Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [126]
He chose the name Abu Nidal (“father of the struggle”) and grew impatient with the PLO. One of his first jobs when he formed his own splinter group was to start bumping off the PLO leadership. He hated them more than he hated the Israelis, but he did leave time for killing the Israelis, too. Over a span of twenty years he coordinated terrorist actions in over twenty countries that killed at least nine hundred people. He was good at what he did.
In October 1985, just two months before I would cross paths with Nidal, his rival splinter group, the Palestine Liberation Front, run by the equally-feared Abu Abbas, hijacked a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, off the coast of Egypt and killed an elderly American by the name of Leon Klinghoffer. They put a bullet in his head while he sat in his wheelchair, and then wheeled Leon in his chair straight off the ship and into the Mediterranean.
This act stunned most of the world, and it was fair to say that Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs were developing a PR problem.
I lived in the part of the United States—southeastern Michigan—that had (and still has) more Arab-Americans and people of Arab descent per capita than any other part of the non-Arab world. I grew up with Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians. But mostly Palestinians, whom we called Arabs, but thought of as white people, the way you used to think of Hispanics as white people (sure, they were brown, but they were Catholics, so they got half a point).
The Arabs in Flint owned the grocery stores, the movie theater, the department store, the real estate agency, and a lot of gas stations. Saying that the people of Flint liked the Arabs would be like saying they liked themselves. A man who was born in Palestine was more likely to have delivered you in the hospital than blow you up on a plane. Much more. We simply did not have this view of them as “terrorists,” and so when Arab or Palestinian became a dirty word, it didn’t become one for most of us. Ask anyone in Flint who grocery-shopped at Hamady’s, bought their school clothes at Yankee’s, ate at the American diner or danced at the Mighty Mighty Mikatam, and they will not know what you are talking about when you point out to them that the proprietors of these establishments had their lands invaded or snatched from them by the Israelis on the other side of the world.
This was not the sentiment throughout much of the rest of America. Arab had become pretty much synonymous with “evil,” and between OPEC jacking up the price of oil and causing “oil shortages,” the two recent wars with Israel, and the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Americans had pretty much seen enough to make up their minds that the last person you wanted to see in your neighborhood or on the flight to Fargo was an Arab guy.
An Arab-American foundation decided that they’d seen enough, too, and opened up an information and education office in Washington, D.C. They tried to put out press releases to counter the terrorism stories in the media with news about what Arab-Americans were doing to make America great. They sent speakers to talk to students on campuses. And they sponsored journalism fellowships to take groups of writers and reporters to the Arab world and show them firsthand how most Arabs lived and behaved.
In the summer of 1985, I applied for one of those fellowships. Issues regarding Arabs were a concern for the readers of my newspaper, the Flint Voice (which was now the Michigan Voice), many of whom were Arab-Americans in Flint and Detroit. I had never been to that part of the world, and the foundation promised full access to whatever