Arts and Culture

Excerpt: "We've been living in Bethlehem for a while now and, in living here, we've been able to focus on serving a couple different groups of people, and one of those is the people living in Dheisheh, which is the largest of the three refugee camps in Bethlehem. There are 12,000 people living in less than a third square mile... As we got to know families in Dheisheh we became aware of one project in particular. Eight years ago women in Dheisheh organized themselves into a cooperative, a union, where they make hand embroidered coin purses and pillow cases, and some of the women who didn't know how to prior learned the trade and then were able to make these as a way of providing for themselves and their families."

Americans of Middle Eastern decent use humor to raise awareness about the harmful effects of prejudice. Watch:

by Jennifer Redfearn

New York, New York - Modern Iran shows a variety of perplexing faces to the world: hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sophisticated academics, outspoken exiles.

One young Iranian couple, determined not to leave their country's public relations to others, is bicycling around the globe to spread a message of peace and environmental conservation.

by Caesar Chelala

NEW YORK, New York - Two very dissimilar events with contradictory results took place recently in Iraq, practically simultaneously: the withdrawal of five Sunni ministers from the so-called unity government of Nouri al-Maliki and the victory of the Iraqi national soccer team over Saudi Arabia for the Asian Soccer Cup. The first is indicative of the battle for power being waged among the factions present in that troubled country, while the second succeeded precisely because those factions were able to overcome th eir deep-seated differences and work towards a common goal. The politicians could learn a valuable lesson from the latter.

In the recent film "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq," a Turkish James Bond figure makes much use of his license to kill, dispatching U.S. soldiers with ease and cool usually associated with 007's effortless slaughtering of gangs of KGB agents. Sinister Israelis are blasted as well, their trade being in the stealing of organs from Iraqi babies, provided to them by an obliging U.S. military when it is not too busy machine-gunning wedding parties. Grotesque as all this might seem, it has been the most popular Turkish movie in years, breaking all box office records within days of release.

By Jon Gorvett

by Matt Horton

ARAB and African hip-hop artists converged Dec. 16 at Washington, DC's local progressive hot spot, Bus Boys and Poets, to raise funds for the forthcoming film "Slingshot Hip Hop: The Palestinian Lyrical Front," expected to debut at film festivals this year. Over a hundred people packed the restaurant's small performance space, and hundreds more were turned away.

Emceed by Noura Erekat, the show began with rapper-activist Iron Sheik, who warmed up the crowd. After watching a superb clip from "Slingshot Hip Hop," members of the audience started writing checks in order to help filmmaker Jackie Salloum complete and market the film.

Special guest Noose, an Arab-American artist from New Jersey who recently opened for Hip-Hop super group Bone-Thugs-in-Harmony, continued the positive performances with a beautiful spoken word piece, and MC Narcissist, an Iraqi-Canadian artist who is part of the Montreal based group Euphrates, brought fire down on the grateful crowd.