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By Ray Hanania Perception, perception, perception. That is reality in the United States. Success in any ethnic American community, the news media and elsewhere, is just a matter of knowing how to manage perception. With that basic truth in mind, I found it to be very easy to rise to the top of the Arab-American community. The "top" wasn't very high. It wasn’t a slow process, either. I moved quickly to the "top," although when I got there, I realized how low we really were when it came to influence and fighting anti-Arab stereotypes. My motivation to strive to leadership in my community found itself in a military barracks in the middle of a tumbleweed-plagued Idaho desert. I spent most of my two years in the United States Air Force during the end of the Vietnam War at an F-111 fighter base located stateside, in Mountain Home, Idaho. I had asked to be sent to Indiana, so I would be close to my family after Basic Training. But the assignment sergeant made no bones about his dislike for Arabs. "You want Indiana?" He asked. He knew I was Arab. It was how the training sergeant addressed me the entire six weeks, and the name, "Arab" carried over to Lackland Air Force base where I received training as an emergency medical and dental technician. "Yes Sir!" I snapped, not veering my eyes or moving my head. "Well, let's see, Airman Ahab. How about ... Idaho?" Idaho? I'd never even heard of the place. I entered training in early October, just before the Egyptian Army under President Anwar Sadat marched across the Suez Canal and recaptured a sliver of land occupied by the mighty Israeli Army. It was a major psychological blow to Israel and its supporters, and while it was really a minor military victory, it was a greater moral boost for Arabs around the world. For the first time, an Arab army had given Israel a black eye. Of course, that black eye cost me terribly in the service, and it did little to change the world's image of the "Arab," or to "right" the injustice against the Palestinians. The military didn't treat us like the Japanese during World War II, but they did lecture us about "loyalty." I knew only two other Arabs while at Lackland, the Assi brothers, twins who had enlisted together and planned to serve together. Their English was broken, but we often talked and exchanged smiles every time there was a discussion about the Arab attack against Israel. It wasn't proper to rejoice in the attack against Israel, especially since the Egyptians were still considered a Russian client state, and Israel was America's front line against the Communist threat against "our" oil fields. So we rejoiced silently, among ourselves. And we were quiet when officers or other enlisted personnel spoke about the ghastly "Arab sneak attack" against Israel during its "highest holy days." During the war, the United States military was placed on high alert. We were told by our base commander that our base was preparing to "assist" if assistance was required. There was a great fear during those initial days of the 1973 War that the Egyptians would "drive Israel into the sea," even though that was far from the truth or the goal. But what did truth have to do with perception, anyway? Everyday, after training, we were called into auditoriums were we received updates on the fighting. It made Arabs like myself uncomfortable, because in every discussion, we felt like it was "us" against "them." Our loyalty was always in question, either openly or by virtue of the discussion. I couldn't believe I would hear that 8th grade question put to me again. "Whose side are you on?" Hey. I'm wearing an American military uniform and was training to support our fight in Vietnam? What else did you want? My firstborn? A lot of the African Americans in the service didn't seem so gung ho about supporting Israel, either. My roommates were all Black. I figured that was how the military dealt with integration, by putting minorities and those they perceived as minorities, like Arabs, together in the same barracks areas, two in each room. It was always Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities together, and Arabs with everyone. Only the Whites seemed to get rooms with themselves. It was a subtle form of segregation. The "red necks" were the ones who were most excited about the war, and they wanted to "kick some Arab ass." I heard the term "sand nigger" used so much during the service, and southern drawls mis-pronounce the word "Ay-rab!" often. The red neck DJ at the bar played Ray Stevens’ song "Ahab the Arab" often at the Little Egypt strip bar where we hung out after work. When Ray Stevens gets to the part where Ahab the Arab calls his wife, Fatima, or calls his Camel, everyone in the bar starts singing at the top of their lungs, " ... aaaayyyaaaa yaaaa, yaaaa, aaaayyyaaaa, yaaaa, yaaaa ..." It was after the war and my training, and during my re-assignment from Lackland to Mountain Home, Idaho, that I began visiting the base library, reading up on Middle East history. I was trained as a dental technician, and