Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ Category
The US had lofty goals for the Middle East and for West Asia. Thomas Carothers has been the architect of pushing democracy to the Middle East. Noam Chomsky in a recent interview mentioned him with reference to US machinations in South and Central Asia. Dr. Chomsky clearly stated the fact that the US is in Afghanistan and Pakistan because of oil in Central Asia. He also stated that the US only supports democracy when it suits its interests. Dr. Chomsky also said that US is is to convince the Pakistanis that what America wants is good for them. According to Dr. Chomsky, the US is not concerned by the civilians killed in drone bombings–it si concerned as being perceived as Anti-Pakistani.
Carnegie Vice President for Studies Thomas Carothers writes about fake US support for democracy in other countries.
Despite sweeping rhetoric about the global spread of democracy, the Bush Administration has significantly damaged U.S. democracy promotion efforts and increased the number of close ties with “friendly tyrants,” concludes a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Security interests, such as the war on terrorism, and U.S. energy needs have led the Bush Administration to maintain friendly, unchallenged relations with more than half of the forty-five “non-free” countries in the world.
Carnegie Vice President for Studies Thomas Carothers argues in his new report, U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush, that the main U.S. presidential candidates have voiced support for democracy promotion, but not yet outlined plans to put it back on track. Carothers analyzes the Bush Administration’s record on democracy promotion and its effect on democracy worldwide, and then presents fresh ideas about the role democracy promotion can and should play in future U.S. policies.
Key Report Conclusions and Recommendations:
• Democracy promotion must be decontaminated from the negative taint it has acquired under President Bush by improving U.S. compliance with the rule of law in the war on terrorism, ending the close association of democracy promotion with military intervention and regime change, and reducing the inconsistency of U.S. democracy policy by exerting real pressure for change on some key autocratic partners, such as Pakistan and Egypt.
• Democracy promotion must be repositioned in the war on terrorism. The idea that democratization will undercut the roots of terrorism is appealing but easily overstated. The next administration should deescalate rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion as the centerpiece of the war on terrorism while escalating actual commitment to the issue in pivotal cases where supporting democratic change can help diminish growing radicalization.
• U.S. democracy promotion must be recalibrated to account for larger changes in the international context. A host of ongoing developments, such as the rise of authoritarian capitalism, new trends in globalization, and the high price of oil and gas, have eroded the validity of a whole set of assumptions on which U.S. democracy promotion was built in the 1980s and 1990s. The next administration will need to respond in large and small ways, such as by drawing an explicit tie between energy policy and democracy policy, re-engaging internationally at the level of basic political ideas, reducing the America-centrism of U.S. democracy building efforts, and strengthening the core institutional sources of democracy assistance.
“More than ever, U.S. democracy promotion must square a daunting circle—it must embody strong elements of modesty, subtlety, and the awareness of limitations without losing the vitality, decisiveness, and creativity necessary for success,” the report concludes.
Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies—international politics and governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A leading authority on democratization and democracy promotion, he has researched and worked on democracy-building programs around the world for 20 years with many U.S., European, and international organizations. He has written numerous books on democracy promotion including most recently Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies and Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge.
It is pedagogical to note that the word “democracy” was popularized by the US and the UK to align the world and its own population for war in Europe. The word does not appear in the US constitution–nor does it appear in the Magna Carta. In fact Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton wrote reams against institution democracy in the US. The US supports democracy when the rulers stop supporting US policies. If the rulers are democratically elected, as in Chile’s Allande , or Venezuela’s Chavez, or Pakistan’s Bhutto, the US funds the oppostion and even supports the coups.
Filed under: Current Affairs, Pak CA, US CA, US Int Rel., US Poli 
The Indo-American relationship has been a subject of much discussion in the world. The Wall Street Journal on March 13th has written an article written by Sumit Ganguly acknowledges the low point in US-Indian relations, over exaggerates the importance of Putin’s sales call on Delhi, and warns the Obama Administration with an empty threat “If the United States doesn’t act quickly, much of the progress in U.S.-India relations over the past decade will be lost“. The Obama Administration for all its faults is pre-idocracy and has both the intelligence and foresight to know what is good for America.
