On this day, the newspaper, as usual, is folded in half and is free at the entrance to the many oriental restaurants that line the roads east and west of Detroit. Arab American News. Catch it, sit on a sky bench, order ogdat, a delicious Yemeni stew or lentil soup, when the cold sets in, turn the pages according to local and distant news, under very white neon lights, all part of the tastes and habits of Michigan’s capital city and its surroundings. .
It is home to the largest Arab and Muslim community in the United States. There, over the last forty years, invasions and wars in the Near and Middle East have come more or less directly to Americans, Lebanese, Palestinians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians to revive the rust and abandonment of what were once symbolic lands. Henry Ford was drowning.
In early November, a month has passed since the bloody attacks and hostage-taking by Hamas in Israel. The intense Israeli bombardment of Gaza plunges many Palestinian-American families into grief, then, more and more often, into mourning.
An electoral weapon
There were injured and died by thousands of people, so much so that, one day, it is the brother, daughter or cousin who is affected. Killed by an army heavily armed and financed by the United States. The “one”. Arab American News Lets give a slogan: “Abandon Biden” (“Let Biden go”). A year before the presidential election, anger has become an electoral weapon.
But anyone who reads from right to left and in Arabic turns the newspaper the other way and comes across another “headline”: a photo of the ruins of Gaza, under a headline that simply says “No relief.” Netanyahu rejected the ceasefire. Arab American News It has two heads. Written in two alphabets. Talk to those who vote and those who don’t. Those who immerse themselves in American society and who stay close to their traditions. Those who watch American channels and those who tune into the stories of Arab channels, Al-Jazeera or Al-Mayadeen.
Its readers do not necessarily understand the other side of the newspaper. At its midpoint, page 14, the two languages converge. “It is the only place where Arabic and English meet. Otherwise, they never meet.” Osama Siblani explains with a smile.
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