Arab Community Reacts With Confusion, Suspicion and Hurt

“You sound suspicious. Who are you? What is your telephone number?” demanded a man from the Arabic Translations Center in Huntington Beach, who refused to identify himself to a caller. “I don’t want to talk.” He hung up.

“Tell me who you are and what your motivations are,” said Mohammed Mostavan, president of the Arab American Assn. of Orange County. “What do you think of this incident? What I’m asking is, are you on the side of decency?”

Not even Mostavan was quite sure which side that was anymore. Confusion, suspicion and hurt were everywhere in the Arab community Friday following the bombing of the West Coast office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee that killed one of California’s leading Arab spokesmen, Alex M. Odeh.

Community ‘Sincere and Sorry’

“You must know how sincere and sorry the community is about his brutal murder,” said Mostavan. “It is a severe blow to the community, and it should be a severe blow to the nation in general, to see that while we are concerning ourselves about so-called terrorism overseas, to look at the terrorism that’s happening right here in this country and bring the people responsible for it to justice.”

Mounzer Cha’Arani, recent president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. of Arab Americans and a Santa Ana civil engineer, said, “People say this is the country of the melting pot and freedom of speech. It makes you wonder now.

“If every time somebody opens his mouth and gives an opinion they’re going to deliver a bomb to his door, you can understand that we’re very concerned. We don’t know who might be next.”

Southern California’s Arab-American community--an estimated 150,000 strong, with 30,000 to 50,000 in Orange County alone--has kept an oddly quiet political profile in an era of turmoil in its ancestral homelands.

In part, Arab leaders say, that has to do with their diversity of background. While all are members of a common ethnicity and probably speak a common language, they may be of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim faiths.

They may trace their origins to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon or any one of 17 other Arab nations along the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and North Africa. In the United States, their unity comes through affiliation with religious and cultural organizations, rather than strong neighborhood or social ties.

Unlike most other ethnic groups, most have roots within the United States that stretch no further back than the beginnings of the 20th Century. They are struggling, Mostavan said, to be recognized first as Americans.

“We are American citizens, but we happen to be proud of both our American heritage and our Arab ancestors,” said Marwan Sbaita, president of the Arab Student Assn. at Cal State Fullerton.

“But the American awareness, it’s close to zero, practically none,” Sbaita said. “TV, the movies, I mean look at the movies: The Arab is the evil person, he’s either the camel jockey, an oil tycoon, a sheik or a guy that’s married to a harem. That’s not a fair picture of the Arab nation.”

Odeh was part of the movement to fight discrimination based on such stereotypes, Arab-American leaders say.

Groups Become More Visible

In Orange County and throughout the Southland, Arab-American groups have become increasingly visible, participating in forums on immigration issues with Latino groups, sponsoring cultural fairs and scheduling banquets with community leaders on issues of Arab-American concern.

The Islamic Society of Orange County, which consists largely of Arab-Americans, sponsors five college scholarships, conducts a weekly radio program on KMEX in Pasadena and has its own school at the mosque in Garden Grove for children through the third grade.

At Friday’s regular prayer meeting, many Muslims had just heard of the bombing, said Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society. “It was a shock,” he said. “We had about 600 people there, people who were coming straight from their offices, who hadn’t heard the news. Odeh was quite well known, though he was not a Moslem.

‘Killed for Their Views’

“For us, it’s very saddening to see that living here in a free country, where people are supposed to be free to express their views, somebody is killed for expressing their views.”

In recent years, Orange County’s Arab-American community has emerged as a growing--though so far ignored--political force.

Cha’Arani, president of the newly formed Arab-American Republican Club in Orange County, said the organization became the largest ethnic group to sign volunteers for the Reagan-Bush campaign in Orange County in 1984.

Yet Odeh and other Arab-Americans were “extremely active” in the Jesse Jackson campaign as well, said Josh White, who led the campaign in Orange County.

“He was killed this morning?” White said softly on hearing the news. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is shocking. . . . He had all the attributes of a good American. He was above reproach. And if there’s anyone who really represented some good Americanism principles, it was Alex.”

‘Tremendous Sadness’

By mid-afternoon, calls from at least six ethnic organizations had come in to Arab-American Assn. headquarters from sympathizers.

“My reaction is one of tremendous sadness because we have lost a very good patriot,” said Orange County Latino activist Amin David, who is half Lebanese. “He loved this country very deeply, and he spoke in very eloquent terms about it.

“The Arab community is starting to recognize that the only meaningful inroads into these dark alleys of discrimination would be to gain political muscle, and through the very professional services and direction of Alex, they began the long road of pulling together and forgetting their own individual agendas,” David said.

Much of the road still lies ahead, Mostavan said.

“How do I describe the community now?” he said. “It is a place of dreams. A society of aspirations. But it’s a coherent society. Look at the Arabs as one of you, because they are one of you. They’re here. They’re not going away.”