A World Perspective

A World Perspective
Although I agree with Maya Angelou about the inappropriate paraphrasing of the "drum major" quotation, this quotation makes sense to me.

Friday, September 27, 2013

A Syrian American community that is divided, but hopefully not forever

If you have not already been introduced to the radio program "Marketplace," allow me.
Here's a sample story on which I couldn't resist commenting:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/syrian-americans-find-ways-help-afar



Palestinian youths flash V-signs while they hold Syrian flags during a pro-Syrian demonstration November 18, 2005 in Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
How best to deal with the extremely messy situation in Syria?
That’s the question the U.S. government and the international community are wrestling with right now. But it’s one that Syrian expats have wrestled with in a different, more intimate way for more than two years.
Metro Detroit has one of the nation’s largest and oldest Syrian communities. How have they dealt with the crisis? How are they using the community’s social and economic resources to help? 
A long history, but strong ties
Syrians started migrating to Detroit more than 100 years ago.
But today, many are newer immigrants who still have close ties to Syria.
Recently, about one hundred Syrian-Americans gathered at a tidy park in suburban Detroit. They chanted and held banners depicting scenes of atrocities in Syria, including victims of a chemical weapons attack attributed to President Bashar Al-Assad.  
Ibrahim Alkeilani stood on the fringes of the protest, holding the flag of the Syrian revolution. He said it’s hard to even get ahold of relatives in Syria.  And when you do, conversations take place in a kind of code.
“I call it secret Syrian ways of communication,” said Alkeilani. “We use funny words, and different expressions, basically to evade Syrian monitoring of the telephone lines.”
Even before the uprising against Assad’s government more than two years ago, there were nearly as many Syrians living outside Syria as there were inside.
And right now, those inside Syria rely on family members abroad more than ever.
Wael Hakmeh, a Syrian-American born and raised in the U.S., said it’s not easy to send money to his in-laws there. At this point, ex-pats basically have to find someone to smuggle money directly into the country. And even then, there are dangers to spending U.S. dollars in Syria.
“The Assad regime now is jailing people who use currency other than the Syrian pound,” Hakmeh said, “and they don’t want the continued devaluation of the pound.”
Finding ways to help from afar
Hakmeh is an emergency room physician. There are lots of doctors in Michigan’s Syrian community. Some have even gone back to Syria to provide medical aid.
There are other ways for Syrian-Americans to help out from afar—like frequent fundraisers for humanitarian assistance.
“Consistently, these fundraisers have all raised over a million dollars,” said Lena Masri, a Syrian-American attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Michigan.
One thing southeast Michigan’s Syrian community doesn’t lack is money. And they’ve raised millions upon millions of dollars in relief funds over the last two years, with the vast majority going to help the refugees in the camps that have sprung up around Syria’s borders.
Masri said what they do lack is manpower -- especially to help refugees who have ended up in the U.S. She’s taken on dozens of refugee cases, for those claiming political asylum and also what’s known as “temporary protected status.”
Masri said the community isn’t seeing a truly overwhelming number of Syrian refugees -- yet. But there are some, and she has personally taken on dozens of cases.
Masri said an informal network of support has popped up to support refugees here. She’s seen applications showing that many receive money, housing and other support from Syrian-Americans.
“They’ve consistently been able to list others who have provided financial support from shelter to utilities to, you know every day expenses,” Masri said. “And these are people who don’t necessarily know each other.”
“A generation of refugees receiving another generation of refugees”
That kind of generosity -- even from strangers -- is something Dr. Adnan Hamad has seen again and again. He works for Arab-American Center for Economic and Social Services in Dearborn.
Over the course of decades, Hamad has seen waves of refugees from the Middle East -- Lebanese, Iraqis, and now increasingly Syrians -- arrive in metro Detroit. He said that absorbing these refugees is almost second nature to Detroit’s large Arab-American community.
“This community is about a generation of immigrants receiving a second generation of immigrants,” Hamad said. “A generation of refugees receiving another influx of refugees.”
These networks of support are impressive, but not all is rosy. The civil conflict in Syria has split Detroit’s Syrian community. There are rebel supporters like the protesters above, but there’s also a pro-Assad faction. The conflict has ended friendships and split families.
But Hamad is confident the larger Arab-American community will pull together to support displaced Syrians.
 “I think the community is going to be more helpful to the Syrian refugees than any other influx of refugees that we have received in the past,” he said.
And Hamad, once a Palestinian refugee himself, has seen a number of families arrive in Michigan traumatized, penniless and friendless. And he says within a few years, many have re-built their lives to the point where they’re the ones contributing the most to the next wave of refugees.

About the author

Sarah Cwiek is a reporter who joined Michigan Radio in October 2009.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The soft power of transnational scientific collaboration

Good news today from the American University of Beirut in the march to reduce suffering from cancer <http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2013/Sep-21/232017-lebanese-scientists-hope-for-breakthrough-against-leukemia.ashx#axzz2fdAF4UN1>. Here, a copy of the article, with the added hope that people around the world can better appreciate the resilience and dedication of scientists amid political strife.

