Shaheen, whose family is from Lebanon, has been a lone voice in American film criticism and scholarship fighting against the negative connotations of Arabs in American culture.
Pro-Palestinian forces at Pittsburgh were fighting an uphill struggle to win support for divestment from Presbyterian delegates who had been shaped from childhood to think that Muslims are simply not "one of us," a false representation which is easily exploited by political strategists, both religious and secular.
Think, for example of the "search" for Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Which brings us to the remarkable chain of events that transpired during this year's 220th General Assembly.
What happened, as one Presbyterian participant explained, was "complicated."
The Associated Press described the key GA vote this way:
"By a razor-thin margin, the largest Presbyterian group in the United States rejected a proposal Thursday to divest from three companies that do business with Israel. Pro-Palestinian advocates vowed to try again.
"The Presbyterian General Assembly voted 333-331, with two abstentions, to reject the divestment plan. A second vote instead affirmed a policy of investment in support of peace in Israel and the Palestinian territories. That proposal passed by a much wider margin, 369-290 with eight abstentions."
This was the AP story used by ABC News. AP gives the anti-divestment spin with this incorrect description of what was in the resolution, "to divest from three companies that do business with Israel," dropping the major point of contention.
The resolution was not directed against all companies that do "business with Israel." It was aimed at three companies that directly support Israel's occupation, a fact which AP did not include in its story.
The AP story also says nothing about the occupation. Israel does not like to call what they do an "occupation."
This, of course, is what leads to bloggers like Robert Naiman, who works as policy director for Just Foreign Policy, a progressive website, to give us his version of how the anti-divestment spin is so totally shaped by the Israeli narrative.
The headline in his Huffington Post blog says it all: "Ludniks Losing Middle America." Naiman explains:
"No doubt many among what Peter Beinart calls "the American Jewish establishment" celebrated the result. They had pulled out the stops to block the Presbyterians' selective divestment move. 1300 rabbis and 22,000 other Jews wrote to the Presbyterians, falsely seeking to characterize the proposed move as 'the use of economic leverages against the Jewish state.'
"Yet as The Rev. Gradye Parsons, stated clerk of the PCUSA General Assembly, explained in the Washington Post, the resolution was opposed to specific actions of particular companies linked to the occupation, leaving investments in many other companies doing business in Israel untouched. And therefore, claims that the Presbyterians were contemplating "divesting from Israel" or "boycotting Israel" were disinformation; disinformation that, in the short-run, may have proved successful.
"But as the Sergeant said to the Pirate King [in The Pirates of Penzance],
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