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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPalestinian-American NFL Player Faces Smear Campaign
Muna Shikaki, New York City
In many ways, Oday Aboushis football career followed a typical trajectory: he started playing football at the age of five and all throughout high school, following which he was granted a scholarship to study and play at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. This year, the 65 and 305 pound Aboushi was drafted in the fifth round to play an offensive lineman for the Jets. But, Aboushi is also Palestinian-American, and that made things very different.
When I went to interview Aboushi at the Jets training facility in Florham Park, New Jersey last week, I thought I would be working on a feel-good story about a Palestinian-American who made it into an industry that was quite untraditional for an immigrant Arab family. But no such luck, the story of Aboushis success quickly turned political due to no other fact but his ethnicity.
Aboushi is not the first Arab-American to play professional sports in the U.S.; but being vocal about his origins, his ties to his homeland and the collective Palestinian experience made him a quick target for an extreme fringe of rightwing Zionists.
The attacks began with accusations ranging from Islamic extremism to anti-Semitism from Front Page magazine, a web blog that features typical rightwing rants. The blog went through Aboushis Twitter feed and determined that a picture he re-tweeted of a Palestinian woman kicked out of her house by settlers in Jerusalem was anti-Israeli.
The website also made it seem like using the word Nakba (catastrophe) to describe the mass displacement of Palestinians out of their homeland in 1948 was somehow controversial. They even attacked a speech Aboushi gave to a social gathering of Palestinians, who belong to Al Bireh Society. In that speech, Aboushi discussed his path to the National Football League (NFL) and his drive to succeed.
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http://english.alarabiya.net/en/sports/2013/07/14/Palestinian-American-NFL-player-faces-Zionist-smear-campaign.html
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)K & R
KG
(28,751 posts)MinM
(2,650 posts)Oday Aboushi and his family. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)
A stunning tweet just came across the wires from Major League Baseballs recently hired new media coordinator Jonathan Mael. It reads, The @nyjets are a disgrace of an organization. The Patriots have Aaron Hernandez, the Jets have Oday Aboushi. (Mael has since deleted his account, making him a rather ineffectual new media coordinator.)
Aaron Hernandez is, of course, the former star tight end now on trial for premeditated murder. So who is Oday Aboushi? Hes a Brooklyn-born fifth-round rookie lineman from the University of Virginia. His crime, in the eyes of Mael, is being of Palestinian heritage as well as having the temerity to discuss what a life of dispossession this has meant to him and his extended family.
This ugly line of thought exists on a plane beyond tweets. In a stunningly unprincipled piece on Yahoo! Sports, a writer named Adam Waksman wrote this week that Aboushi was involved in anti-Semitic activism and asked whether he should be drummed out of the league. Waksman compared Aboushi with those who traffic in anti-gay, anti-black, anti-immigrant, sexist [speech] and asks, Does the NFL want its image associated with prejudice, violence or fundamentalism on any level?
Aboushi is not quoted once in this entire piece. He is just Waksmans silent, hulking brown mannequin. Instead, the main source Waksman draws upon for proof of his anti-Semitic activism is Front Page Magazine. For the uninitiated, this is the creation of David Horowitz, the hard-right-wing minstrel best known for taking out ads in college newspapers arguing that people of African descent should thank Europeans for slavery. Front Pagewhich bills itself as fighting the war at home and abroadis a one-stop shop for anyone seeking articles cheering on George Zimmerman or catching up on the most frightening anti-Arab rhetoric in Israeli politics. Quoting it for source material on Palestinian activism is like choosing to learn about the environmental rights movement by reading an Exxon/Mobil newsletter. ...
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175216/slander-ny-jet-oday-aboushi#axzz2Z1YBqtYx
bluedigger
(17,086 posts)He'd be a local hero and role model in the Detroit suburbs.
Purveyor
(29,876 posts)Arcanetrance
(2,670 posts)But as far as the guy goes he's a politically minded individual which is great more 20 year Olds need to be aware of the greater world around them but I haven't seen evidence of him saying or doing anything that warrants what's being said about him. I'm sick of this muslim=bad shit that's now commonplace here in America