of course, the new medical base commander felt there must have been some justification to assign me to assist a Jewish dentist. Or, maybe it was just coincidence. (When you are an Arab, coincidence is the spice of life.) Every day in the clinic, we listened intently to some guy named "Morris Gindy's" report on the CBS Radio network from Cairo. I taped every report, and would go home and transcribe them, gleaning details and facts. I recall the doctor mimicking the reporter's sign-off with what sounded like a heavy Pakistani accent after each report: "This is Morris Gindy. Cairo." I spent most of my off-duty time at the base library reading every book about the Middle East that I could. And, when I was done, I bought a typewriter and started writing a book that I called The Palestine Irredentist, a chronicle of the Palestinian struggle for independence. My doctor encouraged me, telling me I should reach out to Arab scholars and others for support. I sent letters to everyone, and started to receive replies from people like Newsweek’s Middle East correspondent Arnaud De Borchgrave. I remember sending him a letter asking him to review my manuscript, and receiving his Air Mail reply ... Rue de Berrie was the street he lived on in Paris. I sent him the manuscript, 500 pages of history, not from firsthand experience, but an argument, the same argument I was now learning to make with my American friends at the base. I became somewhat of a "scholar" there and engaged in some detailed discussions about the history of the Middle East. It was all on-the-job education. The public was interested in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war and all the Armageddon hype that followed. The Arab oil embargo and the threats of terrorism all made Middle East discussions interesting. Letters were coming to the base from all over the world and the Middle East. And since letters with a foreign postmark were all are reviewed by the military censors -- they didn't always open them, but they certainly did take notice of the city of origin at one of the country's primary fighter bases -- I began to get a little extra notice. I received letters from Zehdi Labib Terazi, the spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization in New York. Marwan Kanafani, a representative of the PLO, also would send me documents that I would request for my research. The envelopes would be decorated with left-wing slogans and pictures of men holding up automatic rifles and their fists. The PLO's office in Beirut would send me photographs, and I received correspondence from offices representing the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front, and other organizations, all listed prominently in the United State's Government dossier of known "terrorist" organizations. One letter came from the Headquarters of the Red Cross in Geneva Switzerland, a copy of a transcript of an eyewitness report that followed the April 9, 1948 Jewish terrorist attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, when followers of Menachem Begin’s Irgun murdered more than 254 Palestinian civilians during the first Palestine war. And, because I believed in fairness, I wrote to Menachem Begin himself, through the Technion in Tel Aviv, asking for his response to charges that he was a terrorist. Apparently thinking that "Hanania" was a Jewish name, Begin wrote me a short letter telling me he was forwarding me some documentation he thought would help me better understand the conflict and the position of his political organization, the Likud. I hated the guy but immediately found a bond when I saw his letter was filled with typos, and handwritten corrections in pen. All these letters started to come to me after the US and the Soviet Union found themselves near the brink of nuclear war as a result of the Egyptian attack against Israel. Letters with strange postmarks, and sent by organizations blamed for some of the worst terrorist bombings and airplane hijackings in world history. I guess I should have expected what happened next. "Airman. What the f--- is going on?" "Sir?" I asked, not sure what he was talking about. "I'm talking about all this mail from these organizations all over the world. You think we wouldn't notice?" "Well, sir. I didn't think there was anything to notice. I am ..." "Shut up!" He yelled. "And answer when I ask you a question, Airman!" An airman was the bottom of the pile, one stripe on my sleeve, not even close to being a person until you could reach the lowest rank of sergeant with three stripes. I finally explained to the base commander that I was writing a book. "Anti-American propaganda? That could get you a dishonorable discharge, Airman!" "No sir," I said. "Not anti-American at all." I explained how I felt, that I needed to understand why so many people were looking at me differently. Why people seemed to hate Arabs. I needed to understand about my own people. "You know, some of the other enlistees are complaining about you staying up late and typing your manuscript. We’re concerned about it." I had to give him a copy. He read it