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A video has surfaced of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel attending a meeting of Muslims, where both Israel and one of his deputies spoke in Arabic. The deputy said that Israel pledged to keep young people out of jail and to put “God first, your family second and the community third.” Israel credits his deputy Nezar Hamze as a likeminded individual who is on the same mission as Israel. Israel compares himself and Hamze to lions on a mission. Both Israel and Namze boast that they keep young people out of jail, rather than put them in. “I want you...

A sickening case has emerged in Tower Hamlets, London of a young girl aged just 5 being forced to live with foster carers who took away her Christian cross and demanded that she learn Arabic. The Muslim carers wore a niqab and burka covering their faces. In a report seen by The Times, girl was apparently so distressed after the experience that she cried and begged authorities not to take her back there as the carer didn’t speak English. The girl was also apparently barred from eating bacon and recently told her mother that “Christmas and Easter are stupid” and...

Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli ministers approved a controversial bill on Sunday that would define the country as the "national home of the Jewish people" while downgrading Arabic as an official language, officials and reports said. If the bill eventually becomes law, Arabic would be defined as having special status, while "its speakers have the right to language-accessible state services," though it would not be an official language, Haaretz newspaper reported. Hebrew is defined as the "national language" in the bill, which would become part of the country's so-called basic law, which is similar to a constitution, it said. Ministers confirmed...

Every street sign in Israel is in Hebrew and Arabic, but many Israelis can’t understand a standard conversation in Arabic. In a moving letter to Haaretz written this week by Lital Lam, a student at Tel Aviv University, headlined “Israelis, Speak Arabic,” Lam expresses the alienation she feels because she does not speak Arabic fluently. She notes that 40% of the university’s students speak Arabic as a mother tongue — and she can’t understand her classmates. The specific issue she raised is the role of Arabic in Israel’s education system. Today in Israel, Arabic is taught in grades 7 through...

A YouTube star known for pranks and hoaxing says he was removed from a Delta Air Lines flight after speaking Arabic. In a series of tweets and videos, Adam Saleh described the incident on Delta Flight 1 from London Heathrow Airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. “We got kicked out of a @Delta airplane because I spoke Arabic to my mom on the phone and with my friend slim,” Saleh wrote. In one tweet, he called for a boycott of Delta. Delta said two customers were removed from the flight and later rebooked “after a disturbance in the...

DEARBORN, Mich. — A billboard written in Arabic located along a Michigan interstate near an Arab-American community is calling Donald Trump “afraid.” The Detroit Free Press reports the sign translates into English as, “Donald Trump, he can’t read this, but he is afraid of it.” The sign went up last weekend and the Free Press reports it’s funded by the Nuisance Committee super PAC, which was started by the creator of the Cards Against Humanity card game.

The sign is clearly poking fun at Donald Trump, but unless people driving on Interstate 94 in metro Detroit speak Arabic — or have a buddy who can translate — they’ll be scratching their heads. . . . “I chuckled,” Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Detroit News. “I laughed. Duh. This is how people feel in the community. It’s mocking Trump. It’s funny yet very appropriate considering the nonsense Donald Trump has continued to say about Muslims.”

The New York Post reported a letter that was partially written in Arabic was found in a plastic bag that held the second pressure cooker device in New York City Saturday night. That device planted four blocks from the bomb that exploded in the Chelsea neighborhood wounding 29 people did not explode and was taken away by authorities for investigation. Second device — possibly a pressure cooker — found 4 blocks from Chelsea explosion https://t.co/yDGCfaEXni pic.twitter.com/PFclpUlM5i — Eyewitness News (@ABC7NY) September 18, 2016 The Post also reported police interviewed two men who said they saw an Arabic looking man carrying...

"Authorities: Would-be Minnetonka bank robber demanded money, then interpreter. Authorities say the suspect appeared to be in his 50s and spoke only halting English."