Mr. Ganguly who lives and works in a nondescript institute in Singapore laments the fact that “Mr. Obama has spent far more time courting states like North Korea, China and Pakistan than he has India.” Neither Russia nor Portugal–nor any other has been power has the wherewithal to either challenge the US, nor the gumption to step into any breach anywhere. Prime Minister Putin is in Delhi for one purpose only–to get the Bharatis to pay up for equipment that Delhi has bought.
The US has evaluated the topography of international relations and chosen China over India. The US cannot afford to antagonize Beijing. This is a fact of life.
Condoleezza Rice’s loose talk of making India a superpower was not an edict of God–even though President Bush claimed to have direct discussions on foreign relations with the Holy Father.
Mr. Sumit accurately describes the foreign policy of Delhi when he narrates the history of the Cold war when Bharat deliberately allied itself with the Evil Empire for five decades. This was not an accident of history–this was well thought out policy to deny the US ascendance over the USSR. Bharat (aka India) voted against the US in the UN, denied it access to monitor Russia moves and forced America to find bases in Pakistan and Diego Garcia. Most importantly, Bharat supported the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and did everything in its power to destabilize Pakistan.
Evan A. Feignbaum has recently published an article about the need to have a strong and robust Indo-US relationship. He is a Senior Fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Feignbaum served during the George W. Bush administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia.
Mr. Feignbaum uses forecasts made by Goldman Sachs to showcase the agenda of building a robust relationship between India and America.
This is the same firm that could not even predict its own bankruptcy and demise. Goldman woud not have been able to survive had it not been a timely bailout from the US Treasury. Glodman Sachs (GS) is based on 200 Wall Street the heart of the incompetence, and corruption that brought down the entire western system of finance. GS was unable to see the malaise the filth next door on Wall Street. In October 2008 GS received $10 billion preferred stock investment from the U.S. Treasury–as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It is poignant to note that According to a 2009 Brand Asset Valuator survey taken of 17,000 people nationwide, the firm did not not have a positive reputation among investors–which forced the firm to become a regular bank. In September 23, 2008 Goldman Sacks had to sell $10 Billion of its stock to Berkshire Hathaway.
Can the predictions of Goldman Sachs be trusted? Should US policy be based on the Sachs vision, or will US policy based on the false notions bring profit to Americans?
Goldman Sachs has been trying to build up the profile of Delhi–to rake in profits. GS is a failed company–and has lost all credibility. It goes a bit beyond the failure of GS.
Goldman Sachs (GS) by Matt Taibii’s in his article, The Great American Bubble Machine, (July 9-23, 2009 in Rolling Stone) http://www.zerohedge.com/node/943. Taibii’s thesis is that in pursuit of its own profit, Goldman Sachs was involved in six major bubbles to the detriment of the nation. The six bubbles Taibii lists are:
- The Great Depression
- Tech Stocks
- The Housing Craze
- $4 A Gallon gasoline
- Rigging the Bailout, and
- Global Warming
Mr. Feignbaum hyperbole is typical of the Wall Street mindset which creates these bubbles:
The future of the U.S.-Indian relationship will depend on whether India chooses to align with the United States and whether it sustains its own economic and social changes — and on what policies Washington pursues in those areas that bear heavily on Indian interests.
Until the late 1990s, the United States often ignored India, treating it as a regional power in South Asia with little global weight. India’s weak and protected economy gave it little influence in global markets, and its nonaligned foreign policy caused periodic tension with Washington. When the United States did concentrate on India, it too often fixated on India’s military rivalry with Pakistan.
Mr. Feignbaum underestimated the propensity of the Bharatis to shoot themselves in the foot by being on the wrong side of history–time and again.
While eulogising Bharat, Mr. Feignbaum fails to comprehend the profound depth of penury in a country which houses most of the world poor and where 75% of the population lives below $2 per day. Sitting in America Mr. Feignbaum perhaps cannot see that Maoists who control 40% of the landmass of Bharat. Mr. Feignbaum also does not know about the plight of 450 million Dalits and Untouchables. He therefore purposefully narrates the Bollywood version of Bharat.
