An antiwar Arab, a proud American
The road leading to Joseph Haiek’s house is lined with royal palms, like the streets that invariably run under the opening credits of any movie set in Los Angeles. Skinny and straight, the street climbs up one of the Verdugo hills into a wide-lawned Glendale neighborhood of nice Spanish homes and California bungalows.
Here Haiek and his wife have lived for 20 years, and here Haiek runs the News Circle, an Arab American magazine and a tiny publishing house that he founded in 1972.
Last month, as the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, Haiek put the final touches on the fifth edition of the Arab-American Almanac. His almanacs include, among other things, a brief history of the community and its members’ contributions -- did you know that the waffle cone was invented at the St. Louis World’s Fair when an ice cream vendor who had run out of cones asked the man in the next booth, who happened to be a Syrian waffle maker, for help?
A genial, welcoming man, Haiek speaks of Arab Americans, in all their duly noted diversity, with a fond pride similar to that of the homeland-touting father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Did you know, he asks by way of introduction, that “almanac” is an Arabic word meaning weather or state of condition?
This geniality does not waver when talk turns to the war. Haiek does not support this war; he thinks it is unnecessary and will do perhaps irreparable harm to the world-standing and soul of the United States. He uses words like “slaughter” and “needless suffering” matter-of-factly. What he fears most, he says, is that “America will go down the drain. The last time, everyone was with us. Now they are against us. If Americans are not free to roam the world, then they are not free.”
Over his left shoulder, a television, with the sound turned off, broadcasts Al Jazeera, the Arab equivalent of CNN. Al Jazeera came into the American consciousness when it broadcast taped statements by Osama bin Laden following the attacks of Sept. 11 and has been raked over the media coals recently for showing pictures and videotape of dead and captured American soldiers.
Haiek, a Palestinian, emigrated with his wife and four kids from Jerusalem in 1967; he became an American citizen five years later. There is a list of other Arab stations on a Post-it stuck to his computer. “But I have been so busy,” he says, his hands hovering like an anxious pianist’s over the two blue binders that hold the almanac’s page proofs. “I do not have time to watch the news all day long.”
Instead, he checks in several times a day with these channels, with CNN and the American networks. And he sees what many Arab-speaking Americans see: two very different wars.
“I will see one report on Al Jazeera,” he says, “and then I will wait and see what CNN says and try to figure out which is right. Sometimes it is them,” he says motioning to the TV, “sometimes it is us. Sometimes it is somewhere in between.”
Census statistics say 40% of Los Angeles residents were born in another country, and many of those people are now watching the war unfold, at least in part, through media that are not American. Many of the newscasts from Europe and even Mexico are focused more on the antiwar sentiment, on civilian casualties in Iraq and less on play-by-play analyses of our military’s progress through the sand.
As “an American by choice, not because I just happened to be born here,” Haiek says he hopes God will bless the coalition troops, and he has no doubt of their victory. “They are many, they are well-trained. Will we beat Saddam Hussein? Of course we will,” he says.
But he is equally clear in his denunciation of the war itself. “Why do the Iraqi people have to suffer so much? Hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq have died already because of politics, because of the sanctions. I know generals and troops are trying to avoid civilians, but how can they when the bombs are dropping like they are?”
The images flicker soundlessly behind his head, very different from those one would see on CNN. Children swathed with bandages, old men clutching guns, raising them in the air.
“You see,” Haiek says. “We have roused people who were dormant. That man, he should be sleeping all day long. Now he has a gun.”
He exhibits neither outrage nor frustration. He believes this war is about controlling oil rather than disarming Saddam Hussein, and he speaks of this as if it were the general consensus. We are fighting a war with Europe in the Middle East, he says. We are trying to redraw the lines that the British drew in 1918.
He does worry that, as happened after Sept. 11, patriotic fervor will take a destructive turn and make life more difficult for Arab Americans. Which makes his absolutely fearless condemnation of this war even more striking. When asked if he thinks his accent, his heritage, his occupation will make his words seem incendiary, he looks puzzled.
“I am an American,” he says after a minute. “I stand with the pope and former President Jimmy Carter. In this country, you say what you think.”
His hands rise, palms up, a gesture neither of supplication nor impatience, as if he were offering something obvious and simple. And he is. The whole point of the United States is that we have the freedom to think and speak as we will. This is why we all are here in the first place -- so we can say what we think. Fearlessly.
Haiek has high hopes for the new almanac, which contains almost a hundred more pages of information than did the previous edition.
Information, he believes, is the greatest foe of bigotry and nationalism and fear. “Did you know,” he says, “that the dress of the Statue of Liberty is Arab?” It’s in the style of an Egyptian farm woman, he says. He flips through the almanac’s page proofs to find an entry explaining that sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi’s original colossus was to guard the entrance of the Suez Canal. And, indeed, an accompanying sketch of the project, which was eventually shelved, looks very much like Lady Liberty with the head of an Egyptian. She’s even got the lamp.