She fled for her life after getting death threats in Syria. Now journalist Rowa Alkhatib has landed a plum job as a talk-show host with Sweden’s national radio broadcaster. She tells The Local Voices how she’s now helping quench Arabic speakers’ thirst for knowledge about their new home. Back in Syria, Rowa Alkhatib worked as a presenter for a range of television and radio networks, but threats from radicals and the Assad regime forced her to pack her bags, she says. Like so many others in Syria, she made her way to Turkey, where she found radio work and lived...

(CNSNews.com) -- Arabic is the fastest growing language in the U.S., with the number of Arabic speakers growing by 29 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. Over the longer period from 2000 to 2014, the number of Arabic speakers in the U.S. nearly doubled, rising from 615,000 in 2000 to 1.1 million by 2014, according to the study, which analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau. As a result, census questionnaires will be available in Arabic for the first time in 2020, Pew reports. “The number of people ages 5 and...

This is a weird thing on a very unused garden blog I found. I've notified the place, Otten Bros. No email back. I worried about this.

Arabic is the fastest-growing language in American households — and that’s leading the US Census Bureau to explore the tricky task of adjusting its questionnaires to ­accommodate the language’s right-to-left script. The bureau is using focus groups to explore possible changes to the 2020 census questionnaires for Arabic speakers who are not English-proficient, the Pew Research Center reported Friday. Arabic is now the seventh-most commonly spoken non-English language in US households. An estimated 1.1 million people ages 5 and older speak Arabic at home, an increase of 29 percent between 2010 and 2014.

The young nation of South Sudan has chosen English as its official language but after decades of civil war, the widespread learning of English presents a big challenge for a country brought up speaking a form of Arabic.I knew there might be problems as soon as I arrived at Juba International airport - and was asked to fill in my own visa form, as the immigration officer could not write English. The colourful banners and billboards hung out to celebrate South Sudan's independence back in July, and still adorning the streets now, are all in English. As are the names...

[Original title too long: What the media didn’t tell you about Arabic-speaking Muslim student who got kicked off Southwest Airlines] The mainstream media went ballistic after learning that an Iraqi student was removed from a flight after an alleged ‘Islamophobic’ woman reported him because she heard him speaking Arabic. Left wing pundits and Muslim advocacy groups demanded to know why “speaking Arabic” is a reason to remove someone from a plane and were calling for boycotts of Southwest Airlines. What the media conveniently left out is that the (see-something-say-something) woman is a native Arabic speaker and said he was talking...

A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic. The student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Oakland on April 6 after he called an uncle in Baghdad to tell him about an event he attended that included a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. “I was very excited about the event so I called my...

Officially, Sweden doesn't keep a record of the languages its inhabitants speak. That fact was infuriating to Mikael Parkvall, a linguist at Stockholm University, so he decided to find out for himself. What is the most popular non-Swedish language in Sweden? After poring over various statistics and studies, Parkvall came to a conclusion: Arabic was very likely to now be the second most popular language in the Scandinavian country. Parkvall's study focused on native languages rather than second languages, which he says are a better judge of what languages are actually spoken in a country (while English is widely spoken...

WASHINGTON, United States — The United States is to review staffing on a hotline to report ceasefire violations in Syria after some volunteers had trouble understanding Arabic speakers. State Department personnel in Washington are manning a line to allow witnesses in Syria to report breaches in a tentative truce between rebels and regime forces. But in recent days reports have surfaced that callers from the Middle East have found it hard to explain the details of alleged air and artillery strikes. According to non-profit news organization “Syria Direct” one US official mistook “Harbnifsah” — a frontline village — for “Harb...

A Texas mayor wants federal agents to investigate after a black banner with Arabic-style writing was seen mysteriously hanging from the top of a government-owned building on Monday.

An Israeli parliamentarian has drawn ire and ridicule after suggesting "Palestine" is a borrowed term that Palestinians themselves cannot pronounce. "The letter P doesn't exist in Arabic, so the borrowed term Palestine is worth debating," MK Anat Berko (Likud) said during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday night. [...] In Arabic, the word is written with an F and is pronounced "Falesteen." Palestinian Arabs not fluent in English often use the letter B as a substitute for P when speaking the language. [...] "Don't you have a brain?" MK Tamar Zandberg, from the left-wing Meretz party, shouted during the session. ...