Today, however, India is dynamic and transforming. Starting in 1991, leaders in New Delhi — including Manmohan Singh, then India’s finance minister and now its prime minister — pursued policies of economic liberalization that opened the country to foreign investment and yielded rapid growth. India is now an important economic power, on track (according to Goldman Sachs and others) to become a top-five global economy by 2030. It is a player in global economic decisions as part of both the G-20 and the G-8 + 5 (the G-8 plus the five leading emerging economies) and may ultimately attain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. India’s trajectory has diverged sharply from that of Pakistan.
Bharat has grown at the rate of 3% per annum for the best pasrt of the century (last decade not withstanding). Bharat rose the bubble–all boats rise with a rising tide. There is no guarantee that Bharat can maintain the growth rate of the past decade. Mr. Feignbaum is right, Bharat has always supported the enemies of America. It sided with the USSR, not for a day or a month, but for six decades–and today continues its relationship with Russia. Can Delhi be trusted?
This is what Kanwal Sibal says in the Hindustan Times.
Western overtures to the Taliban constitute a significant diplomatic success for Pakistan. Its grit in resisting US pressure to act against the Afghan Taliban has been rewarded. With US Central Command Chief, General David Petraeus, now averse to Pakistan stirring up any more ‘hornets nests’ in the border areas, a self-confident Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is offering to mediate between the US-Nato and the Taliban. His only condition being that Pakistan’s need for a soft strategic depth in Afghanistan is recognised as an insurance against the Indian threat and limits are put on India’s presence in Afghanistan. Kayani’s stature in Pakistan has risen and Pakistan’s attitude towards India has hardened, as was evident during the recent foreign secretary-level talks in New Delhi last week.
India would need to rethink its options in Afghanistan. We cannot count on President Karzai as before. Our local popularity is a fragile base for retaining our long-term influence, unless we can affect power equations within the country. Anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan need stronger backing by Russia, the Central Asian countries, Iran and India. The US is disregarding India’s long-term strategic interests in the region; it is yielding to Pakistan’s disruptive ambitions in Afghanistan.
There is a hurricane of multimedia commentary on the failure of Bharati diplomacy in Afghanistan. Not only was Bharat excluded from the tripartite conference on Afghanistan in Tehran, Delhi was not invited on the regional conference in Istanbul, and sidelined (Times of India called it “given a 2nd row seat) in London.
Mr. Feignbaum however continues to spell out his own agenda.
With economic growth, India acquired the capacity to act on issues of primary strategic and economic concern to the United States. The United States, in turn, has developed a growing stake in continued Indian reform and success — especially as they contribute to global growth, promote market-based economic policies, help secure the global commons, and maintain a mutually favorable balance of power in Asia. For its part, New Delhi seeks a United States that will help facilitate India’s rise as a major power.
After the destruction of the USSR, cornered and isolated, Delhi pursued a policy of false appeasement towards the US. It then tried to drive a wedge between the US and China and tried to build itself as China’s rival. The Obama Administration is not interested in making enemies with China. After all Beijing is the new banker–thanks to the GS scandals.
Two successive Indian governments have pursued a strategic partnership with the United States that would have been unthinkable in the era of the Cold War and nonalignment. This turnaround in relations culminated in 2008, when the two countries signed a civil nuclear agreement. That deal helped end India’s nuclear isolation by permitting the conduct of civil nuclear trade with New Delhi, even though India is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Important as the agreement was, however, the U.S.-Indian relationship remains constrained. For example, although U.S. officials hold standing dialogues about nearly every region of the world with their counterparts from Beijing, Brussels, and Tokyo, no such arrangements exist with New Delhi.
