An writer in the Arab News laments American prejudice and “shameful unfairness” in denying his granddaughter a car she won in a local contest.
My granddaughter, Mashael, a student at King Fahd Academy in Washington, recently won a prize in a local competition. The prize was a luxury car, but her happiness was short-lived. When she went to collect the prize, the organizers refused to give it to her because, according to them, prizes were only intended for those who hold American nationality. The news was devastating. Mashael was not prepared for such a shock. Imagine an excited girl, eagerly awaiting a prize she won fairly in an open competition being told she could not win because of her nationality! The machine that sorted the entries and selected the winners did not differentiate between an American and someone from another country.
Now, it may be that this is in fact an example of bias, that there were no such rules in the contest, nor local or state regulations about who was eligible for winning a prize in such a contest. On the other hand, there well might have been — one might ask, for example, if residents of other US states were eligible to win, either. Anyone who’s tried to sift through the fine print for such contests (or run one) knows the legal and regulatory hassles involved.
On the other hand, assertions that outrages like this demonstrate that Arabs and Muslims in the US are dealt with “as if they were not humans” and that this is “why American Muslims are treated unfairly while American Jews enjoy more rights than ordinary Americans” are goofy enough to make you wonder about the whole factual premise of the article.
But one has to wonder what Mashael was planning on doing with the vehicle if she ever had to return back to her country-of-citizenship. After all, women in Saudia Arabia are not allowed to drive cars.