The political affiliations of Arab Canadians: Between multiculturalism and religion

This study is set forth to explore whether the susceptibility to persuasion—as articulated by Cialdini’s persuasion strategies—could vary with culture and acculturation. We examined individuals from the Arabic culture and their susceptibility to persuasion, according to the following strategies: reciprocity, commitment, liking, scarcity, consensus, and authority. The study involved 1,315 Arab Muslims between 18 and 60 years old (Mean = 34.65, SD = 9.16). The respondents were recruited from among residents of the Arab region (n = 507), immigrant Arabs in non-Arabic Muslim countries (n = 361), immigrant Arabs in East Asian countries (n = 85), and immigrant Arabs in Western countries (n = 362). Respondents completed an online Qualtrics survey. Controlling for socio-demographic variables (age, gender, income, education, and length of residence), our results indicated that susceptibility to the strategies differed significantly among Arab Muslims in the Arab region, with reciprocity being the highest and authority the lowest prevailing strategies. The same pattern of susceptibility emerged among immigrant Arab Muslims, regardless of their host country and the acculturation mode (integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) they endorse. These findings suggest that there is a consistent persuasion susceptibility pattern in the Arabic Muslim culture that does not seem to be modified by immigration and acculturation modes. Our findings are contrasted with the scarce research on cross-cultural differences in susceptibility to Cialdini’s persuasion strategies.

This paper is a discussion of how Arab Muslim Canadian women perceive themselves as women, the factors influencing their gender perceptions, and if that may have changed as a result of living in two cultures: Arab Muslim and Canadian. The nine Arab Muslim women interviewed were exposed to life and education in their own societies as adults and then experienced life and education in Canada. These women were interviewed to ascertain their gender perceptions and the factors influencing their views. The findings of the study, through Arab Muslim Canadian women's narratives, show that the faith of these Arab Muslim Canadian women heavily influenced the way they perceive themselves as women and their role in society. This research indicates that Arab Muslim women are negotiating their cultural, religious, and personal identities and that these negotiations operate in complex ways. In addition, for some of the participants, certain aspects of cultural traditions may have influenced the way they perceive themselves as women. For other Arab Muslim women, the experiences and the opportunities that became available through their education in Canada were regarded as significant in their lives and perceptions.

Using a multidomain and bidimensional approach, the present study applied and extended the acculturation gap-distress model with an immigrant Arab Canadian sample. Consistent with this model, immigrant Arab emerging adults (n = 113) perceived acculturation gaps between themselves and their parents with respect to their heritage and settlement culture orientation and values. Some of these gaps, in turn, were associated with poorer outcomes. Extending the model, the most problematic acculturation gaps were those in which the emerging adult perceived themselves to be more oriented to Arab culture and values than their parents. We also found some support for the moderating role of parent-emerging adult relationships.

This chapter examines the development of the Arab Canadian novel, first by discussing the history of Arab immigration and the Canadian cultural and political landscape. It then considers the beginnings of Arabic fiction in Canada, focusing on Arab Canadian literary figures such as Sa‘d al-Khādim, along with early novels written in French and English. It also looks at playwrights who have written novels and discusses works with contemporary cultural politics as the main theme. The chapter reveals that Arab Canadians and Quebecois are actively involved in many literary, cultural, and activist scenes, as reflected in works that expose racism and the myths of official multiculturalism.

