including the women —was far more impressed by the Warrior/Poet/Lover with all those teeth—for God's sake, his horse was better-looking than the average Englishman! Omar Sharif—that studly brother was an Arab!

(I wouldn’t be surprised if, even as we speak, an overheated Freudian graduate student is writing a dissertation arguing fervidly that the real motive behind the 'Six Day War' was rage at Omar for stirring up the hormones of young girls of all monotheistic religions.)

Back to the point: When I was growing up, Arabs were real people. There was no negative stigma attached to being an Arab or a Muslim. Among American Arabs that I knew, there was no hostility between Christians and Muslims. We were Catholic but my father's best friends from high school until he died were Muslim, Greek and Irish. I had Syrian Muslim friends and Jewish friends and Black friends and Chaldean friends fresh from Iraq and there was no significant difference between one group and another. Neither I nor any Arab that I knew was brought up with hostility toward Jews. The only heavy ethnic hostility I heard coming from any old-country Arab was aimed at Turks! (Turks!) Until recently, Arabs were included in the American sales pitch, 'All men are created equal'. Blacks weren't, and often Jews weren't, so I spent much of my life defending them!

Can you imagine how strange it feels to spend your life defending 'minorities' ... then wake up one day to find that you've become one?

That’s what ‘IT’ was like.

But what was i like?

(This will give you a pretty good idea of why most Arabs don't quite know what to "do" with me.)

The Art, Joy & Sexy Delight of THINKING

All of my life I've been almost fanatically independent. (What's the point of living in a free country if you're not going to use the freedom?) In a fairly free country like America, the main threat to your freedom isn't from Russians or Martians or Hitler or Doctor No, it's from the culture you're raised in. Face it: we are all brainwashed by whatever culture we grow up in. So my starting assumption was this: There are a couple hundred different countries on this earth; there are hundreds of languages, religions, social systems, and ways of interacting in those countries. And they change across time. So the number of possible beliefs, philosophies, religions, behaviors, ways to eat, drink, think, make love, work, play—is enormous.

If, as many of our religions claim, there is only One True God and by implication, One True Religion... and if, as most of our countries claim, there is only One Country Wonderful Enough to deserve our patriotism and to demand the death of our children in wars against Less Wonderful Countries... and if, as they tell us again and again, there is only One Truly Great Economic System ---what do you think the odds are of us just happening to wind up in the One Perfect Time, Place, Religion, Country, Political, Social, Economic System?

The odds of any of us ‘happening’ to wind up in the One Right Place are too silly to consider. So, if you believe what your parents, friends and culture have taught you to believe, then you're little more than a well-trained monkey. There is nothing free, nothing creative, nothing personal about your Self, because you've let your mind—and all the value systems that fill it—be formed by accident.

One thing was certain -- I was NOT going to be anybody’s trained monkey!

I wanted to try everything the world had to offer—every way of thinking and being and eating and loving. I wanted to play every sport, eat every food, love every woman, read every book. I wanted to talk to anyone, anywhere, about anything. I wanted to listen to their music, learn their courage, get bombed with them, write books about them, join them in their causes. I wanted to teach them my powers and learn theirs. I wanted to try everything in the world that I had the time, energy, guts, and money (this aint, Oz) to try. And then I wanted to choose from that wonderful abundance to create my own one-of-a-kind Self. The only limits were my imagination, energy, persistence, guts—and my limits of body, mind, spirit and all that other good natural born genetic chit. Of course you can’t change your genes, but that was never the point. The point wasn’t to cry about things that can’t be changed, it was to take full advantage of things that can be changed.

Honey, I was determined to be free (even if it fuggin killed me)!

According to the guidelines I set for myself, I had to go against the grain of my own upbringing. In any dispute between Arabs and anyone else, I had to lean toward the other side. I was also (but to a much greater extent) brought up American, so in any dispute between America and another country, I had to put my finger on the scale to offset any tendency to favor America. Not anti-American or anti-Arab, just trying my damndest to be fair...to find the truth in any situation and get behind it.

Be fair: Judge both sides by the same standards.

Never yield to a tendency to favor your own group, whether it’s Arabs, Americans, men, heterosexuals, or suave-looking, slam-dunking super-dudes.

