arab-american – Radio Free

Each Cup of Coffee You Drink is a Celebration of Arab-American History

Farrah Hassen — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 05:52:19 +0000

Many of us start our morning with a cup of coffee (or several). It’s easy to take for granted. But where does it come from?

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, but it was first cultivated commercially in 15th century Yemen. In fact, the word “coffee” is derived from the Arabic qahwa, as Yemenis called it. And “mocha” originates from Yemen’s al-Mokha port, where coffee was first shipped.

Coffee is just one of the countless contributions that Arab culture has brought to our everyday lives. As we commemorate National Arab American Heritage Month this April, it’s also worth recognizing the contributions of the over 3.5 million Arab Americans who strengthen our nation.

At first sip, Yemeni coffee brings communities together. I witnessed this recently at a Yemeni coffee house in Sacramento, where I heard people speaking Arabic, Spanish, and English, and observed college students working on their laptops next to older people who’d just returned from a protest wearing “Hands Off Social Security” t-shirts.

Yemeni coffee is known for its natural sweetness and its distinct addition of spices, like cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. The Yemeni coffee I tasted unlocked layers of flavor and deeper meanings as well — a source of cultural identity under threat from ongoing war.

Yemeni coffee houses are sprouting up all over the country — like Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Company, a popular chain founded by Yemeni entrepreneurs with locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and California.

Qahwah House, another chain founded by a Yemeni immigrant, operates dozens of stores, including in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — home to the nation’s largest population of Yemeni Americans.

As Mohamed Algushaa, founder of Aldar Cafe in Memphis, told Bon Appétit, “Yemeni coffee is our identity.”

In a time-honored tradition, Yemeni coffee houses offer pots of coffee (and tea) to be shared among friends, lovers, family, and colleagues well into the late evening. This promotes a more communal experience. After all, catch-up sessions and spirited political debates cannot easily be contained in a commuter cup.

Yemeni coffee houses also place a premium on the aesthetic, blending tradition with modern design. Many feature mosaic tiles, arches inspired by famous mosques in Yemen, and embroidered cushions.

With each sip of aromatic coffee and bite of sweets at these coffee houses, we learn more about Yemen’s proud people and rich history beyond the prevailing mainstream narrative, which demonizes Yemeni people by routinely equating them with racist tropes.

That’s something other Arab Americans like myself know all too well, and continue to confront.

Through these coffee houses, Yemeni Americans preserve a culture threatened by decades of war, including the U.S.-backed, Saudi and UAE-led bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands from 2015 until 2022. And since March, ongoing U.S. airstrikes have escalated, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more in what are likely war crimesagainst civilians.

These conflicts have ravaged the country, which suffers “one of the world’s worst protracted humanitarian crises — a crisis defined by hunger, deprivation, and now, a worrying escalation,” observed a United Nations representative.

Such challenging circumstances directly impact the farmers and their coffee bean harvests, not to mention most Yemenis trying to survive and make a living. The most fundamental way to preserve their culture is to stop the bombings.

Yemen is more than an unending war zone or the subject of Signalgate intrigue. It’s home to millions of families, unique biodiversity, and several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the Old City of Sana’a, which has been continuously inhabited for over 2,500 years.

Despite the profound difficulties, we should raise our coffee cups to the resilient Yemeni people who first brought us this ubiquitous beverage and to the Yemeni Americans who carry on their traditions.

May they bring us all together to share a much-needed pot in peace.

The post Each Cup of Coffee You Drink is a Celebration of Arab-American History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Farrah Hassen.

This year, Arab-American political power came to the fore over Gaza

APR editor — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 07:35:19 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Rami G Khouri

One of the major political developments in the United States that has got little attention in the wake of the Democrats’ astounding loss in the November 5 elections is the success of Arab American political organising.

A new generation of political activists has emerged that has earned representation in unprecedented numbers and impact for the 3.5-million-strong Arab-American community in elected and appointed political offices.

It also put Arab Americans on the electoral map for the first time by launching the Uncommitted movement during the Democratic primaries and making a foreign policy issue — Israel’s genocide in Gaza — a national moral issue.

The Democratic Party underestimated the power of this new generation and the intensity of citizen anger, which cost it dearly in the election.

What happened in the Arab American community is a vintage all-American tale. They, like other communities, started their pursuit of political impact as a low-profile immigrant group who became dynamic citizens after political developments threatened their wellbeing and motivated them to take action.

Arab American mobilisation traces its beginnings to small-scale participation in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns for the Democratic Party. Jackson was the first serious presidential candidate to include Arab Americans as Democratic Party convention delegates, part of his Rainbow Coalition of:

“the white, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled [who] make up the American quilt”.

