Moustafa Bayoumi Boeken

"Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake 'Mustafa Bayoumi' was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an 'anti-American, pro-Islam' agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed. Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present"--From publisher's website

The story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemyArab and Muslim Americans are the new, largely undiscussed “problem” of American society, their lives no better understood than those of African Americans a century ago. Under the cover of the terrorist attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the explosion of political violence around the world, a fundamental misunderstanding of the Arab and Muslim American communities has been allowed to fester and even to define the lives of the seven twentysomething men and women whom we meet in this book. Their names are Rami, Sami, Akram, Lina, Yasmin, Omar, and Rasha, and they all live in Brooklyn, New York, which is home to the largest number of Arab Americans in the United States.We meet Sami, an Arab American Christian, who navigates the minefield of associations the public has of Arabs as well as the expectations that Muslim Arab Americans have of him as a marine who fought in the Iraq war. And Rasha, who, along with her parents, sister, and brothers, was detained by the FBI in a New Jersey jail in early 2002. Without explanation, she and her family were released several months later. As drama of all kinds swirls around them, these young men and women strive for the very things the majority of young adults desire: opportunity, marriage, happiness, and the chance to fulfill their potential. But what they have now are lives that are less certain, and more difficult, than they ever could have imagined: workplace discrimination, warfare in their countries of origin, government surveillance, the disappearance of friends or family, threats of vigilante violence, and a host of other problems that thrive in the age of terror.And yet How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? takes the raw material of their struggle and weaves it into an unforgettable, and very American, story of promise and hope. In prose that is at once blunt and lyrical, Moustafa Bayoumi allows us to see the world as these men and women do, revealing a set of characters and a place that indelibly change the way we see the turbulent past and yet still hopeful future of this country.

„Wir sind in internationalen Gewässern angegriffen worden – die Israelis haben sich wie Piraten verhalten […] Als sie begannen, das Schiff Richtung Israel zu lenken, war das eine Entführung! Die ganze Aktion ist illegal!“ – Henning Mankell, an Bord des Gaza Solidaritäts Konvois. Am 31. Mai 2010, um 4:30 Uhr, greifen israelische Kommandos im östlichen Mittelmeer die Gaza-Flottille an, die humanitäre Hilfe nach Gaza bringen wollte. Innerhalb weniger Minuten werden neun Aktivisten erschossen und viele weitere verletzt. Die 700 Passagiere werden festgenommen und nach Israel in Gefangenenlager gebracht, wo ihnen alle Dokumentationen über die Militäraktion abgenommen werden. Die israelische Armee versucht, die öffentliche Wahrnehmung der Ereignisse zu kontrollieren. Der Angriff löst weltweit Empörung aus, mit spontanen Demonstrationen in Europa, den USA, der Türkei und Gaza, die den Überfall verurteilen. Der türkische Ministerpräsident spricht von „Blutbad“ und „Staatsterrorismus“, während Libanons Ministerpräsident den Vorfall als gefährlichen Schritt bezeichnet, der die Spannungen in der Region verschärfen wird. In diesem Buch berichten Teilnehmer und Journalisten von den Ereignissen der Nacht und verknüpfen sie mit der dreijährigen Blockade des Gazastreifens sowie dem jahrzehntelangen Konflikt zwischen Israel und Palästina.