Uncategorized | Cultural Glimpse

August 25, 2013

Documentary about my mom – Coming in September!

Remember the three beautiful filmmakers from France who honored my home with their visit? Well, they just informed me that the documentary about my mother’s experience in attaining her US citizenship is coming out next month. It will be posted on their website, http://www.mybelovedenemy.com , sometime in September.

My Beloved Enemy is a project portraying Iraqi-American stories ten years after the start of the war. The film crew toured different parts of the United States to show the challenges and triumphs that various Iraqi-American individuals and families face.

With all the misconceptions and stereotypes that exist out there in the mainstream media, this kind of project is especially important today. It shows the everyday truth that is neglected, overlooked and undermined. Yet it is this truth that could help us put an end to unnecessary killings, even wars, that were ignited by misconceptions and stereotypes.

It is also important because in 2007, the U.S. refugee program began admitting Iraqis to the country, to date some 85,000. Still more are entering the United States every day. What better way to know the people who are to become our neighbors than to watch a real heartfelt documentary about them!

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June 9, 2013

A World Without Prejudice

I heard a knock on my door. My daughter assumed it was her uncle and rushed to open it. It was not her uncle but a lovely well-dressed family of a mother, father and their daughter. Jehovah’s Witnesses have come to my door before, and I am never displeased by their presence. Sometimes it is an elderly woman with her grandchild or two sisters or friends, or whomever. But they are always polite and sensitive and I appreciate that they have taken the time to get up early Saturday mornings, dress as if they are going to church, and pass out literature that one can choose to read or not read. Nothing is forced.

Yesterday’s literature especially caught my attention. It was entitled “A World Without Prejudice: When?” and it talked about how discrimination and prejudice is nonexistent in heaven.
“God is not partial,” said the Christian apostle Peter (Acts 10:34,35) having received a divine vision in which he was told: “You stop calling defiled the things God has cleansed.” Or simply created?

Fifty years ago the work of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., caused over 100 countries to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. Other global initiatives were adopted in the decades that followed. Yet in 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated “Nevertheless, racism continues to cause suffering for millions of people around the world.”

What’s the answer? Attempts to eliminate prejudice must not merely curb discriminatory acts but also change a person’s thoughts and feelings toward people of another group.

Myself, I’ve always thought that the best way to do this is not just by reading about their issues, but to actually spend time with another group of people, invite them to your home, share a meal, visit their place of worship, ask them questions. We do not have to travel overseas to meet a new people and culture. It’s right here in our neighborhood, waiting to be discovered.

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Video | March 10, 2013

The Masters and a Bee Gees Song

One of the first English-speaking music bands we listened to as we awaited our Visa to the United States was the Bee Gees. When we arrived to our new country in February 1981, we continued to relish this band’s top-hit songs.

Last night, we went to the Masters Restaurant in Madison Heights. My family and I have frequented this restaurant for years for its family-friendly atmosphere, its delicious and reasonably priced dishes and the nice sounding piano lounge singer who plays every Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

At my request, Gordy Hunter sang one of the Bee Gees songs yesterday. It was the first time I’d ever talked to him, as our table was right beside him. Normally, our group is a lot larger and we end up either sitting on the second floor balcony or on the other side of the restaurant.

My memory went back to the olden days, before all of us ten siblings got married and formed our own families. Although the majority of us live within a mile or two from each other, I felt a little sad at the memory – until my brother told us about his first date with his now wife of twelve years. He had brought her to the Masters and for reasons he didn’t go into, he said that he’d told her he had no plans of marrying her and she ended up in tears. Laughing wholeheartedly, he then said, “I guess, that trick worked.”

January 20, 2013

Saddam

I was watching an Iraqi documentary screened at a local restaurant when I received a call from a friend. I had to take the call. I walked out of the restaurant and stood outside in the cold. My friend, who had suddenly become very ill last fall and has been in and out of the hospital on a regular basis, shared some good news. She’s been feeling great lately, despite having gotten off of her pain medications. A lot of her healing was due to holistic therapy and maybe a little bit, or actually a lot of, love.

I was glad to have been briefly pulled away from the documentary, which was about the suffering of the Kurdish people in Iraq during the Baath regime – the stuff Iraq is made of. I found a couple of things interesting in this documentary. One, the Al Anfal campaign which Saddam was accused of. Al Anfal was a military operation allegedly launched by the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war. Yet although in December 2006 Saddam was put on trial for the genocide during Operation Anfal, he was quickly executed for his role in the unrelated Dujail massacre, which killed 143 men. The Anfal trial, which supposedly killed thousands, recessed on December 21, 2006 and when it resumed on January 8, 2007, the remaining charges against Saddam were dropped.

During Tareq Aziz’s trial, the Iraqi Foreign Minister said that the U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the Anfal and Halabcha incidents, took the official position based on examination of available evidence that Iran was partly to blame. A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time reported that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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Video | March 10, 2013