(Fuggem if they can’t take a joke!)

When in doubt, favor the underdog.

When still in doubt, give people who’ve been historically screwed (e.g., people of color, women, gays) the benefit of the doubt.

When still in doubt, favor the option that gets the fewest people killed.

One thing that was absolutely out of the question was reflexively favoring your own group. “My country (race, sex, religion, etc.) right or wrong” was WRONG! That kind of throwback thinking had allowed German human beings to look away from the extermination of Jewish human beings and enabled white human beings to avoid responsibility for kidnapping, raping, murdering and enslaving Black human beings.

It was part of the world I had rejected, part of everything I hated. And, honey, I wasn’t having any part of it. I was not going to be some brainwashed, throwback, trained monkey who defended my country whether it was right or wrong, never noticing if we were Nazis or Slavemasters until someone forced it down our throats.

No way! I was going to be a man of honor. I would defend whoever was being screwed.

(‘Oppressed’ is too fancy a word for us Detroit boys. Screwed’ll do just fine.)

I wasn't the only person who felt that way. The others may not have gotten there by the same road I took, but damn near every politically active person I knew put their asses on the line for every cause they thought was right. If anything, they were less assertive in defending their own (ethnic/religious/ racial) group than with other groups. Defending people who were being screwed was a dignified, heroic act— you didn’t want to dishonor it by turning it into something self-serving and greedy.

During the 1960s, all the great Black and Jewish troublemakers I knew and learned from were right there on all of the issues. Black hellraisers went to anti-Vietnam ‘teach-ins’ and Jewish hellraisers went on Civil Rights marches. Goodman and Schwartz, the kids killed with Chaney in the Mississippi Civil Rights demonstrations, weren’t the only Jews involved in Civil Rights work? There were thousands. The current hostility between Blacks and Jews is tragic precisely because of how intensely they were involved in each other’s lives only a few years ago.

African Americans have put their lives on the line for other people’s causes whenever they were given the freedom to make choices. Black soldiers—a million of whom fought in World War II—were among the first to liberate the concentration camps. On every college campus that I have first-hand knowledge of, Black professors and students have been the strongest defenders of Jews whenever antiSemitism brought its ugly retarded ass back into action.

Everybody who had the spirit defended whatever they thought was right. The journalist Jacobo Timerman—Argentinean, Jewish, and almost mythically brave—expressed it beautifully when he described his friend Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a French-Jewish historian:

Vidal-Naquet stands where we have always

stood: with all the just causes at once, with

a humanist simultaneity of priorities.

Thousands of Black, white, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Baptist, Northern, Southern, Hispanic, Asian, straight, gay, handicapped and whatever else you can think of people defended “all the just causes at once.” Every march and demonstration for Black equality had thousands of non-Black participants. Viola Luizzi, a white woman from Detroit was shot and killed after the ‘65 Selma- Montgomery, Alabama march. And every Vietnam War protest was attended—and often led—by African-Americans. In 1966, Julian Bond (in those days, baby-faced, Black, and so brilliant he scared the hell out of you) was denied a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives because he opposed the Vietnam war with more brains and conviction than the Good Ol’ Boys could bear. And it wasn’t just civil rights and Vietnam. Anyone who was worth a damn either started out or ended up fighting for “all the just causes at once.” By the time Malcolm X was murdered, he had reached out to Muslims and Third World peoples of every color—and at the rate he was going, he would surely have defended people who were being oppressed —screwed—anywhere in the world. By the time Martin Luther King was assassinated, he was leading not only Black People’s Marches, he was leading Poor People’s Marches.

One of the most honorable men (make that one of the only honorable men) in modern American politics is Andrew Young. In 1976, Prez Jimmy Carter appointed Mr. Young, a young Afro brother from Georgia, as the U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1979, Andrew Young was forced to resign from that prestigious position because, acting on principle, he had committed the unforgivable sin -- in Land of the Free Home of the Brave, Freedom of Speech America!-- of TALKING to representatives of the PLO. (We’ll talk about that later, I promise you.)

If he had been a different sort of person, Andrew Young could have copped a plea or apologized or somehow or other weaseled his way out of the situation he found himself in. But he didn’t. He had done the right thing and he knew it and he wasn’t going to bullshit about it or apologize for it.

