Governor Corzine signed an executive order Friday in a ceremony at the Passaic County Technical Institute creating the New Jersey Arab-American Heritage Commission.

The 25-member commission will coordinate events observing the heritage, culture and history of Arab-Americans, as well as work with schools to ensure that curriculum reflects the state’s diverse population....

Before signing the order, Corzine and Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, referred to remarks made by Colin Powell on "Meet the Press" Sunday, when he took on false rumors that presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is Muslim and asked, "Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country?" Powell concluded his comments with a reference to the death of a Muslim soldier from New Jersey, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan of Manahawkin, who was killed in Iraq on Aug. 6, 2007.

Pascrell emphasized Paterson’s strong Arab community and the need to counter stereotypes and racial profiling.

"The day of litmus tests over who is a good American and who is not a good American is over," Pascrell said. [Link]

An Arab man employed at a biotech company on the UBC campus has been awarded $11,599 in damages after the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal found he was a victim of racial profiling by colleagues, which led to him being reported to the RCMP as a suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The case was so egregious that the tribunal said it would have awarded Ghassan Asad much more than the $6,000 he had sought as compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect.

"If it were possible to increase the award beyond $6,000 I would do so," said tribunal member Abraham Okazaki, given the insensitivity and lack of care by Kinexus Bioinformatics Corp.'s senior management. [Link]

A jury has awarded $337,000 to a former Missouri Department of Natural Resources supervisor who claimed he was subject to a hostile work environment after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq.

Mohamad Alhalabi, who is of Lebanese descent, told the jury in St. Louis County Circuit Court during a two-week trial that his bosses did nothing to alleviate ethnic slurs, including personal attacks in anonymous anti-Muslim fliers. [Link]

After rifling through every civil lawsuit in Portland month after month, you start to cast aside certain suits almost without a second glance. Auto wrecks. Slip-and-falls. And the always-popular wrongful termination.

This suit comes from the latter category, but it caught our eye for a colorful (alleged) quote that's included—supposedly verbatim—in the complaint. Journalists like to use quotes because they bring the characters in our stories to life. I'd like to encourage local lawyers always to do the same in their court filings.

In a lawsuit filed Friday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Salahadin N. Treki, 48, of Newberg, claims he was hired in June 2005 as a full-time moving and storage worker at Rose City Moving & Storage Co. in North Portland.

According to the lawsuit, Treki faced discrimination on the job because he is a Muslim of Libyan origin. The lawsuit says he was denied a pay increase and was falsely accused of taking long breaks.

But the most serious charge is the bombshell. According to the lawsuit, in June 2006 Treki's foreman (who is not named in the lawsuit) confronted Treki and said (money quote):

"You fucking Arab terrorist motherfucker, I will kill you." [Link]

A Philadelphia woman,
Kia Reid, was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Philadelphia to eight
months confined to a community corrections center as part of two years
supervised probation, following her conviction on a federal civil rights
charge, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division
Rena J. Comisac and U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania announced.

At her guilty plea on June 22, 2007, Reid admitted to committing a
federal hate crime by sending a note threatening violence to her supervisor
at work, who is Arab and Muslim American, in an attempt to interfere with
the supervisor's federally protected employment activity. During the
early-morning hours of Monday, Oct. 2, 2006, Reid left an anonymous
threatening letter in her supervisor's office at the Sheraton Suites Hotel
in Philadelphia. Reid had affixed words and phrases which appeared to be
cut from publications, including the phrases "REMEMBER 9/11," "you and your
kids will pay," "tie onto the fence," "strategically planned," and "death."

"Attacks against individuals because of their race, ethnicity, or
religion are contemptible and un-American, and will not be tolerated,"
Acting Assistant Attorney General Rena J. Comisac said. [Link]

Prejudice against Arabs overlaps religious bias among students

Zeinab Sleiman has faced modern teenage temptations, such as drinking and partying. What helps her keep her distance is the guidance set down by her Muslim upbringing.

The 18-year-old graduated from Fordson High School, a public school here. Most students are Arab-Americans, and many are Muslims like Sleiman.

"I think my religion helps me in that way that it forbids it, so I just know that it's wrong," said Sleiman, who served on the mayor's youth advisory council. "I think, 'In the long run, is this going to help me?' If not, then I don't think I should be choosing it."

While most Arab and Muslim youths share this view, balancing beliefs and American society can be challenging, especially because many non-Arab-Americans are still ignorant and suspicious of Islam.

