Dalia Masad, a Palestinian and market analyst for a cell phone company, has an idea of the image many New Yorkers have of Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East.

That image, she said, comes from the media’s constant
reporting on the violence in Iraq and its portrayal of women. Indeed, some New Yorkers picture a hijab, or headscarf, when hearing the words "Arab" and "woman" in the same sentence. Others believe that women in the Middle East don’t have as much freedom as their Western counterparts, and that they are not allowed to drive or work.

“The image is very distorted,” Masad said during a phone conversation from her home
in Ramallah. “They don't know much about us.”

Photo: Courtesy of Business for Diplomatic Action The 2007 fellows during a visit to the United Nations.

Last year, Masad and six other young Arabs participated in a business fellowship
whose aim is to change the image of the Middle East in the eyes of Americans and
vice versa.

The Arab American Business Fellowship is the first privately financed effort to improve Arab-American relations through business. Business for Diplomatic Action, a private sector task force whose objective is to bring about cooperation, respect and mutual understanding through business-led initiatives, first conceived of the initiative in 2006.

Thomas Miller, the vice president for Business for Diplomatic Action, explains ____how the fellowship originated. (Audio: 1:05)

Similar initiatives exist outside the private sector, such as those organized by the U.S. Department of State in the form of student exchanges, said Ann Schodde, executive director at the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy. The uniqueness of this effort, however, is that it “focuses on the business world but does not have a business trade agenda,” she said.

Photo: Courtesy of Dalia Masad Palestinian fellow Dalia Masad at Sesame Workshop in New York in October 2007.

The program, a collaboration with the Dubai-based organization Young Arab Leaders, the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy and the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, was started in October 2007 with the arrival of seven young Arab professionals in New York City. The fellows visited participating companies and organization, such as Sesame Workshop, The New York Stock Exchange and New York University. A week later the program continued in Des Moines and Washington, D.C.

Thomas Miller, vice president of Business for Diplomatic Action, has studied global affairs and issues for most of his professional life. And yet, after spending several days with the fellows, he said that he “probably learned more about the Middle East region from my exposure and friendship with these fellows than in all these years studying the region."

Marleine Davis, the director of operations at the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of ___ Commerce, explains how business can help improve the image of the Middle East.
(Audio: 0:39)


Just as the program taught Americans about the Middle East, the seven Arab fellows realized that they, too, had misconceptions about the United States.

Before arriving in New York, Masad thought that New York was a dangerous city with a high incidence of crime and rape, characteristics that, she said, are not attributed to her part of the world.

“The kind of danger we're used to is of course from the occupation, the bombings, the F-16s flying over, the curfews, the checkpoints and the closures,” Masad said, referring to Israeli control of the West Bank.

“This is something that we grew up knowing. But we didn’t grow up knowing crime or rape, so it’s something to be a bit scared of, we didn’t know how
to handle it, when to walk at night.”

After a few days in New York, Masad realized that the crime she had seen in the movies was not nearly as widespread as she thought.

In an effort to address the fallacies in both regions, the fellowship will triple the number of Arab fellows arriving in New York this year and, for the first time, send 10 American fellows to the Middle East.

“We feel there are many misconceptions about the Middle East, the Arab culture and the way business and society operates there,” Miller said.

To increase mutual understanding and respect, Business for Diplomatic Action decided “to have young Americans actually see for themselves what people in that culture are really all about.”

Photo: Katya Soldak/NYC24 Deeb Sankary, Arab business owner, in Sam's Falafel in the West Village.

Deeb Sankary, a young Arab businessman whose father has owned a falafel shop in the West Village since the 1970s, says that the image of the Middle East in New York affected his business only in the aftermath of 9/11 and attributes any current income slumps to the economy. He does, however, believe that there remains a need for cultural awareness in New York; in his own words, “a big space we could fill in.”


“To this day, people get Indians and Arabs mixed up,” he said. “I am still being called towel head and we don’t wear towels in the Middle East, and that's proof enough right there.”

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