Middle-Eastern Club

Mission Statement

The Middle Eastern Club is dedicated to promoting cultural awareness, education, and understanding about the Middle East to our community. Our goal is to continue exposing our community to the cultural diversity and traditions that are unique to the region. We also aspire to educate our community to better understand the realities and intricacies that govern the Middle East. The club is open to everyone and seeks to bring together all people who share a general interest in the region. We are renown for our bi-annual dinners, and hope to expand our events in include more exposure to Middle eastern culture and diversity such as trips to art exhibits, dance lessons, speakers, cooking classes and more. This mission statement can be viewed link here.

Events

They hold Special Dinners because people enjoy them, and it gains excellent attendance. So then, MEC uses those dinners as our venues to do more academically oriented things, and add the educational component. Other frequent events include Coffeehouses, and controversial movies.

They have worked with Tikkun in the past, a progressive Zionist organization, and recently worked with Hillel, the jewish group on campus. With Tikkun, we sponsored a week of Middle Eastern Conflict awareness. While working with Hillel they co-sponsored comedian duo (arab and jewish), and brought in an organization dedicated to the cause of arabs and jews working together for peace and coexistence. This year with Hillel, we showed a controversial movie that addressed the Palestinian side of the Middle East Conflict, a side that you haven’t always seen, a more critical side. An arab dinner preceeded this event, and a very engaging and successful discussion moderated by Shalom Staub, and Prof. Commins followed.

Effectiveness

MEC has 12-15 dedicated members. They rate themselves a 5, being the highest on a 1 - 5 scale becamse they "always try to balance academic and social aspects within our programming... along with many of the groups on campus, have begun to move away from strictly entertainment programming, and are trying to tackle the more pertinent issues, the ones that result in conversation and dialogue." 4

Problems/Dilemmas

They find their biggest problem to be narrow minded people. Afif, Co-President this year tells us that sometimes " [narrowminded people] completely miss the point of what the event or program was trying to accomplish, and instead go into defensive mode and from there, misconstrue everything into attack on themselves and their principles. People need to be able to look critically at themselves, before they can criticize anything else. Some people are just too proud, and others are just too ignorant." 4

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