and returned it with a note that simply read, "Interesting." When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, I was one of the first enlistees to be offered a discharge through a program called Palace Chase. They said they simply didn't need all of us anymore and we could trade in our remaining years of active duty assignment for service in an Air National Guard base near our homes. We would receive two years Guard duty for every year of active duty remaining. I had two years left in my enlistment. As soon as I reported in to my Guard base, the 182nd Airborne Unit, Peoria, Illinois, the base security officer called me into his office and lectured me about "causing trouble." I couldn't believe it. The more I hit this wall, the more I wanted to break through. Finished with active duty and only required to drive to Peoria once each month, I had a lot of time to go back to school and strengthen what I had learned about the Middle East. And I desperately wanted to reach out to my own community. I knew they were around. I just had to find them. I started by writing letters to the editor of local newspapers on my own. At first, my letters to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune were routinely rejected. I'd read all these letters from people attacking the Arab cause, and very few from Arabs defending it. But little by little, my letters started to get in. One day, Professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod at Northwestern University called me and asked me to attend a meeting of an organization called the Arab-American Congress for Palestine. I was really excited, especially since I had read many of Abu-Lughod's books on Palestine and its history. The most prominent of his books is "The Transformation of Palestine," the bible on Palestinian history. He was a political icon in my community, someone I really admired, and probably the most eloquent spokesman for the Arab cause in the world. And he was one of two chief motivators to push PLO Chief Yasir Arafat to pursue peaceful negotiations with Israel in the late 1980s. He never received the notoriety that he deserved, and while he probably shunned it, it could have given him a platform here he could champion the Arab cause. So I decided I'd prepare for the meeting, which was held in a small storefront banquet hall located on Kedzie Avenue at 59th Street, which was then the heart of Chicago's South Side Arab community. I wanted to fit in. It was my first meeting. So I unwrapped a red and white keffiyeh that my mom had kept in a closet, and placed it on my head. I fit the black rope around the crown to hold it in place and flipped one of the ends across the chin and over my left shoulder. I looked like Yasir Arafat. Although most Americans thought all Arabs looked like Arafat even without the traditional Arab headdress on their heads. It took a lot of nerve on my part to drive from my home in Burbank the two miles through Chicago to the meeting location, with the checkered keffiyeh on my head.. I parked across the street from the hall and I walked into the banquet hall room. The speaker at the front of the hall stopped and watched me as I entered, and everyone turned around and stared, as if they had never seen a spectacle like that before. They were all in suit pants and white shirts, blue collar shopkeepers who had just closed their stores and were interested in news about what was happening in the Middle East. And I sat there the whole evening, struggling to understand the very difficult Arabic that was being spoken. If they had been talking about the evening meal, I would have understood. But this was politics, and the words were things I had never heard my mother and father speak before. Sihyuneen was Arabic for Zionist. Politically correct Arabs referred to the Israelis as Sihyuneen, which means Zionist, not Yahudi, which means Jew, both in Arabic. My mom never called the Israelis "Zionists." The term meant nothing to her. She called them by the term they called themselves, Jews. "The Jews did this ... The Jews did that." To the outsider, it might sound anti-Semitic. But my mother wasn't anti-Semitic at all and had a very kind heart. But Americans who heard Arabs speak often took the use of the word "Jew" to be derogatory and anti-Semitic. I still have a hard time using the word "Jew" because it sounds so harsh. Conditioning, really. I have to say "Jewish." And, when talking about politics, I have to say Israeli or Zionist, although the latter term lost its luster as peace slowly crept upon the Fertile Crescent. Within two weeks after that meeting, I found myself helping the Congress prepare its press releases. In fact, I helped them prepare their first press release, announcing an event where we planned to bring some Middle East speakers. I sent it to all the newspapers. Not one of the press releases ever made it into print. No mention in Kup's column. No mention of activities to come in the Community Calendars broadcast daily on radio or TV. I tried to explain to my new friends that politics was fine but "preaching to the