By Anthony Weiss

LOS ANGELES (JTA) – It’s Friday night, and patrons are sitting and chatting over plates of tajine and hummus waiting for the evening’s main event, a stand-up comedy show.

It could be any nightspot in this city. But a closer look reveals a bolder agenda than just good food and entertainment.

The comedy show, part of a long-running series called “The Sultans of Satire,” features Muslim and Jewish comedians with roots in Iran, Afghanistan and Morocco. The room’s walls, meanwhile, display an art exhibition about the struggles of Native Americans, the Irish and Palestinians.

Jordan Elgrably is the executive director of the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles. (Anthony Weiss/JTA)

Welcome to the Levantine Cultural Center, a nonprofit arts and culture hub whose modest home in a corner storefront on Pico Boulevard belies its grand ambition to bridge the fault lines of the contemporary Middle East.

Launched in 2001, the center aims to foster cultural understanding through concerts, language classes and discussion panels, serving quite literally as a space for common ground.

Read full story

Notes on 9/11

fourteen years on

During the summer of 2001, with other Americans of Middle Eastern heritage, I created a cultural arts center for the Middle East, but then in the aftermath of September 11th, the U.S. went to war against Afghanistan and later Iraq, ostensibly to pursue the terrorists who hit us, but in reality, to expand the American empire and exert more geopolitical control over the Middle East.

Despite the fact that in March 2003, millions of people around the world were out in the streets, vigorously protesting for peace to stave off Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq, the U.S. went in anyway, with catastrophic results. Ultimately we helped to destroy a modern country and leave a security vacuum that allowed for the rise of Daesh, or the Islamic State, and for the expansion of other barbarisms. Should anyone have been surprised?

As James Baldwin said in a conversation I had with him for The Paris Review, “Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it. You create a monster and destroy it. It is part of the American way of life, if you like.”

Yes, we created a monster whom we then destroyed, for we backed strongman Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and goaded him into war against Iran in the 1980s, only to beat him back in the 1990s, and eliminate him in 2003.

PEACE WITH IRAN WINS!

This history is relevant today, of all anniversaries of 9/11, because we have just yesterday narrowly avoided another potential calamity—the war with Iran that the hawks and Israel seem to want the way salivating dogs want a meal of steak and gristle. We can celebrate today the fact that with the Iran nuclear deal—approved not only by the U.S. but by Britain, France, Russia, Germany and China—we have succeeded where in March 2003, we failed. With Iraq destabilized, Syria coming apart, and Egypt having returned to a state of virtual dictatorship under Sissi, not to mention repressive or failing regimes elsewhere in the region, these are not happy times. Yet we know that the youthful population of the MENA is still clamoring for change and advancement. There is enormous creativity and potential that we must connect with, and support.

A few recent posts...

Fresh Tweets

Notes on 9/11

fourteen years on