David Crumm, who has been the religion reporter for the Detroit Free Press for 21 years, sees those challenges all the time in his news reporting. He said non-Muslim Americans knew almost nothing about Muslims in their communities in the 1980s.

But since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Crumm said, Americans are more aware of Muslim Americans, and that's both good and bad.

"Nine-eleven was a tragic event for all Americans, for people around the world, and especially for people in this community, because they knew, and most thinking people knew, that even though these people who committed these terrorist acts claimed to be Muslims, the claim that they made was not really the true Islam," he said.

Speaking with kids from high schools and youth organizations in the Dearborn area, Y-Press learned about some of the stereotypes many Americans hold about Arab-Americans and Muslims.

The issues affecting Arab teens range from everyday high school challenges to discrimination.

The Abusalah family, natives of Palestine, ordered their meals at a restaurant and watched as the white family next to them got more attention from the waiter: Their order was taken first, the food arrived faster, and the waiter was simply friendlier.
He barely smiled at the Arab-American family.

"It's all the time," said Reema Abusalah, 15. "We always get the dirty looks and stares. It's not around Dearborn usually, but when we leave Dearborn, we see people who are not Arab stare at us, give us dirty looks and look funny at us."

Reema feels that people who don't live in diverse communities such as Dearborn rely on biased opinions to generate a picture of Arab-Americans.

For example, a lot of movies cast Arabs as villains, and the news media reports more negative stories about Arabs than positive ones.

Yusef Saad, 16, saw a documentary called "Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People." Arabs come out looking bad in such films as "Back to the Future" and even the Disney movie, "Aladdin," Yusef said.

For Muslim teenage girls wearing the traditional Islamic hijab, or headscarf, stereotypes are sometimes intensified.

"They think that all Muslim girls are oppressed and forced to put on the hijab. Well, it's actually the other way around," said Nour Hijazi, 17. "We want people to look at us and not evaluate how we look, but actually how we are and the way we treat people."

Noor Salem, 14, gets angry when news programs link reading the Quran to suicide bombing, because she knows that's not what Islam stands for.

"(Discrimination) affects everyone because once you start discriminating on one type of person, that person might discriminate back and you might pass it along," Noor said. "You know, discrimination and racism are contagious."

Crumm is hopeful that a thoughtful education will help broaden understanding of Islam.

"There are some people who have a really intelligent and balanced view of diversity and the Muslim community. There are some who still have a very bigoted view because they haven't learned enough, or what they've learned has been inaccurate or skewed," he said.

Jamal Agemy, 15, is half-Lebanese, half-black, and sometimes has experienced dual prejudices from the two cultures. His mother is a Christian, and his father is a Muslim.

"The thing is with the religion, Arab people and Christian people agree on almost 97 percent of the story in the olden days," Jamal said. "And the three percent that they argue on they . . . explode on it and throw the 97 percent out and continue to argue."

The discrimination young Arab-Americans face actually has a plus side, several Arab youths said.

"I think discrimination has made us all a bit stronger because we experience a little bit more than regular people do," Jamal said. "I think it prepares us a little bit more, and it helps us become more mature when the time is right."

It's also made him become an outspoken advocate for his people.

"We're not the people you see on CNN every day, bombing the airports," Jamal said. "We have a conscience, and we are good people. You know, we wake up in the morning and we put on our pants one leg at a time like everyone else." [Link]

hey preferred bookstores or hookah bars to mosques. They stopped listening to pop music and instead surfed Web sites promoting radical Islam. They threw away their baseball caps and grew beards.

New York Police Department intelligence analysts have concluded those were some of the telltale signs of homegrown terrorists in the making -- a mounting threat as grave as that from established terror groups like al-Qaida.

An NYPD report released Wednesday warns of a "radicalization" process in which young men -- otherwise unremarkable legal immigrants from the Middle East -- grow disillusioned with life in America and adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to jihad.

"Hopefully, the better we're informed about this process, the more likely we'll be to detect and disrupt it," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said while presenting the findings at a briefing of private security executives at police headquarters.

The findings drew swift criticism from an Arab anti-discrimination group, which accused the NYPD of stereotyping and of contradicting recent federal warnings that the chief terror threat remains foreign. [Link]

Four Arab-American drivers who said they were harassed by their supervisors at a FedEx Corp. facility in Wilmington have filed a lawsuit alleging they were subjected to a steady flow of vitriol and discrimination.

In a lawsuit the plaintiffs' lawyer said was served on FedEx yesterday, the drivers said managers called them terrorists, asked them if they were sending money to Osama bin Laden, made a call to the FBI that prompted one of them to be questioned, and restricted their delivery routes.

