Muslim Voice
19 th
Ser ving the o C m mu n
New Look
JANUARY 2013
Year
it y
safar/rabi al awal 1434H
Monthly Newspaper
www.AZMuslimVoice.com
Anti-Islam Law Denied By Laura Fawaz, Lansing, MI.– Last week, Muslims nationwide were urged to take action against HB 4769, better known as the Anti-Islam Legislation. S t a t e Legislator Dave Agema, a Republican from Michigan, was the state representative behind this bill, and actively pushing for it to pass during Michigan’s lame duck session. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, had their state-wide chapters calling on “all people of conscience” to urge their state governors “to veto the biased bill which is among those that seek to impose governmentsanctioned discrimination on Continued on page
Iraqi Refugees in US
Carry Memories of War By Ashlee Rezin, CHICAGO -- A fragile sense of security often robs Zuhair Sulaiman of the luxury of a good night’s sleep. “The fear is embedded inside,” he said in Arabic at a meeting at Arab American Family Services in Bridgeview, Ill., just outside Chicago. Along with more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, who abandoned their homes, his family fled to Iraq when Israel was born in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He lived in Iraq as a Palestinian refugee with no citizenship papers for 54 years before applying to come to the United States as a refugee. Now, living in Chicago as an Iraqi refugee, Sulaiman, 58, is grateful to be in a safe and secure country, but nightly dreams of death, and fears for his children when they leave the house. “I saw too many things in Iraq; too many dead bodies, too many dead children, too many heads cut off in the street and too much blood.” But here he faces new struggles—many of them not unlike those faced by others seeking sanctuary in America. He struggles with poverty because of the limited help offered by the U.S. government. He struggles to pay the government back for his family’s flight to America. And he struggles to find his feet in a place that’s so different from what he’s always known. Living in the Al-Waleed refugee camp in Iraq, near the border with Syria and the Al-Tanf crossing, Sulaiman applied to come to the United States through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). With the help of World Relief-Chicago, Sulaiman, his wife Allaay, and their five children, who were born into refugee status in Iraq, were relocated to various areas of Chicago in 2010. Sulaiman now lives with his wife and three of his children in the North Side Chicago neighborhood of Albany Park. “I am a double refugee and a person without a land,” said Sulaiman. He said Iraq doesn’t recognize him as a citizen, took away his papers and treated him as a low member of society. And since Palestinians do not have their own country, and there is no passport stamped “Palestine,” he is a man without a place to call home. As refugees, he and his family
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Growing Up In ‘The World’s Largest Jail’ New America Media, News Report, Peter Schurmann SAN FRANCISCO – A series of drawings is spread across the table in front of Ayman Nijim. One of them, in hues of yellow and blue, shows a row of helmeted stick figures – the Star of David carefully traced above each – bearing machine guns with a tank to their rear. On the side is a wall smeared in red and brown. “Do you see those dots?” asks Nijim, 29, a community-based mental health worker in the Gaza Strip, as he points to a flurry of pencil marks
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Vol.19 Issue No.196
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Blacks Still Go Hungry
Deportations of Parents of U.S. Citizens
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