Rallying Arab America

When the police failed to stop a Brooklyn man from imprisoning his two Pakistan-born daughters last summer, Linda Sarsour was called for help. The father had brought the girls—aged 18 and 19—to the United States to have them married off to American citizens and then he kept them under virtual house arrest for two months while awaiting potential suitors. Calls to the police were of no use because the girls were of legal age. So they complained to their school, which looked, as it had in the past to Sarsour, who hatched a plan. The 28-year-old instructed the girls to leave school early, pack their bags before their father got home, and meet a driver waiting a few blocks away to avoid being followed. After notifying the girls’ mother in Pakistan and the NYPD, Sarsour pulled some strings and set the girls up with a new apartment at the Young Christian Women’s Association of Brooklyn, where she heads community outreach.

With her knee high boots, purple eyeliner and a head scarf tucked tightly around the contours of her face, the fast talking, finger-snapping Palestinian American, admits she’s “not your typical Y representative.”

But settling domestic abuse cases is just one of Sarsour’s jobs. Like many young Arab Americans, her career in social work was sparked largely by the events of 9/11, which continue to weigh heavily on the community in New York. Now, she’s being hailed as a potential candidate for public office in a city which has no elected Arab American officials and yet one of largest Arab American populations in the U.S.

“A lot of people don’t feel comfortable as Muslims speaking out on issues,” Sarsour explains in a thick Brooklyn accent. “They are so intimidated, whether it be their accent or 9/11. But for me, I don’t speak as a Muslim, I speak as a dog gone New Yorker and you better believe I-got- some-things-to-say-that-you need-to-listen-to kinda attitude.”

Over the last four years Sarsour has been building up a voting block in her community and forming alliances with other minority organizations across New York. She played an influential role in rallying her community behind the Democratic Party’s candidates in last year’s general election, and was also chosen to lead major canvassing efforts in Asian and Latino neighborhoods.

“She is a city wide leader for all immigrants, not just the Arab community,” says Jose Davila, head of state government affairs New York Immigration Committee, a multi-ethnic state-wide group which recently elected Sarsour as member of its board of directors.

But Sarsour faces an uphill battle in her struggle to build relationships with politicians and law enforcement officials. The NYPD recently issued an advisory on Islamic extremism, which she says is tantamount to concluding that “anything normal Muslims do is suspicion for terrorist activity.” Arab Americans have also been dogged by bad press in the recent presidential campaigns with both Obama and McCain accused of distancing themselves from the community. Obama’s Muslim outreach coordinator quit due to press attention over unsubstantiated claims that he had links to a radical preacher. McCain’s defense of Obama as “a good family man” when a supporter at a town hall meeting accused Obama of being “an Arab” is still fresh in the minds of many Arab Americans.

“We’re not a community politicians want to be hanging around with,” she explains from her other office in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s most heavily populated Arab neighborhood. There, on a street teeming with Arabic street signs, Sarsour heads a bustling community center known as the Arab American Association of New York, which she likens to “an Arab Ellis Island.”

Brooklyn is host to an estimated 24,000 Arabic speakers with about one third living in Bay Ridge, according to the 2000 Census. (Dearbon, Michgan holds the country’s highest Arab concentration at 30,000). Sandwiched in between hookah lounges and Arabic restaurants displaying whole fish on ice in their windows, the Association operates at out of a cramped one-story office building and is an expressway of human traffic. It serves everyone from the elderly looking for help applying for food stamps to teenagers bouncing off the walls in search of community service jobs.

During our meeting, a new case is thrust onto Sarsour’s shoulders every 10 minutes, either from office visitors or over her endlessly chirping cell phone. She responds with one liners or post-its, dolled out to staffers perpetually waiting in the hallway. “Common sense is just not common,” she says; a cookie in one hand as she rolls her eyes after hearing about a woman who tried to use a New York-issued Medicaid card in Michigan.

Sarsour spends about two days a week at the Association, and runs it largely over her cell phone the rest of the time. She is proud of the strides it has made since being established two months after the fall of the Twin Towers, when the Association functioned mainly as a liaison between the neighborhood and homeland security officials by offering translations and legal counseling. Viewed at first with suspicion in the largely Irish and Italian area (Arabs heritage is only claimed by 10 percent of Bay Ridge’s population), the Association has now established ties to local schools and hospitals. It offers counseling for students— as in the case of the two Pakistani girls imprisoned by their father—as well as help for Arabic-speaking parents. Sarsour says its efforts have improve parent’s participation in school events by offering translators, after school homework programs and adult English classes. It has also partnered with local hospitals to help offer affordable health care.

Last year, New York State Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer, whom Sarsour has campaigned for, helped the Association apply for a $250,000 government grant, which is being used to purchase new offices.

“For an Arab organization to get a quarter of a million dollars in a white neighborhood meant a lot to the community,” Sarsour says.

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