Opinion: Bullying against Palestinian Americans in San Diego must stop

As the one year anniversary of Oct. 7 looms, Palestinian San Diegans have been counting their dead. The assault on Lebanon has the early patterns that resembles Gaza and the West Bank. I talked to my aunt who lives outside of Beirut. In her 83 years she has seen too much. For her children, now aging themselves, their entire lives have been consumed by war. The numbers of direct family members lost are in the hundreds, perhaps thousands in San Diego County alone.

If that is not enough, individuals and organizations in San Diego have launched rampant bullying campaigns to disrupt and sabotage planned cultural and civil rights events and educational support in San Diego hotels, museums, parks, universities, and schools. Below is a partial list of several incidents and crimes where litigation is pending so few details are able to be disclosed. One is the Council on American Islamic Relations, CAIR San Diego, when their Sept. 14 annual gala’s location was abruptly moved. It resembles a similar incident in Arlington, Va.

The Mingei Museum in Balboa Park in July reportedly postponed a Palestinian Tatreez (embroidery) workshop, indicating threats of protest and violence the week before the scheduled Monday night event.

The San Diego based National Conflict Resolution Center forcibly removed Imam Taha, a board member and recipient of a Peacemaker Award without his consent.

The County Board of Supervisors and mayor Todd Gloria have refused to meet with our community, not only to acknowledge individual and collective traumas, but to remediate recent hostile resolutions and misrepresentations against Middle Easterners and North Africans.

Where is the alarm? Rather, San Diego’s elected officials, civic institutions and colleges accept bullying that limits and sabotages Palestinian Americans’ right to grieve or publicly memorialize the past year of carnage and slaughter, strongly claimed by international law to be a genocide and a scholasticide.

An alternate reality has been concocted to justify extreme actions against Palestinian Americans throughout the country. In San Diego County, the American Jewish Committee and its affiliates such as the Anti-Defamation League have been deemed non-reliable sources by Wikipedia. Palestinian American resources for Oct. 7 are readily available.

Palestinian American students have been the most vulnerable. In Chicago on Oct.14, 2023, 6-year old first grader, Wadea al-Fayoume, was stabbed to death by his landlord. He was unanimously commemorated last month by the U.S. Senate. In Vermont last Thanksgiving, three Palestinian American college students, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani were shot and one, Awartani is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Nationwide, the increase in hate crimes and incidents have risen to astronomical levels since Oct. 7, 2023.

Threats made to anyone who criticizes Israel creates fear. This perpetuates the dissemination of false information via propaganda. Silencing is already normalized when it comes to Arab, Palestinian and Muslim Americans.

The silence from entities who tally incidents such as the ACLU, FBI and General Attorney’s office have responsibilities to monitor, gather information and begin investigations. Our District Attorney’s office in San Diego and California’s Attorney General in Sacramento are refusing to notice what is threatening our constitutional rights to engage in public debate. After this long period of silence. Our community concludes that they do not care. Prove us wrong.

Our community feels unsafe while it grieves these losses in our home countries. If bullying is not addressed proactively by our civic leaders, it will metastasize and lead to more violence against Arabs, Muslims and all Americans critical of Israel. We expect to practice our constitutional rights without danger and sabotage. We demand that empathy and discussion, ingredients for healing and responsibly constructed resolutions be sought by elected and civic leaders.

Bittar is an artist, writer and community organizer who lives in North Park.