Last night we had another installment of the Arab-American Dialogue at the German-American Institute here in Tuebingen. This time it was a small group with only 12 people attending including three Americans, three Arabs and one Arab-American. The proposed theme was "our reactions to the November election in the United States." Before we got to the main theme, however, Nicole B. introduced the group to the American tradition of Thanksgiving and the discussed the tradition for about half an hour. Penny had brought some delicious little pumpkin pies. Between the background information and culinary delight they thoroughly dispelled any stereotype of Americans as being a people devoid of culture!

When time came for the main discussion, the four Americans present gave their opinions on the results of the election. The general mood is, of course, optimism, but with some concern - concern on my part which I have already expressed at the ProgBlog and on Penny's part, for example, that we not lean back and think that the work is done. From an Arab perspective, Hussein H. was happy that the Bush administration had gotten a sharp rebuke (a "Denkzettel" as he put it in German), and saw some hope, but saw no real difference between Democrats and Republicans throughout history, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. Before we could get everyone else involved in an evaluation of the election, the disucssion morphed into a general discussion of American crime and duplicity throughout history - and that is where the discussion stayed for the rest of the evening. An elderly German, an Australian and I prolonged this unfortunate turn of the discussion by trying to defend America's record on some accounts. We were not playing the patriotism card or defending America in the traditional way, but arguing instead that the American record is not worse than that of other empires, but that we got much more blame (from the left). We had a Columbian-German repeatedly reciting the littany of American evils committed against Latin America from the early 19th century on, including all the ills of present-day globalization, an Arab listing Israel and the United States as the two countries which cannot be held to account (my suggestion that Russia and China might be similar, indeed worse, got no traction), numerous remarks about American wrongdoing from slaughtering the Indians to the atomic bomb to the reportedly horrific human rights record of the Coca Cola company, etc..

When the smoke cleared, Nicole B. remarked on how negative and unproductive the evening had been. I was inclined to agree. The evening closed with Penny remarking that we should not dwell on the past as much as spend our energies here working on figuring out what we can do in the now to work for betterment. Again I was inclined to agree.

To the extent that I was hoping that the Arab-American Dialogue would get some of its "edge," some of the "teeth" I remembered it having two years ago and which I had missed in October, the evening was a success. We weren't all agreeing or even pretending to agree. But the discussion didn't really get anywhere. The discussion was best, I thought, when particular perspectives became evident on precise events or when specific experiences were mentioned: Hussein and I had very different evaluations of the peace demonstration in September, for example. The fighting in Lebanon was in full swing and a speaker there had waxed indignant about the four criminals who had started the war: Olmert, Sharon, Bush and Rumsfeld. I found the list should maybe not have included someone who had been in a coma for months before the war began and was still gone, but might have included someone like the Hizbollah leader Nasrallah. Hussein was quite satisfied with the list of the guilty, pointing primarily to the excessiveness of the Israeli response.