His reply carried the kind of conviction that America, if it had any intention of living up to its advertising, would insist upon in a President:

Unfortunately, but by birth, I come from the ranks of those who have known and identified with some level of oppression in the world. By choice, I continue to identify with what would be called in Biblical terms "the least of these my brethren."

I could not say that given the same situation, I wouldn’t do it again, almost exactly the same way.

I don’t pretend to be Andrew Young or Jacobo Timerman, but I went on Civil Rights Marches and Voting Registration Drives. I canvassed neighborhoods and reasoned with rednecks (including a few members of my family and most of the people I grew up with). I went to teach-ins and Peace Marches, I helped some young men avoid the war and I welcomed others home from it -- and I celebrated with them the fact that they were still alive (what sense would it make to oppose a war because life was precious, and then berate the soldiers who survived?). I voted for Eldridge Cleaver for President (I was very young), I tried to join the Black Panther Party (I don’t remember if they said No because I was insufficiently Black or because I refused to carry a weapon) and only the fact that I had a wife and two daughters prevented me from going to the Middle East in 1967 and again in 1973 --

You cannot imagine how difficult it is for me to admit this. I'd rather lie about it, but I can’t. If I don’t tell the truth about this—or if I let myself avoid it or even pretty it up a little...to me, this book would be rendered meaningless. I would have cut the heart out of it. With apologies to Arabs everywhere —especially to the people of Palestine— for being so wrong, so gullible, this is the truth...

In both '67 and ‘73, I came very close to going to Israel to join the army. I wanted to protect Israel from the maniacs who had vowed to exterminate it, to destroy it, to drive its people into the sea. There was no doubt in my mind which side I should be on. What was to doubt? Any fool could understand that the people who had endured the Holocaust knew with every cell of their being, knew with every memory and every dream, knew in ways that the rest of us could never know, how precious and irreplaceable life was.

They knew. And, knowing that, they could never hurt another people, especially not innocent people. I was going to be a person of honor. I was going to defend whoever needed it. The people, above all others, that I would never let any harm come to were the ones who have been brutalized for hundreds, for thousands of years -- Blacks and Jews. I would protect them with my own life if it came down to that.

Now that I understand the truth about Israel, there are two things that horrify me above all others. 1. My empathy for the victims of the Holocaust had been consciously and intentionally used to make me an accomplice in the destruction of my own people. 2. If the people who endured the Holocaust can turn around and brutalize, dehumanize, lie about, exterminate and in every way oppress another people -- and then suppress open discussion of the carnage right here in America -- then all "Never again..." means is Never again let it happen to Jews.

Whatever you do, don't say that out loud in New York.

Whatever mental and moral disease the German people had in the 1940s, American Jews have now.

Athens¸ Ohio--mid 1940s...

I am a child in my Aunt Judy's kitchen back in the days when she can still walk. Aunt Judy lives in Athens with Aunt Lily, the old woman from Lebanon who raised Aunt Judy and Dad and their brothers after their mother died.

It's a good summer, it's the summer that Mom read David Copperfield to us each night before sleep. I am six, maybe seven. It's a sweaty afternoon in Athens. I stare through the screen at the summer storm that has blackened the midday sky. Except for Uncle Naman, even the grownups are afraid. Uncle Naman is Aunt Lily's boyfriend. He is a baggy pantsed old man from Lebanon who tells jokes and loves us in a very natural way, unlike Aunt Judy, who is nervous with children. Uncle Naman, no shoes, baggy pants, scraggy socks, strap undershirt and felt hat, picks up his ude—a sort of Arabic guitar—and walks onto the front porch and sits on the squeaky glider. Lightning cracks the black sky, hailstones crash into the porch roof like Japanese pilots and Uncle Naman crosses his legs and begins to play his ude. He closes his eyes and sings softly in Arabic. Within minutes he is so immersed in his singing that he has forgotten the storm and he is singing his heart out in the rottenest voice you've ever heard.

I can't help myself, I begin to laugh.

Aunt Judy says that it's rude to laugh at people, then she begins to laugh. She takes me in her arms, still laughing, and squeezes me to her and, for a moment, it seems like everyone in the world loves me.

Ron D