UAS takes on myths about Middle East

ANGIE LEVINE/Daily Bruin Staff The UAS has posted white feathers
with barbs surrounding them around campus to commemorate
Palestinian Awareness Week.

By Kelly Rayburn
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
[email protected]

The United Arab Society hopes its dove of peace will take flight
at the end of the day.

Today will conclude a three-day event, “Know the People
not the Myths,” put on by the UAS with the goal of
“humanizing the Palestinian people.” On Tuesday, the
UAS began distributing literature on the plight of the Palestinian
people and asking students to sign petitions to the U.S. State
Department and media outlets to address what they called unfair
treatment of Palestinians.

Students were also encouraged to tack feathers on a
papier-mâché dove ““ a physical symbol of a
dedication to peace in the Middle East, said UAS president Hamada
Alzahawi.

“Hopefully peace will take flight,” Alzahawi
said.

The three-day event aimed to offset what the UAS said are common
misconceptions that all Palestinians are terrorists who hate
Israelis.

Shreya Shah, a first-year graduate student in the school of
public health, said she pinned a feather to the dove to help
overhaul just such perceptions.

“People forget that Palestinians are just normal people,
like you or me,” she said.

The UAS also placed foot-long feathers with wire wrapped around
them all over campus: the feathers representing peace, the wire the
constraints that prevent peace, Alzahawi said.

The literature the UAS distributed included conditions
Palestinians desire that would lead to peace.

Palestinians want the right of self-determination, access to
water and freedom of movement, a pamphlet read.

The event did not aim to “criticize the other side,”
Alzahawi said. The UAS tried to avoid falling into political
arguments with pro-Israeli students, he said, and wanted to target
the average “Joe Schmoe.”

But Alzahawi also admitted the difficulty of addressing the
situation in the Mideast without striking some nerves. Some UAS
information was clearly political.

For example, the UAS placed a political cartoon on a sandwich
board that portrayed a caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon chomping away at a giant piece of cheese representing the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The cartoon argued that the Camp
David accords ““ which were rejected by Yasser Arafat, a
development many Israel supporters use as evidence that Arafat does
not want peace with Israel ““ would have left the Palestinians
with a pitifully small and Israeli-controlled state.

Though event planners said they did not want to criticize one
side or the other, the cartoon clearly showed one side as more
responsible for an absence of peace.

One of the reasons the group put the cartoon on the sandwich
board was to show that the media is biased, on both sides of the
issue, Alzahawi said. He said he hoped the event would encourage
people to demand a fair and balanced media.