Let us scrutinize GS a bit more and look Tablisi’s list. According to Taibii:
Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap…with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selIing themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s-and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. (Pg. 54)
How can this happen in a democracy? He argues that “…organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” (pg. 53) Taibii alleges that the government is penetrated-&-gamed by Goldman:
“…Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers – one of Goldman’s last real competitors – collapse without intervention…The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman…Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson…put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the [TARP] funds.” (pg. 98-99)
The average person and the nation suffer…because as Taibii states:
“And here’s the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon…after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008? Fourteen million dollars. That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008…The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year…Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on the same untaxed income.” (pg. 100)
Before Delhi begins sprinting, it needs to walk. Before it can walk, it needs to have the ability to crawl. Before Bharat sets its goals on Superpower status, it needs to become a regional power. In order to become a regional power, it has to extirpate penury on its shores and earn the respect of its neighbors. Bharat has neither the friendship, nor the admiration of any of its neighbors. Enemies run near and abroad. The Bharati mentality has even made Australians leery of Indians. The temple indoctrination has to be replaced with modern education–and Pornywood is not the reality of Slumdog Hindustan–Earth, Wind, and Fire is.
India’s limited choices. It is companies like GS that have been building the resume of Delhi and pushing companies to outsource their business operations to Bharat. The GS type of predictions are not worth the paper they are written on. Bharat’s deep cavities, its internal chaos, its communal strife, its horrid productivity and its communal schisms are huge impediments to its growth. India should reinvent itself
Themes: “Goldman Sachs”, Scandal, ponzi, “Matt Taibii”, Stanford, Madoff,trading Stocks: GS
Filed under: Current Affairs, India CA, Politics, US CA, US Poli Tagged: U.S.-Indian relationship, Wall Street 
Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav sees an international conspiracy to weaken Bharat (aka India). Mr. Yadav thinks that by increasing the women in the Bharati parliament, the parliament will be run by 85% of even 100% women. This is seen as a major catastrophe by Mr. Yadav. Mr. Yadav and his acolytes give the example of Pakistan, Lanka, and Bangladesh–where women have ruled the countries– as reasons for not having more women in the Bharati parliament.
Others in the party think of women as incompetent and unable to hold public office.
All of these forget the fact that Sonia Gandhi holds the strings that make Manmohand Singh use his hands or mouth. He can do nothing that does not have the approval of Soniajee!
Lucknow: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav on Sunday said the women’s reservation bill was an “international conspiracy” to weaken Indian democracy and said it would ultimately lead to an all-women parliament that would be “alarming” for the country.
“The women’s reservation bill will eventually weaken Indian democracy and it is really unfortunate that the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government at the Centre was playing into the hands of those whose only intent was to break the backbone of Indian democracy,” Mulayam Singh said at a press conference here.
He was of the view that 33 per cent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament.
“The manner in which 33 per cent seats would be reserved for women in every election, would lead to sending about 80-85 per cent women to the parliament,” he said.
Terming that as an “alarming situation”, he asked, “just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs?”
He claimed that the reservation bill would further deprive members of the minority communities, tribals and Dalits from entering parliament or state legislatures.
“As it is, as many as a dozen states had not elected a single Muslim at the last election; therefore it was extremely important that the bill provides for reservation of some seats for women belonging to the minority community, OBCs and Dalits,” he stressed.
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” Mulayam Singh added.
He said that Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president Lalu Prasad and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) chief Sharad Yadav were also with him on the issue and that they would continue to fight together against the bill. IANS: Published on Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 15:10, Updated on Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 15:50 in Politics section
It is poignant to note that several states could not even find one qualified Muslim candidate to send to parliament
Filed under: Current Affairs, India CA 
Adelaide is Australia’s festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper, and Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy.
What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?”
While the veracity of this celebrated remark is sometimes disputed, its spirit is not. Stricken with pneumonia, the former prime minister John Howard dragged himself out of bed to pay obeisance to the man to whom he owed many empty buckets. His successor, Kevin Rudd, scurried to an obligatory audience with Murdoch in New York prior to his election. This is standard across the planet. Before he took power, Tony Blair was flown to an island off Queensland to stand at the blue Newscorp lectern and pledge Thatcherism and media de-regulation to the jowled figure nodding in the front row. The next day, the Sun lauded Blair as one who “has vision [and] speaks our language on morality and family life”.
Murdoch knows that little separates the main political parties in Australia, Britain and America. He plays the man. In 1972, he backed Australia’s Gough Whitlam who revealed a radical reformer, even threatening to expose America’s spy bases. A furious Murdoch swung his newspapers against Whitlam with stories so outrageously skewed that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. That has never been repeated.
Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are the promotion of war and jingoism, American foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism toward Aborigines, the world’s most impoverished indigenous people, according to the UN. This antiquated cold warring is not due entirely to the Murdoch press, of course, but the agenda is. When the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto was about to be overthrown by his own people, the editor-in-chief of The Australian Paul Kelly led a delegation to of editors of most of Australia’s principal newspapers to Jakarta. With Kelly at his side, the mass murderer, whom the Murdoch papers promoted as a “moderate”, accepted the tribute of each.
Murdoch’s most unabashed, if entertaining retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian. On one his adoring trips to the United States, home of Murdoch HQ, Sheridan wrote, “The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal … why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia? …” He was referring, as if instinctively, to his master’s pay TV company, Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames “Pilgerist Chomskyism” for “ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama bin Lenin, sorry Laden.”
One of the most effective campaigns in the Australian murdochracy has been the whitewashing of a bloody colonial past, including a series of attacks on the distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide, Professor Henry Reynolds, and the director of the National Museum of Australia, Dawn Casey, for having dared to present the truth about indigenous suffering. Australia’s great maverick historian, the late Manning Clark, was smeared by Murdoch’s Courier-Mail as a Red agent, then as a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch’s London Sunday Times smeared the Labour MP Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.
Something similar awaits those who question the manipulation of the remembrance of Australia’s blood sacrifice for imperialism, old and new. Aimed at the young, a maudlin “new patriotism” reaches an annual climax on April 25, the anniversary of the first world war disaster at Gallipoli known as Anzac Day. The message is undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia’s highest calling.
Such false flags are flown constantly for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers like Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in the 1930s. The debate about state war crimes has all but bypassed Australia. That a former and current British prime minister have been summoned before the Chilcot enquiry in London is viewed with bemusement as nothing like it would happen here. Yet John Howard, who also invaded Iraq, holds something of a record for having claimed 30 times in one speech that he knew Saddam Hussein had a “massive programme” of weapons of mass destruction.
The national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has long been intimidated by the Murdoch press in the obsessive manner of the campaign waged against the BBC. Funded directly by governments, the ABC has none of the nominal independence and protection of Britain’s system of a TV licence fee as the resource for public broadcasting. Last year, HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch, was awarded a lucrative “partnership” with the ABC’s publishing arm, ABC Books.
In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world’s media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we shall all be citizens of a murdochracy. Welcome To The World’s First Murdochracy By John Pilger 11 March, 2010
Johnpilger.com, www.johnpilger.com
Filed under: Current Affairs Tagged: murdochracy 
SAN FRANCISCO – A coalition of Arab-American cultural organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area have launched a grassroots organizing campaign designed to send a clear message to Washington: that they, along with every other Arab in America, are in fact Arab, and not white.
At issue is the format of the 2010 Census form, which has boxes for more than a dozen different racial categories but no racial or ethnic category for people of Arab descent.
In response, community activists have launched a grassroots canvassing campaign to encourage Arabs living throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to complete the 2010 Census by checking the “other” box in Section 9 and write in “Arab.”
The drive was launched at an organizing meeting last Sunday that brought together representatives and volunteers from local Arab social service and cultural organizations.
Loubna Qutami, a coordinator with the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC), one of the organizations behind the campaign, said for far too long, Arabs have been classified as “other,” “Caucasian,” or “white.”
“We don’t want to be subsumed under the category of white,” Qutami said. Arabs “don’t identify as white, and don’t identify as black either,” she added. “We’re still so misunderstood.”
“There is this idea that Arabs are refugees or new immigrants because we’re invisible,” she added. “There’s a distortion in our identity, that we’re camel riders, nomads, when in fact Yemenis were part of the labor movement with Cesar Chavez.”
Qutami said that there is also a “hyper visibility – that we’re terrorists, and that’s when people want to know we’re Arab,” she said. “We need to have a voice.”
She argued that the time is now for Arabs to mobilize as a community, and hopes that these efforts will lead to establishing an “Arab” box to check-off for the 2020 Census.