Everyday ArabnessThe Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Film Nouri Gana (bio) North America is seemingly open terrain. Melting pot and multiculturalism have been articulated as cultural themes to which anyone can contribute. But this is theory not practice. —Marwan Hassan, 2002 The everyday is platitude … but this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived—in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity. —Maurice Blanchot, 1987 [End Page 21] Signifying Terror Marks: Arar and the Masks of Multiculturalism On November 4, 2003, less than a month after his release from prison in Syria, Maher Arar1 read a statement in Ottawa. The statement starts in a way that I find symptomatic of the signifying burden of being (identifiable as) Arab, and/or Muslim, particularly in the alleged climate of American tragic exceptionality following the airborne attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia on September 11, 2001. Arar commences his statement as follows: I am here today to tell the people of Canada what has happened to me. There have been many allegations made about me in the media, all of them by people who refuse to be named or come forward. So before I tell you who I am and what happened to me, I will tell you who I am not. I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of al-Qaeda and I do not know any one who belongs to this group (2003; emphasis added). The emphatic and strenuous repetition of the negative marker "not" in Arar's declarative sentences is evocative not only of the predicament of precarious transpicuity (i.e., of Arar's attenuated poetics of disidentification with the alleged terrorist identifications foisted on him), but also, and simultaneously, of a process of self-identification gone awry, throttled if not underwritten altogether by the hallucinatory insinuations of the negative markers that remain indispensable to its exoneration and legitimation. In other words, the negative marker "not" is here also the marker of an identity-in-negation, a hijacked identity—really, an identity condemned to condemn not only what it has come to connote but also, more subtly and systematically, the very experiential content it would have initially wanted to denote, the very fact of being Arab/Muslim (and also Sunni Muslim if we are to abide by the largely motivated Manichean fanaticisms of our historical moment). Perhaps the psychic devastations of such an ambivalent formula of identification can neither be overstated nor overcome, but the superimposed sociopolitical blackmail of which it is a symptom—namely, the incriminating [End Page 22] presumption that all Arabs/Muslims are terrorists or al-Qaeda conscripts until proven otherwise2—needs to be brought under critical scrutiny, exposed, and contested. In what follows, I shall analyze and theorize the ways in which Arab Canadian aesthetes and littérateurs have grappled with the subtly but largely incriminating discourses about Arabs that have been circulating with variable intensities since the first large wave of new Arab immigrants set foot in Canada (in the late 1960s and early 70s), and have gained momentum during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and in the wake of the Gulf War (1990–1991) until they radically intensified in the aftermath of 9/11. Given that Canada's immigration policy vis-à-vis incoming and exiting immigrants/ permanent residents recently shifted from a multiculturalist purview of selective and calculated openness into a frantic policy of preemption and retrospective deportation in the name of national security, Arab Canadians, I argue, found no viable alternative of voicing their growing discontent but to confront the free-floating and intransigent mainstream discourses of Arabness with the individual and lived experiences of everyday Arabs and/or Arab everydayness. As Marwan Hassan straightforwardly points out in the above epigraph (2002, 160), the multiculturalist agenda of Canada simply falls short of delivering or acting on the promises spelled out in the Multiculturalism Policy adopted in 1971 and later enforced by the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.3 Initially, the 1910 Immigration Act unabashedly prohibited...

We compared the evolution of perception of discrimination from 1998 to 2007 among recent Arab (Muslim and non-Muslim) and Haitian immigrants to Montreal; we also studied the association between perception of discrimination and psychological distress in 1998 and 2007. We conducted this cross-sectional comparative research with 2 samples: one recruited in 1998 (n = 784) and the other in 2007 (n = 432). The samples were randomly extracted from the registry of the Ministry of Immigration and Cultural Communities of Quebec. Psychological distress was measured with the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25. The perception of discrimination increased from 1998 to 2007 among the Arab Muslim, Arab non-Muslim, and Haitian groups. Muslim Arabs experienced a significant increase in psychological distress associated with discrimination from 1998 to 2007. These results confirm an increase in perception of discrimination and psychological distress among Arab Muslim recent immigrant communities after September 11, 2001, and highlight the importance this context may have for other immigrant groups.

Jorge Ahmad

106-P: HLA ALLELE AND HAPLOTYPE FREQUENCIES FOR CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM ARAB DONORS IN HADASSAH REGISTRY

The study of public attitudes toward continental integration has a long lineage in Canada. Still, the research literature has neglected the effect of spatial proximity to the United States. This maintains even though the cross-border trade, travel, and social ties constituting the daily reality of Canada-U.S. relations concentrate near the Canada-U.S. border. This article advances a spatially informed analysis of Canadian attitudes toward North American integration drawing on data from the Canadian Election Studies (1997-2011). The explanation it advances has three main foci: The roles of political party identification and political ideology; the role of spatial proximity to the Canada-U.S. border; and the interactive relationship between political views and border proximity.

Using a narrative approach, we explored acculturation gaps, parent-child relationships, and conflict (intergenerational conflict and ethnocultural identity conflict) in a sample of immigrant Arab Canadian emerging adults. Our findings revealed that perceived acculturation gaps co-occurred with intergenerational conflict (Theme 1) and ethnocultural identity conflict (Theme 2). Furthermore, the parent–emerging adult relationship was observed to play a role in the co-occurrence of perceived acculturation gaps and conflict. Specifically, participants described strong parent–emerging adult relationships as minimizing the co-occurrence of perceived acculturation gaps and intergenerational conflict (Theme 3), as well as perceived acculturation gaps and ethnocultural identity conflict (Theme 4). On the other hand, participants described weak parent–emerging adult relationships as exacerbating the co-occurrence of perceived acculturation gaps and intergenerational conflict (Theme 3), as well as perceived acculturation gaps and ethnocultural identity conflict (Theme 4). We presented these analyses using thick and rich data extracts from the participants themselves.

Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel

This study examined the relationship between different dimensions of religiosity and mental health and well-being, and the mediating role of positive emotion in a sample of 181 Middle Eastern/ Arab Christians and Muslims in the U.S. Results showed a positive relationship between intrinsic religiosity and positive mental health and well-being that was mediated by positive emotion. Intrinsic religiosity had a stronger relationship to positive emotion than did extrinsic religiosity. Positive emotion in tum was related to better mental health and well-being.

Racial Cartoons are a powerful force disguised as entertainment operating to shape public opinion. During the 1980s, 1990s and after 9/11 in 2001, cartoons in the Australian press were particularly directed against Muslim and Christian Arabs without remorse or fear of redress or accountability. The offensive of such cartoons has essentially been directed on three fronts—oil, politics and religion. The drawback resulting from socio-cultural, historical and other differences are no doubt visible; but equally obvious is that anti-Semitism, which was directed against the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, is today mostly directed against the public relations deprived, opinion silenced and undemocratically governed, ethnically diverse Arabs. It is argued in this paper that several forces were behind such distorted visual strategies adopted by the Australian press. Pre-judgement stemming from an inbuilt bias of the cartoonist, or highlighting characteristics which conform to the national interest are likely factors. The debate in Australia as to whether public images and attitudes of a minority “cause” or “determine” policy or whether policy itself changes attitudes is still resting with the jury.

PurposeThis study aims to determine the prevalence of selected health behaviors (smoking, diet, exercise and early cancer detection) and outcomes (obesity, cardiovascular fitness, type II diabetes mellitus and cancer) among Arab immigrants living in Colorado and evaluate the relationships between acculturation and health behaviors from a socio-ecological perspective.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a cross-sectional survey of 100 adult Arab immigrants living in Colorado.FindingsThe study showed that Arab immigrants in Colorado engage in healthy behaviors such as eating a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables (34 per cent), exercising (44 per cent) and seeking early cancer screening (35 per cent among women and 42 per cent among men). In comparison to the general population in Colorado, the study results showed that Arab immigrants were more likely to engage in moderate or vigorous exercise (p < 0.001, OR = 1.84) and consume the recommended daily amounts of fruits and vegetables (p = 0.05, OR = 1.56). The study revealed that culture plays an important role in shaping and affecting Arab immigrant health behaviors. Those who were more acculturated were more likely to be physically active and eat healthy.Research/limitations/implicationsThe prevalence of overweight in the current sample was similar to the rate of overweight in other studies of Arab immigrants. This study’s findings about overweight signal a need for culturally sensitive health promotion interventions for Arab immigrants. The study limitations included the use of self-reported measures in the survey, the use of cross-sectional design and the use of a probability sample.Originality/valueUnderstanding culturally relevant predictors of certain health behaviors, such as exercise and diet, can help health providers design health promotion interventions that focus on the individual and the environment to meet the health needs of Arab immigrants.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the global agricultural food system at the current moment. While scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is a critical issue, many United States residents remain skeptical, presenting a significant communication challenge. Understanding the factors influencing public perceptions of climate change are essential to informing agricultural and environmental communication efforts if they are to be effective at mitigating its effects. Previous studies have identified political affiliation and ideology as key predictors for climate change perceptions; however, understanding more detailed components of political ideology and affiliation could strengthen the predictive capacity of these variables. The current study explored the predictive capacity of perceptions of government control on environmental behavior related to political affiliation and ideology to inform effective communication based on climate change knowledge. Using an online survey of U.S. residents, political ideology and affiliation were found to be important predictors of climate change knowledge but including perceptions of government control on environmental behavior expanded their predictive capacity. Agricultural and environmental communicators are encouraged to integrate more nuanced components of political affiliation and ideology, such as perceptions of government control, into their messaging strategies to increase potential message uptake in the midst of a politically polarized media environment. Future research should identify and explore other aspects of political affiliation and ideology, such as economic and social factors, that may influence the public’s perception of climate change and its related policy implications.