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AAI in the News

Rallying In Dearborn: 'Yalla' in America

By Tamara Audi
Detroit Free Press
Posted on Monday November 6, 2006

It is a word of impatient urging familiar to most Americans from the movies: Arab laborers digging in the desert yelled it during “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; regular viewers of “24” will hear it casually lobbed in the background by Arab terrorists on the run. It can mean anything from “let’s go” to “hurry up” to “come on already.”

But on Sunday, in a half-empty conference room of the University of Michigan Dearborn campus, the Arabic slang word “yalla” was a direct and anxious appeal to Arab Americans to vote Tuesday, and take charge of their political future.

“We’ve got to organize like our lives depend on it, because they do,” James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said in an impassioned speech to an audience of about 70 activists and community leaders at the “Yalla Rally.”

Zogby’s Washington-based advocacy group, a sponsor of the rally, is marshalling Arab-American communities across the country to vote in greater numbers.

While Zogby said he has been encouraged and impressed by the level of involvement and activism nationwide—especially among youth—local organizers of Sunday’s rally said they feared that not enough Arab Americans in metro Detroit will vote in Tuesday’s election.

“We’ve just noticed that political participation in our community is low lately,” said Rashida Tliab, Immigration Rights Advocacy coordinator for ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services. “People are discouraged by the events of the summer and some are fearful.”

Arab Americans have expressed frustration by a perceived lack of political support during the summer conflict between Lebanon and Israel that all but destroyed a few southern Lebanese villages from which thousands of Dearborn residents emigrated.

Posters at the rally printed in Arabic and English read “Enough is enough! Your vote is your voice”—a clear reference to U.S. policies in the Mideast.

The conflict may have helped spur more young people to become politically involved. This fall, ACCESS registered 1,600 new Arab-American voters ages 18 and 29 in one three-month registration drive.

But community organizers say they have also heard from older voters wary of registering their names with a government that has inspired fear with mistaken arrests and indefinite detentions.

At the same time, this election will impact issues that are vitally important to the community, like civil rights and immigration, organizers said.

“This year, probably more than any other year, the stakes are high,” said Taleb Salhab, a national outreach director for ACCESS. “We’re trying to make the community aware of that.”

On Sunday, they tried with one simple word.