"FedEx has abdicated its responsibility of employers to make sure that their drivers are not discriminated against," said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston lawyer representing the men. "This is a particularly egregious example of an employer abdicating its responsibility. . . . They [the Arab-American employees] all came to this country because they wanted a better life for their families, and this is what they got."

FedEx spokesman Maury Lane has declined to comment on the specific allegations in the lawsuit.

"The company has a zero tolerance policy on this kind of behavior," Lane said in a recent interview. "If this behavior is reported or seen, we will immediately investigate and terminate any employee at any level guilty of these actions. These contractors are our lifeline to our customers. We wouldn't do anything to jeopardize those working relationships."

In a complaint filed in July 2006 with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, Loay el-Dagany, from Kuwait, said his supervisor, David Goyette, repeatedly called him a terrorist and threw packages at him.

Goyette also asked Dagany if he was planning to send money to bin Laden or Al Qaeda, Dagany said. After Dagany complained about route changes, Goyette told him not to lose it and "blow up my car," according to the complaint.....

"We were treated as less than human beings," said Dagany, who has worked for FedEx since 2003. "I really just want people to know that in a big company like this, where a lot of foreigners work, people shouldn't be treated that way."....

FedEx has argued that the plaintiffs, who worked for the company's ground package division, were independent contractors and ineligible for protection under state antidiscrimination laws.

In March, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination ruled the employees' complaints were valid, clearing the way for the drivers to pursue their case. They are seeking punitive damages similar to a discrimination case filed last year by drivers of Lebanese descent in California, where a jury awarded $61 million to two FedEx employees who contended that a manager had harassed them with racial slurs. A judge later reduced the judgment to $12.5 million. (FedEx, which has 275,000 employees and contractors, earned $35 billion in revenues in fiscal 2007.)

The lawsuit filed June 29 in Middlesex Superior Court says Dagany, Montaser Foad Harara, who is of Palestinian descent, Oukhayi Ibrahim of Morocco, and Yasir Sati from Sudan experienced a "pervasive hostile work environment and have been treated differently and less favorably than non-Arab, non-Muslim drivers in the terms and conditions of their employment."

The suit adds that the men were involuntarily transferred to an office comprised mainly of minorities, had their routes made less profitable, and were subject to religious and ethnic slurs.[Link]

When she was working as a nurse at a Washington, D.C., hospital, Samar Al Rayyis of Saudi Arabia recalls that a patient abruptly asked her, "Are you a terrorist?"

Al Rayyis told her story today at a panel titled, "From the Victim's Mouth," which was part of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's annual convention being held in Washington through Monday.

"I am taking care of you, for God's sake, the whole day and you are asking me if I am a terrorist," Al Rayyis recalled of her first thought.

"I said, `Excuse me, I am not a terrorist,'" said Al Rayyis, who earned her nursing degrees in the United States and is living in Virginia.

She told about her ongoing difficulties in renewing her work permit, despite the critical shortage of nurses in the United States.

"I am sure this is because I am from an Arabic descent," she said, adding that she hasn't even been able to get an interim work permit while waiting.

The tie-up, she says, prevents her from accepting one of several nursing job offers from hospitals. " I can't work. And I haven't done anything illegal," she said.

The ADC held the panel to highlight difficulties encountered by people of Arab heritage or who are Muslim. [Link]

Abe Dabdoub calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of his family members live in Canada, and on each of Mr. Dabdoub’s 14 trips to visit them since last August, on his way back across the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, the Customs and Border Patrol agents have sent him through a security gantlet, he says.

He has been fingerprinted 14 times, his body searched 9 times, been handcuffed 4 times and isolated in a separate detention room 13 times. On the fourth trip, the border patrol agents started subjecting his wife to similar scrutiny.

Two months ago, he sought relief through a new online system that the Department of Homeland Security trumpets as a one-stop shop for travelers who think they have been wronged, the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, or TRIP. But the problem continues unabated and, typical of such cases, no one in the federal government nor his elected representatives will tell him why he is being singled out.

“I’ve always believed that in America if there is some type of injustice going on, that if you make it known to the right people, it will get taken care of,” said Mr. Dabdoub, 39, who was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents. They moved to Canada when he was 5.

“This time I’ve lost faith in the system; it’s either indifferent or inefficient or both,” Mr. Dabdoub, an engineer and manager of a plant in Cleveland that provides steel to automobile companies, added, in a telephone interview. [Link]