Moustafa Bayoumi: How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America

Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.





His writings have also appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection "Best Music Writing 2006". From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. Bayoumi's work, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in a post-September 11 environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes, fueling widespread discrimination. It is the story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. His title is a reference to the W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was awarded a 2008 American Book Award and the 2009 Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.



The author was recently a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. On the program, he said this: Feisal Abdul Rauf, yes. I think the idea of - behind the project from the very beginning was precisely to model a place like the 92nd Street Y to have some place where we can see - Islam, see American Muslims and the rest of American society come together and create a culture together. And, in fact, they did everything, as they should have, according to plan. They bought the building. They went to the community board and such things. And the project was announced in December of last year to little ado. But then, somehow, in the early summer, it started to generate a lot of hostility. And by the end of the summer, you saw huge crowds around that site in New York to the point where, around the anniversary of September 11th this year, there was a significant demonstration in opposition to it, where - and I went, actually, to see that demonstration, and I've never really seen anything like that in New York City before. I mean, there were thousands of people on the street just yelling, no mosque, no mosque, no mosque, and - a kind of blatant in-your-face anti-Muslim sentiment that really left me quite depressed. On the other hand, there was another demonstration just two blocks away that was a pro - you could call it a pro-Park51 demonstration that was very typical of New York City. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was very diverse. And that one, to me, seemed much more representative of what New York City was all about. And that one didn't leave me depressed. That one left me quite optimistic. Below is the podcast of that show, in full.





In December of 2010, The Jewish Week wrote this, in mentioning and invoking the author: Howard Wohl, president of Tanger Hillel and a 1964 graduate of Brooklyn College, attributes much of the atmosphere to an episode that took place this summer, when the college instructed all its incoming students to read a controversial book edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at the school. The book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” — is a collection of personal stories by and about seven Arabs from Brooklyn. Critics objected to the assignment, saying that Bayoumi takes up the Palestinian cause in his final chapter and provides a decidedly slanted view. Recalling the episode earlier this month, Wohl said his greatest concern is that Brooklyn College doesn’t start to resemble “too many other campuses in North America,” where, in his view, anti-Israel rhetoric has morphed into anti-Semitism, and hate speech has blossomed under the guise of academic freedom.

GRITtv: Moustafa Bayoumi: Midnight on the Mavi Marmara
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Curtis Wilkie and the Dickie Scruggs Story

Richard Scruggs is probably the only man in his prison, or even perhaps the entire U.S. Federal prison system, that is currently legally being paid $20 million a year, up until the year 2025, as part of a few legal settlements he'd put together with Big Tobacco in America. NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and the Dickie Scruggs story. See also: Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South, Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal. NPR notes that: Right now, Scruggs is serving a sentence in an Ashland, Ky., prison. But he has held on to his money — and continues to make more. As Wilkie says, Scruggs' tobacco settlement fee arrangements will continue to pay him $20 million a year until the year 2025. View the webpage for this feature story, here. Read an excerpt here.

Timothy Garton Ash, Wikileaks, and the U.S. State Department

About a month ago, Timothy Garton Ash wrote about Wikileaks and conflicting public interests in The Guardian:

There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things. The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same. Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are "going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world". The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. "Don't even think of it," he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day's New York Times. There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict. One thing I'd bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD.

NPR brought the historian in, to opine on the leaks as well, on the show, "Morning Edition." See the webpage for that feature story here.



See also: The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, The File: A Personal History, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (Third Edition), In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent.

Charlie Rose's Monday, May 11, 2009 conversation with Naomi Klein and William Greider - Business, Current Affairs, Books

CHARLIE ROSE: President Obama will face increasing pressure from the left on a range
of issues, including immigration, healthcare reform, and nominating a
Supreme Court justice. The president’s centrist course on reviving the
U.S. economy has already frustrated many progressives.

Joining me now, two journalists who have written critically and
eloquently about the need for a more activist left. Naomi Klein is a
columnist for “The Nation” magazine and a British paper, the “Guardian.”
She’s also the author of the best-selling book, “The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” And William Greider is the national affairs
correspondent for “The Nation.” His new book is called “Come Home America:
The Rise and Fall and Redeeming Promise of Our Country.”

I am pleased to have both of them back on this program. Welcome.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you.

WILLIAM GREIDER: Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: Nice to see you, my friend. Tell me first about
“Coming Home America: The Rise and Fall and Redeeming Promise of Our
Country.”

Read from the transcript in its entirety here, or you can view the interview from the CharlieRose.com website here. See also: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country, One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Who Will Tell The People, Charlie Rose - Elizabeth Warren / Naomi Klein & William Greider(May 11, 2009), Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy, No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition with a New Introduction by the Author, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, People-First Economics: Making a Clean Start for Jobs, Justice and Climate