The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Rallying Arab America
Linda Sarsour’s struggle to integrate her embattled community into the U.S. political system.
By Habib Battah
“Linda can get anything off the ground,” says Martha Kamber, Executive Director of the YWCA and Sarsour’s former supervisor at the hospital. “She can turn people out where others cannot.”
Sarsour says local appeal has been a major reason behind her success at rallying the community. She was born at the Lutheran Hospital, where she began her career in social work and was delivered by Dr. Ahmad Jaber, a prominent area Arab doctor who founded the Arab American Association and delivered “almost every Arab baby in Bay Ridge,” she says. Her father meanwhile, who had emigrated from Palestine with her mother in the 1970s, is a well-known Bay Ridge area grocery store owner. She married a Palestinian immigrant at the age of 17 and gave birth to the first three children the next year. After completing an Associates Degree at Kingsborough Community College in 2001 she began working as an assistant to Dr. Jaber, which eventually led to work at the Association, headed at the time by her cousin. “It doesn’t get more local than me!” Sarsour exclaims. “If you want to be trusted in this community, people have to know where you come from.”
The ability to bridge generational gaps is an important asset for emerging Arab American leaders, according to Ghassan Shabaneh, a professor who studies Arab American political involvement at Manhattan College. He says early Arab immigrants focused largely on their own survival and were often alienated by American society and government—a far different reality from that experienced by their children.
“The old generation doubts the system and the process, but the younger generation is more integrated. They believe in the system,” Shabaneh says. “They see opportunities beyond the gas station or the grocery. They are more involved, they speak English better, they are more professional.”
Sarsour admits that language and phrasing have been essential in her efforts to build relationships with elected officials: “We make things sound flowery so politicians are more inclined to jump on our bandwagon.” This means avoiding “trigger words” such as ’Islam’, ’Muslim’ and ’terrorist’. Racial profiling becomes, “certain procedures that are not random” while defining the community as “hardworking Americans” is more effective than: “We are not terrorists”, she explains.
According to Shabaneh, the 9/11 backlash—although taxing—has created a progressive focus on local community involvement, representing a shift from the community’s previous preoccupation with criticizing U.S. foreign policy. Ironically enough, the fight against draconian government measures, has helped gain the community gain more recognition from government officials.
Twenty years ago, Arab Americans were largely ignored Shabaneh says. “They were not desired by anybody. But now no politician can win without going to the mosque and talking to the Imam.”
Perhaps a bit of Brooklyn attitude doesn’t hurt either. Not long after the 9/11 attacks the FBI asked Sarsour to join a dialog group to improve community cooperation. But she says she quit after realizing that the Bureau had done little to change its policies toward the community: “It was pointless. I told them I’m not going to sit at the table when nothing is going on, and when I stopped coming, other people stood in solidarity and the whole group died.”
The Backlash 9/11 author Anny Bakalian, knows Linda’s work and lauds her ability to rally a crowd. “She has a lot of charisma and she’s very good on the grassroots level—people die to have that kind of power.”
“My only criticism is that she go back to school and finish her B.A. I keep telling her that but it’s like talking to a wall. She needs the sophistication. She can be so much more powerful, especially if she had a law degree.”
If eventually she is to make a bid for public office, Sarsour may face another set of problems. A small group of websites, beginning with the infamous Campus Watch, have branded her a potential terrorist threat.
In an article published in 2007, Campus Watch defined Sarsour as “a radical Islamic activist and Hamas sympathizer with a power base in Brooklyn.” Although no sources are cited to back up the charge, two other websites, Militant Islam Monitor and Pipelinenews.org, have picked up the piece.
“It’s a cheap shot,” says Bakalian. “She’s a Palestinian, she’s prominent, she wears the hijab (headscarf), she’s vocal. Unfortunately it comes with the territory.”
Sarsour’s colleagues, as well as her boss at the YWCA, also shrug off the charges.
“I know that she sympathizes with what the Palestinians go through and so do I—and I’m half Jewish,” says Martha Kamber, YWCA executive director. “But being outraged over what’s going on in Gaza, doesn’t mean you are a radical, it means you are human.”
Sarsour’s coalition colleague, Raquel Batista, says she doesn’t see the allegations as a major threat to a future political campaign: “I think it’s about having the right people around you to challenge the misconceptions. It’s about showing her commitment to the community and showing folks that she wants to be part of the democratic process.”
But Campus Watch founder Daniel Pipes has successfully led media campaigns to oust some of Sarsour’s contemporaries. These include Debbie AlMontasser, who was forced to resign as head of an Arabic speaking school in Brooklyn last year following baseless accusations the school would spread radical Islam. Pipes also took aim at Mazen Asbahi, President Obama’s former Muslim outreach coordinator, who resigned from the campaign last summer following unsubstantiated claims that he was loosely linked to a radical preacher.
Both AlMontasser and Asbahi resigned citing the pressure of a media circus distracting from the projects they supported. Kamber says she isn’t worried about Sarsour: “It’s going to be hard to hold her back.”
For her part, Sarsour laughs off the charges. She admits a cousin was a member of a Palestinian party, but it was Fatah, which allied closely with the Bush administration, and not its bitter rival Hamas, which the U.S. government views as a terrorist group.
As for any harmful effects on her political aspirations, Sarsour says Pipes may actually be doing more good than harm.
“I get excited when Daniel Pipes writes about me,” she says with a wry smile. “He’s my publicist. When someone says you have a ’powerbase’ that’s like you walk down the street and have a million man march behind you.”
“People want to talk to me all the time after he wrote all that crazy shit about me.”