His campaign gave momentum to voter registration drives within the Arab American community, which continued in the following three decades.

Impact on outcomes
By 2020, nearly 90 percent of Arab Americans were registered to vote. By 2024, the Arab American voter block — in its expansive coalition with other groups — had grown large enough to impact on outcomes in critical swing states, especially Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent backlash motivated Arab Americans even more to engage in meaningful politics. Many members of the community refused to live in fear, trying to avoid the intimidation and smears that had long kept their parents and grandparents subdued and quiescent politically.

As Omar Kurdi, founder of Arab Americans of Cleveland, told me, “We were no longer silent because we saw the dangers to us of being quiet and politically inactive. We refused to live in fear of politics.

“Since then, we have been proud, confident, and active in public. We no longer accept crumbs, but want our share of the pie, and we understand now how we can work for that.”

As a result, over the past two decades, Arab Americans have entered the public sphere and politics at all levels: from local, city, and county positions to state and federal ones.

Elected officials say they succeeded because their constituents knew and trusted them. Candidates who won state and national congressional seats — like Rashida Tlaib in Michigan — inspired hundreds of younger Arab Americans to enter the political fray.

Successful experiences in city politics educated newcomers on how they could impact decision-making, improve their own lives, and serve the entire community. They mastered locally the basics of politics, one Ohio activist told me, “like lobbying, bringing pressure, protesting, educating the public, achieving consensus, and creating coalitions based on shared values, problems, and goals”.

Coalesced into Uncommitted movement
All of this momentum, built up over the years, coalesced into the Uncommitted movement in 2024. As the Biden administration unconditionally supported Israel to carry out genocidal violence in Palestine and Lebanon, Arab-American activists moved to use their newfound leverage as voters in electoral politics.

They joined like-minded social justice activists from other groups that mainstream political parties had long taken for granted — including Muslim Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, youth, progressive Jews, churches, and unions — and sent a strong message during the primaries that they would not support Biden’s re-election bid unless he changed his position on Gaza.

The campaign hoped that tens of thousands of voters in the primaries would send the Democrats a big message by voting “uncommitted”, but in fact, hundreds of thousands of Democrats did so across half a dozen critical states.

These numbers were enough to send 30 Uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, where they could lobby their colleagues to shape the party’s national platform.

One activist involved in the process told me they convinced 320 of the other 5,000 delegates to support their demand for a party commitment to a Gaza ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel — not enough to change the party position, but enough to prove that working from inside the political system over time could move things in a better direction.

Intergenerational support and motivation were big factors in the success of the Uncommitted movement. Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry, who has been involved in such activities for three decades, told me that Arab Americans were always in political positions, but in small numbers, so they had little impact.

However, they learned how the system works and provided valuable insights when the time came this year to act. She mentioned Abbas Alawiyeh as an example, who co-chairs the Uncommitted National Movement and worked as a congressional staffer for many years.

Defeat hotly debated
The Uncommitted movement’s precise contribution to the Democratic Party’s defeat is hotly debated right now. One activist told me the movement “placed Arab Americans at the centre of Democratic Party politics, led the progressives, helped Harris lose in swing states, and nationally brought attention to Gaza, divestment, and moral issues in ways we had never been able to do previously.”

All this occurs in uncharted territory, with no clarity if Arab Americans can influence both the Democratic and Republican parties who might now compete for their vote.

One Arab-American activist in his 30s added, “We are liberated from the Democrats who took us for granted, and we Arab Americans are now a swing vote officially.”

Other activists I spoke to thought the election experience could set the stage for a larger movement to counter the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, though that would require conquering the next hurdle of establishing Political Action Committees (PACs) and raising substantial funds.

That is a future possibility.

For now, it is important to recognise that a national-level Arab-American political effort has been born from the fires and devastation of the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine and Lebanon. Whether it can improve the wellbeing of Arab Americans and all Americans will be revealed in the years ahead.

Dr Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

US elections featuring ‘racism, sexism’ pose challenges for Global South

APR editor — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 08:05:45 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Patrick Gathara

Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.

Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.

In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.

President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.

Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.

This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.

“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”

Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.

America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3

— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024

“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.

The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.

As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.

Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.

However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.

Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.

Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.

This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.

However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.

This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.

In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.

During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.

However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.

Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.

Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

US elections featuring ‘racism, sexism’ pose challenges for Global South

APR editor — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 08:05:45 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Patrick Gathara

Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.

This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.

America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3

— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024

“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.

The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.

As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.

However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.

During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.

Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.