Tag: arabic
Sanders Releases Radio Ad In Arabic Before Michigan Primary

Sanders Releases Radio Ad In Arabic Before Michigan Primary

Less than a week before the Michigan primaries, the Sanders campaign released a radio ad in the state with a simple, repetitive theme: stand together. This time, the Vermont senator’s message was in Arabic.

Dearborn, Michigan is home to the largest concentration of Arabs in the country. Some 40,000 predominantly Muslim Arabs live there today, and as a result of the racism pandered by the Republican candidates throughout this election, the vast majority Dearborn’s Muslims are planning to vote for a Democrat.

The Arabic language ad made the choice eminently clear for listeners.

“Republican candidates are attacking Muslims because of their religion. Bernie Sanders wants to end the racism and hatred that divides us.

“When a Muslim student voiced her fears of the hateful rhetoric in this election, Bernie responded, by saying: If we stand for anything at all we have got to stand together to end all forms of racism and I will lead that effort as President of the United States.

“On Tuesday, March 8th, vote for the candidate who stands for all of us: Bernie Sanders.”

Sanders, whose campaign has already shared a revolutionary-themed poster in Arabic, is attempting to woo voters to his campaign against big banks and bigots alike. The effort is backed by an uncoordinated campaign by several social media groups aimed at boosting Arab and Muslim political participation in the 2016 election.

On Facebook, the group Muslim Americans for Bernie posted a video of an Ohio imam going door-to-door and asking for people to vote for Sanders. Arabs for Bernie, a Twitter account, posted a similar message after Sanders’s rally in Dearborn:

The 2016 presidential election has awakened the Muslim vote in America. Seventy-three percent of registered Muslim voters have said they are planning to vote in the next election, with the vast majority going to Clinton and Sanders.

Turns out calling for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” clearly hasn’t gone over too well.

Photo: A printed out sign found in Hamtramck, Michigan asking voters to choose Bernie Sanders in the upcoming Michigan primaries. Graham Liddell via Twitter

Texas Mayor Calls The Feds On “Arabic Banner”

Texas Mayor Calls The Feds On “Arabic Banner”

A day after the discovery in Lubbock, Texas, of a sign in Arabic on the side of the city’s unfinished city hall, an arrest has been made related to the incident. A press release from the Lubbock Police Department announced the arrest of Kyle Alexander Holub, 22, for criminal trespass.

Just yesterday, Lubbock’s mayor called local and federal investigators to investigate a large banner in Arabic that was found hung on the side of its unfinished city hall. Though the sign translated to “love for everyone,” Mayor Glen Robertson, in a letter to City Manager James Loomis, demanded the state investigate the sinister banner:

“I am requesting that the flag be removed immediately, that we get an accurate translation of the flag, and that Chief Stevens notify the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and our Lubbock County Sheriff’s Department. I am also requesting that we take whatever steps are necessary to secure the building and ensure that this does not happen again. I fully understand that we must gather more facts before we make a knee jerk reaction but I am concerned on several levels.”

An accurate translation took all of a few seconds, most likely, given that Lubbock is home to at least one mosque. Failing that, Lubbock is home to numerous universities, like Texas Tech, whose Director of the Language Laboratory, David Villarreal, translated the message for everythinglubbock.com.

Fox News and the New York Post posted ominously worded headlines regarding the incident. America’s most-watched news channel’s headline read “Arabic Banner Mysteriously Appears On Texas Building,” while America’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper headline read “Mysterious Arabic Banner Hung From Top Of Texas High-Rise,” as if to suggest an attack on the city of Lubbock were imminent.

But with the news that a white college student committed the trespassing offense, Lubbock can rest easy. Meanwhile, the rate of suspected hate crimes against Muslims has tripled since the Paris attacks.

Photo: EverythingLubbock.com

One Arabic Sentence Closes Schools, And Ignorance Wins

One Arabic Sentence Closes Schools, And Ignorance Wins

There are many good reasons to cancel school. Snow. A hurricane. No heat. A busted water pipe.

But until last week, I had never heard of canceling schools because of what they were teaching.

I have now.

An entire school system in Virginia was shut down Friday — 10,000 students, all kept at home — after a teacher gave an Arabic calligraphy assignment. The assignment, to copy a line as written, was from a standard textbook in a standard class, world geography, with the subject being world religions.

Unfortunately, the line used was the Muslim statement of faith, which translates to “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

The kids were asked to try writing it.

They went home and told their parents.

Look out.

Emails flew. Phones rang off the hook. Anger simmered and boiled over. The textbook identified the shahada as the Islamic statement of faith, but according to reports, it was never translated to the students, nor was it taught as dogma. It was basically an art project, to see how difficult calligraphy is to reproduce. Chances are most kids had no idea what they were scribbling.

Nonetheless, parents said their kids were being brainwashed. Some called for the teacher’s firing. (Don’t they always call for a teacher’s firing?) Some, the local sheriff told the media, wanted the teacher’s head “on a stake.”

With all the angry smoke rising, law enforcement suggested — and the school board agreed — that every single school in the county be closed Friday.

And all learning screeched to a halt.

Now, there are several legitimate questions in this story. First, is there no other example of Arabic calligraphy? Didn’t anyone involved — teacher, principal, textbook editor — realize a statement of faith is too volatile for a glorified penmanship lesson?

But having asked those questions, here’s another: Do we really need to shut an entire school district over this? Have we so quickly paralyzed ourselves with fear? Are we that spooked by the mere letters of the Muslim faith? And who were the police most concerned about — Muslims, or those who hate them?

“I will not have my children sit under a woman who indoctrinates them with the Islam religion,” a mother told a Virginia TV station.

I understand the anger. It was a foolish exercise. But I’m pretty sure the teacher, whose name is Cheryl LaPorte, was trying less to indoctrinate than to accelerate, hoping to work her way through the Standards of Learning tests that are required by her job.

Now that the district has removed that sentence from the class, she can use a different line to teach the calligraphy lesson. Problem solved.

But not over.

There is a reason book burning is so unnerving. So is shutting a school. Fear stymies education. It paralyzes the mind.

Ironically, the limiting of education — and the exclusion of girls from learning at all — is a key criticism we level against fundamentalist religions — including Islam. We’ve never minded doing Christmas shows in public schools that feature Jewish, Hindu or Muslim students.

Yet here we are, closing down an entire school system — with no actual threats being made — because of a copied Arabic sentence?

I imagine the most hysterical parents would prefer their kids never learn anything about the Muslim faith, never hear the word “Allah,” perhaps never be made aware that 1.6 billion people in the world — nearly 25 percent of the global population — practice that religion.

But ignoring Islam is a clear path toward demonizing it. And if you think that’s how you win a war on terror, think again: Polarizing faiths is the surest way to make certain they attack each other.

The Islamic State would like nothing better than if we made every Muslim feel unwelcome here. People go where they feel wanted. If we remove the freedom of religion principles that make this country great, we might as well set up an express train between the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalists.

There will always be problems. There will always be issues. And, by the way, terror attacks were not invented this year, this decade or even this century.

But learning — open learning — is essential to a free society. It is the bread of a peaceful culture.

Knowledge is power. Ignorance sparks fear. Shutting down schools just means the latter is winning.

(C) 2015 BY THE DETROIT FREE PRESS DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: Ahmed Bin-Baz via Flickr