"Republicans will have to find a way to stem the loss of Arab American support, while Democrats will need to make Arab American voters feel more confident that Senator Kerry will address their concerns and make a difference in dealing with the issues they care about."

A recent poll of Arab American voters in four key states has some bad news for both President Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry. The poll shows that the percentage of Arab Americans who believe that President Bush deserves to be reelected is a low 28 percent. When matched up against John Kerry, Bush loses 54% to 30%.

"Political shock in Spain!" blared ABC News on Sunday night, as regime change came to Madrid. Along with Tony Blair, Spain's conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar had been the staunchest of Bush allies.

One down, two to go.

The dialect of Aramaic that Jesus spoke would be very similar to that represented in the Aramaic texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the earliest writings of what is called Jewish Palestinian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic (found in texts from the second century and later), Newsom said.

There are still small communities of Aramaic speakers in Syria and Iraq, she said, which helps scholars understand the language better, since they can compare the ways in which words are used in a variety of contexts.

From the invention of the ice cream cone to the development of the Ford Mustang, the many accomplishments of Lebanese-Americans will be front and center at the new Arab-American museum set to open in January 2005 in Dearborn, Michigan.
...
As but one indication of the excitement behind the project, hundreds of Arab-Americans gathered at an old, abandoned furniture store in downtown Dearborn in late September 2003 to celebrate the museum’s groundbreaking.

There is talk of creating new League institutions such as an Arab-wide parliament and court of justice; of League decision-making becoming more effective; of ensuring that League Resolutions are followed up, rather than being allowed to gather dust, as so often in the past; of making member states and rulers accountable for their actions. Algeria has suggested that the office of Secretary General of the Arab League, traditionally held by an Egyptian, should be open to any Arab. With so much at stake, the proceedings of the Tunis Summit will be watched with close attention.

Perle's second brush with the law occurred a year later in 1970. An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle discussing with an Embassy official classified information which he said had been supplied to by a staff member on the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation was launched to identify the staff member, and quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt. The latter had been previously investigated in 1967 while a staff member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for suspected unauthorized transmission to an Israeli Government official of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967 war in the Middle East.

Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives! Helen Thomas calls him "the worst president ever." A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him "among the worst presidents in US history." No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him "the worst president the US has ever had." Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his government as the "worst ever." Even Bushie du jour, Christopher Hitchens, calls the man "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things." Only Fidel Castro, it would appear, has had kind words for our 43rd President. "Hopefully, he is not as stupid as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were."

Thus he [Benny Morris] eloquently shows why Zionism is a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral righteousness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means nuclear weapons, massive military force, alliances with unsavoury regimes, theft and manipulation of other people's resources, aggression and occupation, the crushing of Palestinian and all other forms of resistance to its survival, however inhuman - then so be it. The truth is of course that the problem for Zionism was always how to keep Palestine without the Palestinians. And hence today's Israeli anxieties about the so-called Palestinian 'demographic threat'. As the impasse of ending the intifada, despite draconian suppression, persists, there is a near panic over 'demographic spill over' diluting Israel's 'Jewish character'. Limor Livnat, Israel's education minister, put this eloquently in a radio interview. "We're involved here," she said, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the JewsIsraelis not a state of all its citizens" The Palestinian prime Minster's recent (tactical) proposal of a binational state has only increased the panic. Opinion polls show that 57 per cent of Israelis support transferring the Arabs (Haaretz, 31.12.03) and government ministers like Avigdor Liebrman advocate this idea quite openly.

The Arab American Chaldean Council (ACC), in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), will host a first-of-its-kind economic summit in Detroit on Feb. 23. The 2004 MBDA Minority Enterprise Business Summit will focus on efforts to expand opportunities for ethnic and minority-owned businesses in the Metropolitan Detroit area, home to the largest Arab community outside the Middle East.

But at least now I am starting to see why the return of the Golan Heights is so important to the Syrians. I'll worry more about the politics of the Golan, but at least now I know how the Heights came to be so empty: they were depopulated by war, not nature.

And a last thought: if Americans are going to take the ambitious role in the world that President Bush envisions for them--remaking the Middle East, heralding the final trumph of democracy and capitalism--we are all going to have to learn a lot more about the places we are seeking to remake. Because each place has a story, told once by politicians, and second time by real people.

FAAIR is an American non-profit non-governmental organization founded in 2001 to represent Arab-American interests in government and the media. FAAIR is dedicated to promoting fair policies and a better understanding of the issues pertaining to the Arab world, as well as presenting a more accurate and positive image of America to the Arab world. In this way, FAAIR aims to serve as a much-needed bridge between America and the Arab world.

According to the World Values Survey, a higher percentage of Muslims (around 88 percent) agreed with the statement, "I approve of democratic ideals," than Western Christians.

The newspaper claimed al-Qaida bought the weapons in suitcases in a deal arranged when Ukrainian scientists visited the Afghan city of Kandahar in 1998.

The riddle surrounding Iraq's WMD was solvable without resorting to war. For all the layers of deceit and obfuscation, there existed enough basic elements of truth and substantive fact about the disposition of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programs to permit the Gordian knot to be cleaved by anyone willing to try. Sadly, it seems that there was no predisposition on the part of those assigned the task of solving the riddle to do so.