 Lebanese scientists hope for breakthrough against leukemiaSeptember 21, 2013 12:38 AMBy Kareem Shaheen
People stand in front of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. (The Daily Star/Hasan Shaaban)
People stand in front of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. (The Daily Star/Hasan Shaaban)
A+A-
BEIRUT: Scientists in Lebanon have developed a drug cocktail that they hope could cure a rare form of leukemia, in a milestone for cancer research in the region.
The drug combination targets Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), a blood cancer that affects 1 in 100,000 people in Lebanon but whose prevalence is rising as patients use expensive drugs to live longer with the symptoms.
The researchers at the American University of Beirut Medical Center tested a combination of arsenic and interferon in mice injected with leukemic cells. A paper on the research was published this month in the International Journal of Cancer, a peer-reviewed publication.
Current treatments for CML are expensive, reaching up to $4,000 a month, and patients have to remain indefinitely on treatment because the primary drug in use, known as imatinib, does not cure the disease.
While imatinib targets the bulk of the tumor in CML, it does not affect the cancer stem cells, which can self-renew and generate new cancer cells if the treatment stops. The existing medication therefore controls the growth of the cancer, but does not cure it.
“I’m not from a rich family, I have sick people in my family and understand how it is important to have the money,” said Rihab Nasr, assistant professor of medicine in the Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences at AUB and the project’s leader. “I wanted to find a treatment that cures.”
Both interferon and arsenic are used separately for cancer treatment. Arsenic is a toxin, but can be used in cancer treatment and may be instrumental in degrading the proteins that are central to cancer stem cell growth.
Nasr first tried the combination on cancer cell cultures that were collected from patients and kept alive in incubators in the lab, some of which were resistant to the current treatments.
The drug cocktail worked, and so Nasr moved on to try it on mice.
First, the scientists injected the mice with cells infected with a DNA fragment that carries a specific “oncogene,” which is a gene that can transform into a cancer cell that causes CML.
The mice developed leukemia within a few weeks. Then they were treated with the drug.
“And it worked,” Nasr said.
But to make sure the treatment was targeting the cancer stem cells that can multiply and renew the cancer, Nasr took the experiment one step further. She took samples from the bone marrow of the treated mice, where the cancer stem cells would have remained if they were not eradicated, and injected them into a second set of mice.
Most of the mice that received the treated bone marrow did not develop the cancer, and lived on to die essentially of old age.
“This tells me that the combination of arsenic and interferon is eradicating this small population of cancer stem cells,” she said.
Nasr and her fellow researchers will now look into why the interferon and arsenic combination works on the leukemia cells, a process that is not fully understood.
Nasr thinks the combination might be targeting a chain reaction that allows cancer stem cells to replicate, breaking down the cycle and causing them to die off.
Nasr said that advances in cancer research and technology are allowing the development of more advanced treatments. She would like to eventually carry out clinical trials to test the efficacy of the drug on humans, but she would need to do that in combination with other clinics and research centers abroad as the population with the disease in Lebanon is too small to prove whether the cure could work.
The disease is more common among older adults, between 40 and 50 years of age.
Still, she is hopeful because the combination could also mean an easier life for patients. Many cancer patients do not take well to interferon, for instance, but a drug combination would have a lower concentration of it, thus reducing side effects.
Nasr presented her findings in Europe and Qatar, where the foundation created by the country’s former emir funded part of her research.
She said that a major challenge for cancer researchers in Lebanon and the Middle East was often a lack of resources, and that scientists in Lebanon had the knowledge to make significant contributions to cancer research.


Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2013/Sep-21/232017-lebanese-scientists-hope-for-breakthrough-against-leukemia.ashx#ixzz2fdBTebFu
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb) 

Monday, September 9, 2013

Blogging on the intersection of peacebuilding and public diplomacy

Dear Members of the U.S. Congress:

Don't forget to fund a robust international peacebuilding effort! International diplomacy depends on the partnerships we build through non-violent communication from the local to the global levels. This recently published peace
http://www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org/2013/09/peacebuildings-vital-role-in-national-security-best-value-for-impact-at-all-levels/ is a collaboration with a dear friend and former U.S. Information Agency colleague, Michael Graham.


Monday, September 2, 2013

Celebrating the past and enjoying the present

My dear aunt, Lorna Michaelson, passed away July 20th. She was a concert pianist and music educator http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/219131771.html?



page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue . I won't be at this celebration of diasporan culture in Detroit https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/usa/traditional-arab-music-and-flamenco-unite-on-stage-in-detroit

Image courtesy of www.theaustralian.com.au

but I will continue to honor all Arab American artists, including Aunt Lorna, for their contributions to world-class song and dance.