March 2008

In a year when the race for the White House is dominating headlines and political parties are working overtime to get the vote out, a handful of Arab-American performers are vying for the hearts and minds of their countrymen via awareness through laughter.

Call it the new Arab Lobby -- only it’s not the minds of those on Capitol Hill this group is looking to woo. Across the country, performers of Arab and Iranian heritage are taking their case to Hollywood with an explicit message: No More Mr. Bad Guy. “There aren’t any American movies with an Arab hero, or romantic comedies with an Arab-American lead,” explains comedian Dean Obeidallah, a co-founder of the Arab-American Comedy Festival, held last month in New York.

“We’re going to need you to sample wells.” His ears perk up. It’s the summer of 1989, and he’s at an interview for a job in the waste management department with Dr. Po Wang in the County of Orange, California, in his best suit and holding an empty briefcase. “Sampling whales?” he thinks to himself, unsure if he’d misunderstood; with English his third language after Arabic and French, and Dr. Wang not a native speaker himself, it was hard to tell. As an electrical engineering student at California State, he’d had no reason to work with animals before. Still, this was actual engineering work, not the menial library and lab jobs he’d held till now. “I could do that.” Born in Damascus in 1967, Amer Moujtahed graduated from Laique in 1985, probably the best school in Syria at the time, and a member of high Damascene society. It was somewhat shocking then to learn that none of it counted once he traveled to the United States to study. “In the US, you start from zero.” Moujtahed says. Although he started from scratch in the US, he quickly proved that he had a drive to succeed that was uniquely his own. Three years after getting the job at County, he was quickly promoted to the “Project Management” program, which takes the best engineers and fast tracks them to management positions. “I brought a lot of the concepts they taught into my work,” he says. “One is the five nines, where I’m 99.999 % responsible and accountable for all the work that I put out.” It’s this strong work ethic that helped him complete a project to protect landfills in California from the approaching El Nino in 1996, which was a year late when he started, and which he completed on time nonetheless. Successes like that brought him in 1998 to Epoch, the largest privately held ISP in North America. Cutting his teeth on a project that would allow changes to the network without crashing it, Moujtahed quickly became Director of Systems Engineering and Corporate Data Security, a position no one before him held for more than three months, and which he kept till he left the company in 2002. During the Epoch years, success followed success. He was responsible for cleaning up the Y2K problem that plagued all IT companies. His quick thinking also managed to avoid the Denial of Service catastrophe, which shut down other American ISPs, by installing the security hardware a year before the attacks occurred. So why return to Syria? “I had never intended to stay in the US after I graduated, it was my father who kept encouraging me to stay,” he says. Moujtahed was very close to his father, and for a moment in the interview, he is moved beyond speech while talking about him. “He was my best friend. I spoke to him almost daily since leaving Syria.” At 8:20 PM, on February 14 2002, Amer got the call he always feared to receive, telling him his father passed away. Exactly one month later, standing over his father’s grave, he made a decision. “I’m responsible for my family unit at large,” he says. “They help you when you need money to get educated, when you’re traveling around to make a living. By the time you’re in a position to give back, you’re a million miles away and the people who’ve helped you have passed on. Would you accept this from your children? Then why should your parents?” The following June, he sold his house, two cars, and gave up all his stock options, and, with his wife and two children, prepared to make a go of it back home. And what a go it’s been. Five years later, Moujtahed has worked for Transtek; held several director level positions at Syriatel, and now heads iTech Syria, which specializes in IT, designing, implementing, building, securing, maintaining and operating networks, systems, and applications, as well as providing IT support. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in Syriatel and iTech,” he says. “We’re operating at the same level they do in the West, and it’s powered by Syrians 100%.” He still uses the managerial methods he learned in the US. His company’s motto is “do it once, do it right” signaling his belief that in IT, there is no margin for error. He’s also created a lat organization, where everyone shares accountability and successes equally. “It’s a melting pot, where over 70 Amer Moujtaheds work together to succeed.” He also inds that it’s easier to achieve work/life balance here in Syria. “In the West, you are a hostage to your job, your house, car payments, and most of all your credit cards, working till you’re 60 when you can finally reap your reward,” Moujtahed asserts. “But who says you’ll reach 60?” In Syria, he actually sees friends and family all week long, and can relax on his small ranch near Damascus he always dreamed to buy, a dream he probably would never achieve in the US. “Why do Syrians who succeed in the West and in the Gulf think they can’t succeed equally over here?” Moujtahed asks. “We create our own chances, when our preparation meets with opportunity. The money you’re going to make, you’re going to make anywhere, so why not make it at home?”

Any visitor to the website of the International Artists can see your name as a cello player, and one of the best in the world at that, so where did you learn to play music at that level?

Declaring war on your waistline!

You would think that Mediterranean food spells out: ‘H-E-A-L-T-H-Y’, but you should think twice before la-beling it so, given that it is almost always deep fried and heaving with animal fat. Sometimes we consume our food with a slight Western touch: a coffee smoothie, followed by a cheeseburger with French fries. FW: conducted a survey rating what Syrians eat most, from fast food, appetizers, entrees and desserts, to favorite drinks. We came up with the most desirable and the most sought after foods on the Syrian dinner table. The results were very “un-healthy” not only in terms of caloric impact, but also excessive carbohydrates, added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium. As you read, please keep in mind that 2,500 calories a day is a reasonable intake for the average male, and 1,800 is the same for the average female.

How life was with Syria’s Shakespeare

She married a man who grew up reading the works of Gibran Khalil Gibran. Inluenced by the legendary Arab-American author of “The Prophet” her husband became, in his own right, one of the giants of Syrian theater in the 20th century. She was a young stage actress who had briely performed in Syrian TV alongside the comedy duet Duraid Lahham and Nihad Quali.

Talal Abboud, The Rector of the Higher Institute of Business Administration (HIBA) speaks to FW: