Middle Eastern in the U.S.

On May first 2008 I attended an event at CSU Chico called, Being Middle Eastern in the U.S. Seven Middle Eastern students hosted the event. Some of them and their families are from places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Palestine. Their mission was to show us a video of comedians with Middle Eastern origins, tell us about their lives in America, and answer questions.

They showed a video of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, which showcased four comedians with Middle Eastern roots. The comedians Maz Jobrani, Ahmed Ahmed, and Aron Kader are the "Axis of Evil" but they have a guest on their DVD, Dean Obeidallah. Axis of Evil Comedy Tour is about using comedy to bring to light Middle Eastern culture in the US.

The video was shown with an intermission where everyone was given a piece of a Middle Eastern food called lhotka (I am unsure how to spell it). It was the first time I had tried it and it was good and quite interesting. They also answered questions and talked about themselves and their time in America during the intermission and after watching the DVD. The over all feeling that I got from the experience is that people from the Middle East are often miss represented by the media. They only show bits and pieces from those cultures and it is usually just the radical side of it. People over generalize when it comes to most things, which can be very hurtful. None of the students said they had ever been really hurt by racism but they did say California is more tolerant than other states. One of the students did have a relative whose family was kicked out of a restaurant once the waiter found out they were of Middle Eastern heritage, this happened just after 9-11.

Some of the students said they were going to go and live back home when they were done with schooling at Chico. They want to go back because it is beautiful there and many of the places in the Middle East are not in a state of war, they are peaceful. They said that before the Middle East was seen as a place of terrorists the people were poets. They said that the Arabic language has many more words than English and that it is a poetic language; it actually has about seven ways to say love all with different depths of meaning.