choir" was non-productive. "We should be talking to the American people," I would argue. "They're the ones who need to hear what we have to say." "But the media is controlled by the Jews" was the quick response and "no one will publish our views." I understood the logic, but it was wrong. So, I decided to start my own newspaper, in English, called The Middle Eastern Voice. And I also volunteered to serve as an English announcer on a radio program called The Voice of Palestine. It all seemed so important, back then. The newspaper, the radio reports. But I still felt we were losing the battle and the war. I'd watch our representatives on television lose every debate, every time. Their arguments were correct. They just didn't look good presenting them. And I didn't listen to the arguments. I watched and compared how the Arab and Israeli representatives acted. In fact, the first time I really was moved with this feeling of disparity between Arab and Jewish spokesmen, I was watching an Arab and Israeli debate on Kup's show broadcast from Chicago and televised by a local television station in Mountain Home Idaho, while I was in the service. I sat in the front room of the single bedroom mobile home anchored in the middle of the Idaho desert and screamed at the TV. I knew more than that guy. The Arab looked like an idiot. All his college diplomas, degrees and titles couldn't make up for how poorly he presented himself on TV. The Israeli spokesman was always dressed like an American. He always spoke perfect English. His suit was sharp, the tie was fashionable and his hair was always perfectly cut. They always had cool names, like "Howard Squadron." It sounded so tough. The Arab, on the other hand, dressed so sloppy. Because to Arabs, image didn't matter more than the principle of the ideology. How absurd to think that perception was greater than the principle. We ignored perception and tried so hard to document every dotted "i" and every crossed "t." His name was something that sounded like part of Ray Stevens’ song, "Ahab the Arab." It might as well have been Hubble-Bobby Al-Boobah Ali! In some parts of the United States, they put you in jail for having a name that sounded like that. The Arab "argument" in these debates was so predictable. It was one of loud emotion. Incoherent logic, drowned in footnotes, explanations, and historical insignificance. Did you ever read a book written by an Arab? There are as many pages of notations in the back as there are pages in the book. It is as if we Arabs have to continually justify our arguments. And, anyone who knows anything about a public debate knows that those people who try the hardest to justify their arguments always come across like they are lying. Even Professor Abu-Lughod's book, The Transformation of Palestine, is filled with footnotes. (Read the novel Exodus. No footnotes. Yet more Americans believe what they read in Exodus than they do in the more accurate book, The Transformation of Palestine.) The individual, on the other hand, who makes his case calmly, consistently and without trying to "convince" an audience of its veracity is the individual an audience most often identifies with. I knew how to do it. And one day, I got my chance. "Mr. Hanania?" the voice on the telephone asked. It was a woman, calling. Someone very distinguished. "Yes," I answered. "This is Essee Kupcinet." I had seen Kup’s TV show in Idaho, while in the Air Force. He was just some columnist at the Sun-Times who always wrote about Israel. I also knew that Irv Kupcinet was ferocious in his defense of Israel. And, that usually meant being unfair to Arabs. "I understand that you are the spokesman for the Arab-American Congress," Essee said. In all the time we ever spoke, neither she nor Kup would ever say the word "Palestine." "The Arab-American Congress for Palestine," I emphasized. "Right. We would like to invite you on our program to talk about the developments in the Middle East with Abba Eban. Can you make it?" Could I make it? Television? A national audience. Damn right I would be there. At the TV station, Kup and Eban spent a lot of time talking together in the studio. Essee escorted me to a green room where I sat alone until I was called onto the set. It was the first time I had ever done TV. But I knew my mission. I wasn't going to scream and yell. I wasn't going to try and fill the 22 minutes of the half hour show with a six-hour argument about the history of Palestine. No, Eban was too smart for that. And Kup certainly would not miss the chance to join in a tag-team-pummeling of another Arab spokesman, even one as young as me. I remember the introduction. Kup went on and on about the achievements of Abba Eban, Israel's foreign minister and the Jewish State's most eloquent spokesman. Kup simply turned to me, and in the only broken English spoken that night, announced, "And we also have, Ray Ha-na-nana ..." "Hananeeya," I corrected. "Hananeeya," he repeated with some emphasis, "the spokesman for the Arab-American Congress." "... For Palestine," I corrected with a smile. Right away the mild mannered Eban