Former metro Detroiter joins discussion panel June 10, 2007 BY TODD SPANGLER
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF
WASHINGTON -- One is an activist law student from Grosse Pointe Shores, another a Republican policy adviser for the Department of Homeland Security. A third is a 21-year-old jazz singer.
All three are Arab Americans and delivered the same message Saturday: Be proud of your heritage and put your culture on the line with other Americans.
The three were members of a panel discussion called "Growing Up Arab American" at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's convention in Washington, D.C.
The theme struck by the three -- Salah Husseini, an American University law student who grew up in metro Detroit; policy adviser George Selim, from Cleveland, and Lena Seikaly, a singer studying at the University of Maryland -- was reiterated throughout the day at the convention, which dozens of members of southeastern Michigan's large Arab-American community attended.
For Husseini, 25, the realization that he wanted to help Arabs all over the world -- right now, he's working on a project to get asylum in the United States for a group of Iraqis -- came in college. Before that, he said, he lived a dual existence: one with his American friends in high school, another at home with his Syrian parents.
As a teenager, he said he struggled with the question of being "too Arab." Now he thinks Arab Americans must make themselves heard in order to let the rest of the public understand the concerns of their community. Only then, he said, can change happen.
"We're somewhat hesitant to stand up and speak out for what we really believe," he said.
During a morning discussion on anti-Arab sentiment in media coverage, the panel members agreed that most problems with covering the Arab community spring from ignorance, not intent.
And the best way, they said, to correct that problem is for people to make themselves heard, whether it's by getting jobs in the media or writing letters to editors and broadcasters en masse.
"It's not that we want the media to be pro-Arab or pro-Palestinian," said Hoda Osman, a freelance journalist who is vice president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association and who has worked with ABC News. "It's just that we want it balanced."
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