ADC Internship Program
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is now recruiting interns for the winter semester, as well as for next summer. We recruit both undergraduate and graduate students. Please circulate this announcement to others who might be interested.
ADC interns will have the opportunity to work on issues related to domestic civil rights, international human rights, legal issues, education, community organizing, government relations, publishing, the media, and U.S. policy in the Middle East. There are also positions with our Chief Administrative Officer through which interns can learn fundraising, grant writing, and non-profit management. We can help facilitate applications to the State Department intern program.
Internships during the school year can be part time, usually 15-20 hours per week, depending on what is practical in terms of student class schedules. There is a small stipend, which is prorated according to the number of hours worked.
Internships during the summer run from late May until early August. The summer intern program is full-time, and includes an educational component. One day a week, interns visit government and congressional offices, Middle East organizations and Arab embassies or have speakers, films and discussions on Arab American issues. A small stipend is provided.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is an Arab-American civil rights organization. It is dedicated to ending discrimination, stereotyping and hate crimes against Arab Americans and to promoting the Arab cultural heritage. It serves as a voice for the Arab American community on issues of foreign and domestic policy.
For full details on the ADC intern program, the work assignments in each ADC department, and the application procedure, please check the ADC website: www.adc.org , or contact Marvin Wingfield at 202-244-2990.
Urgent Memo to ARAB/AMERICAN Students Activists:
An organization called campustruth.org has started placing extremely obnoxious anti-Palestinian advertisements in campus newspapers across the country. These ads can be seen at http//:www.campustruth.org The Media Department of ADC prepared this document to help you respond to this new campaign. You may contact ADCfor any questions you may have.
RESPONDING TO THE ANTI-PALESTINIAN CAMPUS NEWSPAPER ADS PLACED BY CAMPUSTRUTH.ORG
As many of you may know, an organization called campustruth.org has started placing extremely obnoxious anti-Palestinian advertisements in campus newspapers across the country (these ads can be seen at www.campustruth.org. This document is intended to help you respond to this new campaign.
The first thing that should probably be noted is that these advertisements are extremely crude and in many cases will probably be counterproductive for the cause they are supposed to serve. On the other hand, one may well not wish to allow this sort of outrageous racism to go unanswered. As a proactive step, those of you on campuses with large daily newspapers might want to contact people who work in those papers before they begin publishing these advertisements and find out what their policy on paid political advertisement is. Do they have any standards? Is it all completely out of the discretion of the editors? All of this is useful information. Any of you with contacts in those papers might want to discuss the issue with people there to try to prevent them from accepting these ads, especially if standards and policies are already in place that bar racist or offensive advertisements. No doubt the best outcome would be to stop these ads before they ever appear on your campus.
In the event that your major student paper (I wouldn't worry about what comes in small right wing heavily funded rags that exist on campuses from the country but are not read by anyone) publishes such an ad, I would suggest three possible steps:
1) Ask for a meeting with the editor-in-chief and managing editor of this newspaper in order to explore their policies regarding paid political advertisements and the question of standards. If they have any standards, these ads probably violate them. The ad currently being placed by campustruth.org contrasts and Israeli athlete and Palestinian suicide bomber as "children's heroes." Would they have printed an ad that depicted some well-known white American football player as a "white children's hero" in contrast to O.J. Simpson as an "African- American children's hero?" All of this should be explored with them in the spirit of trying to get them to see just how offensive this really is. It is likely that they just don't get it, and I think we should use this as an educational opportunity to try to make these people recognize, perhaps the first time in their lives, the fundamental humanity of Palestinians and other Arabs. I think that approaching them in anger is completely pointless in this case, especially since this is a paid advertisement for which they are not directly responsible in terms of content, at least in their own minds.
2) Rather than giving these papers additional money via ads of our own, I would suggest making our point in an op-ed article. I think the op-ed should discuss the advertisement, expose its racist message and interrogate precisely why it is that anyone would think it worthwhile to spend money in order to promote the dehumanization of Palestinian children (see talking points below). I think such an op- ed would be enormously effective, and cause considerable pain to the people who took out the advertisement, without incurring any costs to ourselves. In other words, we can insure that the principal effect of this advertisement is to give us free space in this newspaper to promote our views, which would be a delightfully ironic turn of events. We can take the moral high ground in this article and in our dealings with this newspaper, and I think we certainly should. I would say that the biggest mistake in this instance would be to allow our emotions and our understandable anger to get the better of us. This is the voice of experience speaking (I spent over five years writing for a large university newspaper and I understand how these operations work and how the students who run them think).
3) If such an ad appears on your campus, and you want to do something about it, call the newspaper, ask for a meeting and ask them if they would be willing to entertain an op-ed submission commenting on the advertisement. You need to find out what their policies in this regard are before actually writing the thing -- they may have a policy against running articles commenting on advertisements, in which case may be our own ad really would be a good idea. This matter should be dealt with deliberately, calmly and with consideration, not in haste or in anger. That will yield the best results. ADC media department will be happy to help you contrast draft op-ed pieces and compose advertisements to counter those ads.
TALKING POINTS ON THE MERITS:
These ads are designed simply to demonize Palestinians; anyone can play this game but in most cases it would not be tolerated or published. The ad about children's heroes is not simply an attack on Palestinians, but an attack on Palestinian children, which is cowardly and despicable. Can anyone really believe that Israeli children are simply good and nice while Palestinian children entertain murderous fantasies? One could certainly mock the implicit point being expressed that all Israelis are nice and good, while all Palestinians are bad I mean, how stupid do they think their audience is? You could point out that people ought to feel deeply insulted by such ads, which take them for idiots.
At least one quarter of the Palestinians killed during the past two years of conflict have been children, most of them killed in and around their homes. The Israeli human rights group BTselem recently reported that 80 percent of Palestinians killed in the enforcement of the massive curfews in place in recent months in the West Bank have been children.
One has to question the morality and intellectual integrity of anyone who would pay money to demonize an entire group of children based on their ethnicity.
The reality is that everyone, Israel and Palestinians alike, is suffering and experiencing pain, loss and anger as a result of this conflict - one cannot forget, however, that the conflict is made inevitable by Israel's ongoing illegal military occupation of Palestinian lands and the fact that the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not citizens of the state that rules them, or any other state, have no human or national rights, and live under conditions at least as bad as those during the apartheid-era South Africa.
TALKING POINTS FOR DEALING WITH NEWSPAPER STAFF:
Newspapers are responsible for the advertisements they agree to print - if they assert their First Amendment right to print any advertisements they wish to, and the First Amendment rights of the advertisers, you should insist on the right to comment on those advertisements in their paper. This is not actually a right you have as such (in fact the First Amendment allows him to be as unfair as they want to be), but it is a fundamental aspect of fairness and balance, which are part of the canons of journalistic ethics. Printing these advertisements but not accepting commentaries about them constitutes rank hypocrisy and a standard that exchanges inclusion in the conversation taking place in the newspaper for money. At the very least, having printed those ads, your ads cannot be rejected. The proper counter to these advertisements are ones calling for tolerance and mutual understanding, and which question the integrity and decency of people who would pay money to vilify others on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality, including children.
Media Department
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee www.ADC.org
Visa Denials
The ADC Legal Department is currently working on compiling incidents of US visa denials. The US State Department is interested in investigating incidents where inviduals' visas were denied without a given reason. Therefore, please circulate this request within our chapter and the ADC membership in our area and send any information you may have related to any such incidents to the ADC Legal Department at legal@adc.org at your earliest convenience.
