We need stories; stories we can live by, that teach us about ourselves. Our stories should speak to the realities of our everyday lives, the fear and insecurity that accompany us as we face birth, death, and all that lies in between.

Most troubling was the fact that it was largely covered as a straight news story, as in: “a coup for Giuliani, anxious to buttress his credentials with social conservatives.” Such tripe can only be attributed to either sloppy reporting, or a peculiar form of amnesia which appears to plague too many U.S. journalists. It is simply inexcusable to ignore Robertson’s thirty year record of fanaticism and bigotry and to, therefore, regard his blessing “as a political boon.”

Last weekend, most of the Democratic candidates for President addressed remarks to a gathering of Arab American leaders assembled at their Quadrennial National Leadership Conference (NLC) in Michigan. An examination of how each of them dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proved to be quite revealing.

In the aftermath of Secretary of State Rice’s fourth recent visit to the region to prepare for a Middle East peace conference, only the meeting’s  proposed location has been decided. The situation looks quite bleak, with little to show for the efforts made to date.

We are living in an era of remarkable world-wide transformation, which has accelerated dramatically in just the last few decades. The collapse of communism led to the emergence of free market democracies throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Previously marginal economies in the Arab Gulf and South and Southeast Asia have emerged as global players, while at home they have experienced dramatic modernization and urbanization

Despite the musings of pundits, spin from the campaigns and the results of respected national polls, the U.S. presidential primaries are not over. In fact, they have not even begun.

While doing politics is never easy, for Arab Americans it has, at times, been an especially difficult business. Despite this, over the last thirty years, Arab Americans have succeeded in finding sufficient common ground to organize their constituency, to mobilize on issues of common concern, and to secure recognition and access in the political mainstream.

In focusing the central themes of his campaign on security and fear of terrorism, Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor and now leading Republican presidential candidate, appears to have taken a page out of Karl Rove’s 2004 playbook. His views on these matters are laid out in fifty-three terse paragraphs in the September/October issue of the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, in an article called “Toward a Realistic Peace.”

While he testified under oath, in hearings before the U.S. Senate, that he was not involved in the firings, had not sought to influence the testimony of other witnesses, did not apply pressure on others in the Administration to support the policies under investigation, or simply did not recall matters relevant to the inquiry – other facts and testimony provided by more credible witnesses show Gonzales to have been less than truthful. Because of these inconsistencies, the Inspector General of the Justice Department is conducting an investigation into whether or not Gonzales lied in his testimony – itself a crime – and whether other acts constitute criminal violations.

I was just in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a former coal-mining town that generated national attention for its attempt to enforce an ordinance making it a punishable offense to house, employ or serve “illegal” immigrants. The Hazleton ordinance was recently struck down by federal court, but the political discourse of some in that community has already moved beyond “illegals” to a crude nativism with complaints about immigrants and their “foreign” lang