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Omar Kader
Many Palestinians who have come to the U.S. as refugees since 1948 - who with their children now number more than 100,000 - still struggling to shape new identities as Americans, says Dr. Omar Kader, the new executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. But as an American-born descendent of Palestinians who came to the U.S. a generation earlier, his own search would appear to have ended long ago. Dr. Kader exudes enough self-confidence to convince you that he knows exactly who he is and that he has what it takes to confront those who defame Arabs and Arab Americans.
For most of his adult life he has been toting books around college campuses, first as a student and then as a professor. He earned his B.A. from Brigham Young University (1970) in Provo, Utah - the city where he was born and raised - and received both his M.A. (1974) and his Ph.D. (1981) in international relations from the University of Southern California.
A Real Expert on Terrorism
The portrayal of Arabs as terrorists is probably the stereotype which aggravates Dr. Kader the most, since he wrote his dissertation on international terrorism and understands more about it than many of the frequently-quoted "experts." "Right now," he says, "many of the writers on terrorism are either Israelis, or Americans who are...