I am hardly progressive when it comes to Israel.
As a Jew, I stand firm in my support for Israel, and sincerely belive that if the Palestinians in the Middle-East want peace they must recognize Israeli’s right to exist and learn to govern themselves through rules of law, where they agree with and teach their children that it is okay to co-exist with Israel.
That said, I salute, Rev. Khader El-Yateem, who decided to run for the City Council, and Palestinian-American nationalist Linda Sarsour, who I don’t exactly get a warm and fuzzy feel from. Both have a right as Americans to have their say, and to feel pride in and stick up for their cultural heritage.
These thoughts came to me, when I slipped out of El-Yateem’s standing room only campaign kickoff yesterday to get away from the endless speeches, and as is my want whenever I cover something along the Fifth Avenue corridor of Bay Ridge, went searching for a Middle Eastern or Turkish restaurant – which happens to make some of the best gyros and homemade humus at reasonable prices in the city.
And in no time, I found the Istanbul Bay Turkish Cafe & Restaurant, 8002 Fifth Avenue, where the waitress gave me a corner table with my back to the Mexican-Americans manning the gyro spits. It was a beautiful late Sunday afternoon and the restaurant was filled with locals – Arab Muslim-American families who have pursued their version of the American dream in Bay Ridge,
Sitting next to me for instance was a family of five, the mother wearing a traditional Muslim-American head covering, the husband in an official looking NYPD t-shirt and three young children. The waiter brought the usual steaming hot Turkish bread and other Turkish delights, but the oldest son, in typical American boyhood fashion, insisted they also get french fries.
These people are as American as anyone. If they decide they want to elect one of their own in the City Council, and have a candidate they like and they have the wherewithal to get that person elected in a diverse district that includes a good many Chinese and longtime Norwegian, Irish and Italian-Americans, then I say God Bless ’em.
And if El-Yateem gets elected and it gives Sarsour a bigger platform to promote the BDS movement, which I find anti-Semitic for a variety of reasons, then so be it.
Now my Orthodox Jewish friends and brethren might disagree, but I recommend they step out of Borough Park some Sunday and venture out to Bay Ridge on Fifth Avenue for some humus and olives soaked in olive oil with bits of garlic. If they did, I’m sure they would see Arab Muslim families loving a free life on American soil just as much as they do. And if the two cultures chatted a bit, I’m sure the Jews would find many Arabs who escaped their own hell in the Middle East just as Jews did several generations ago in Europe and elsewhere.
But Bay Ridge ain’t Borough Park nor should it be. This column isn’t looking for a Kumbaya moment. It’s just raising the point that Arabs living in Bay Ridge have their own kind of American pride and attitudes on how the world should be run. And as long as doesn’t involve the killing, stealing or hurting of others than who am I to try to stop it?
That’s because the last time I checked my watch both neighborhoods are still in America and not the Middle East. And here, everybody has a right to their opinion.