Undercounting Arabs
According to the 2000 Census, the number of Arabs living in the United States was 1.25 million, a figure that many involved in this initiative believe is inaccurate, since Arabs traditionally have larger families than other ethnic groups in the United States. The Arab American Institute estimates the national population to be more than 3.5 million. Community activists say both numbers are too low.
One reason for the undercount, Qutami said, is that without a box to check Arabs write in a variety of terms – for example, Middle-Eastern, Arab-American or Palestinian — on the Census questionnaire, and the numbers get stratified.
Another organizer, Lily Haskell, who is of Moroccan descent and is with the Arab Resource and Organizing Committee (AROC), echoed Qutami’s views.
She said only by identifying as Arab on the Census will legislators know how many Arabs are actually in their constituency. Also, in certain parts of San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, where new immigrant Arab communities have settled, having such Census data will help ensure that those areas have translators in vital settings like in hospitals to accommodate those in need.
That is exactly why community organizers must canvass neighborhoods on foot to convey this to other Arabs, explained Rama Kased, a coordinator with the Arab Youth Organization (AYO).
Canvassing on Foot
“Canvassing is the oldest way of doing outreach- it was done before Facebook and texting,” Kased said, “this is how you can build off of what they are telling you, it’s really personal and the person feels like their voice counts.” That, she added, was how community organizers and volunteers can connect with and empower other Arabs.
Kased also said the canvassers are reassuring everyone by pointing out that, “we’re doing this for our own community, to unify our community; we’re not doing this for the government.”
That same afternoon, 20 volunteers in 7 groups of 2-3 reached out to 60 Arab-owned liquor stores, markets, delis, cafes, and restaurants in various districts of San Francisco.
Organizers say that this is the first of several planned outreach and awareness days, where they plan to cover other parts of the Bay Area with Arab communities, such as the East Bay, Peninsula, and South Bay.
Similar efforts are also underway in Arab communities throughout the United States like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago. Town hall meetings are being organized and Arab newspapers are writing short, “news you can use” articles that explain how to fill out the Census questionnaire.
Canvassers were wearing T-shirts depicting an Arab woman in a kuffiyeh and the U.S. Census form. They brought large posters that student artists designed, which outlined the need to complete the Census and write-in Arab. They hung them in business windows with each owner’s permission. They also supplied each business informational postcards in Arabic and English about how to fill out the Census, to leave on their counters, in addition to pamphlets outlining social and cultural services available to Arabs in the Bay Area.
Unfamiliar with the Census
Several business owners they encountered were unfamiliar with the Census or its importance, and said many Arabs have always felt left out of the process and kept uninformed.
Arabs, like Samaan Azar, a mini-market owner on 16th and Mission, was one of them. When Ramsey El-Qare and Homa Nader – campaign volunteers representing the ACCC – explained the Census to him, Azar was disappointed. Over the years, he said, he has always had to justify his racial and ethnic identity because there was never a place for him. Azar said he was eager to share the information with all of his other Arab friends and family in the United States.
“We need to be recognized for who we are,” he told the group of canvassers before him.
A few blocks south, Maher Assad, another store owner shared Azar’s concerns.
“This is so frustrating, we are never counted in anything,” he said. “But doing this, these are baby steps, it’s a great way to start,” he said.
But the canvassers encountered some business owners who did not welcome their initiative.
Lubna Morrar, a campaign volunteer representing AROC, said that one business owner she spoke to had been living in the United States for twenty years. “He told me that he wasn’t going to fill out the Census, he didn’t care and he didn’t see the relevance,” said Morrar.
But, she added that this canvassing experience helped several other uninformed Arabs realize the importance of filling out the Census and filling in Arab, anyway.
She said that one well-known restaurant owner who had been in the United States for nearly 30 years was not responsive at first. “But then I asked him if he would identify as ‘white,’ since we’re usually lumped in with ‘white,’ or ‘white-other,’” she said.
“‘No way, I am not white, we are not white, we are not anything except Arab, and if this is what we have to do, then I support it,’” she recounted. Arab Americans Organize to Get Counted in Census
by Suzanne Manneh
Filed under: Current Affairs, US Poli Tagged: Arab Americans 