shot off on a tangent about the Benelux system of government and how it was impossible to believe that Jews and Arabs -- he never said Palestinians -- could share the same land. The Benelux system was an unusual form of government that linked Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. (Get it?, Benelux. Fortunately, I had come across the term during my readings at Mountain Home Idaho.) Eban went on and on about how "tiny Israel" was faced with annihilation, surrounded by 22 hostile Arab countries all bent on driving the "tiny Israel" into the very large Mediterranean sea. Finally, after Kup and Eban started stroking themselves for the first 5 minutes of the show, I interjected, "I don't know about the Benelux system, at all. All I know is that my father was born in Jerusalem." Eye contact. I remembered the single rule of successful television, and I stared at the camera trying to make "eye contact" with the TV audience, instead of looking at Kup or Eban. And I wanted the TV audience to see "puppy eyes" on the brink of tears, rather than the usual serving of emotional, screaming, wild Arab propaganda. "My father was ... sniffle, sniffle ... born in Jerusalem and ... sniffle, sniffle ... he can't go back to his home." He had died by then. But a point was a point. "And, I am his son ... sniffle, sniffle ... and I can't go back to my father's home ... sniffle, sniffle ... My grandfather's home. And my great grandfather's home." And then, I turned to the distinguished looking Abba Eban, relaxed, calm and collected, on the seat next to me, beaming with the confidence of 2,000 years of successful debates and military victories. And I said, "The distinguished Abba Eban can go there anytime he wants, even though he was born in South Africa, and his real name is Aubrey Solomon." I could hear Essee Kupcinet croak behind the lights of the studio, and I recalled Kupcinet immediately jumping to Eban's rescue. Eban's relaxed demeanor suddenly snapped to attention. He sat up straight and his knees came together tight. His face turned stern, and I never got another word in edge wise. Body language said it all. "I can arrange to have you return to Israel," Eban responded. "What about the 3 million other Ray Hanania's?" I asked. "What is it that you want, Mr. Hananana?" Kup asked, coming to Eban's defense. Kup argued that "I" had 22 Arab countries to choose from to move to. Why did I want to move to Israel? "I just want to be buried where my father was born," I said softly, with piercing aim. And without losing a beat, Kup responded with a wink to Abba Eban, "I think we can take care of that." Neither Essee nor Kup said goodbye, and an aide escorted me to the door. I did manage to get Eban to give me an autograph, though, as I was being ushered out. As I waited at the light to cross Michigan Avenue to catch a bus and return home, I saw Eban relaxed in his long, black chauffeur-driven limousine, waiting at the same light. Eban was smoking a cigar. He just stared at me as I stood at the curb. Most of the people who saw the show thought I did well. Instead of dragging the TV audience into a murky argument over politics and history, I had turned it into a personal story that the public could easily identify with. But right away, I heard from the Arab "leaders," who complained that I had made some comments that seemed to support the PLO and Yasir Arafat. And back then, the Arab community was divided, here in the United States, between those who supported Arafat, a "moderate" revolutionary, and George Habash, an "extremist" revolutionary. "Why didn't you tell them about how the Jews murdered our people? Or about how the Jews control the media. Or about ..." It went on and on for weeks. Now, I monitored Kup's column daily and found that he wrote about Israel and the Jewish community nearly every week. I wrote Kup a letter and asked why he didn't mentioned items of interest involving the Arab community, and noted that I had just become a father and had named my daughter "Haifa" after a port city in Palestine that was now part of Israel. "Well, if you have a son, will you name him Jerusalem?" Kup wrote. Later, Kup and I became very good friends when I was hired as a reporter at the Southtown Economist and later at the Chicago Sun-Times, where Kup worked too. I always favored Kup with items from the City Hall beat, and he appreciated it. (The editorial faces at the Sun-Times had changed significantly, by then, too.) He never did loosen up his style of ignoring the Arab community, but occasionally he would mention when I would reach some achievement in my community. The point was that Kup never turned an item down that I gave him. But he didn't go out of his way to find "scoops" about the Arab community. Not giving in, I completed my manuscript and gave the final draft to Professor Abu-Lughod for review. I remember Abu-Lughod giving it serious review, but telling me quite frankly, "It's a great book, Ray. Really. Very well written. Well noted. Good research. But, Ray, really. No one will publish it. Who is Ray Hanania? It's good, though."