EDMOND —
Nijim Dabbour is a journalist who is a graduate of Deer Creek High School and the University of Oklahoma. He is the son of Ghassan and Karen Dabbour, successful restaurateurs in the Oklahoma City area.
Ghassan Dabbour came to the US from Damascus, Syria, and is the child of Palestinian refugees who fled to Syria when the nation of Israel was created. The elder Dabbour says that he is grateful to Oklahoma for the prosperity and education it has provided him and his family over the past several decades.
The younger Dabbour currently resides in Jerusalem and writes a weekly column for an English and Arabic language website that encourages democracy and dialogue among the Palestinian people. Known by the acronym MIFTA, the website is based in Ramallah on the West Bank of the Jordan River.
Dabbour also does volunteer work at a primary school in East Jerusalem. He recently explained via e-mail how he became a journalist.
He began his first academic year at OU as a business major and was immersed in subjects such as business calculus and macroeconomics. But he had always enjoyed writing, and during his second year at that institution he switched his major to journalism. Soon he was writing a column for the campus newspaper.
He wrote about subjects such as a political science professor at OU who questioned the wisdom and long term impacts of the troop surge that then President George W. Bush was putting in place in Iraq. Dabbour also chronicled the plight of OU students who sold their blood to generate money and an effort to start a Klu Klu Klux chapter on campus.
In his senior year, he became the managing editor of that publication, and says that was when he truly began to understand journalism in all of its complexity.
Dabbour took courses in which he learned the theoretical aspects of journalism and the ethics that should be practiced by those who write to provide news to the public.
He minored in Middle Eastern Studies at OU, and said that region had always been of interest to him. As a child and a teenager, he traveled there on an annual basis with his parents to visit members of his extended family. He speaks with respect and affection for the teachers that he had at OU while taking courses on the Middle East, including Dr. Joshua Landis, an Arabic-speaking professor who is an internationally known authority on Syria and also edits an influential website about that nation.
Dabbour also praises Mike Boettcher, a native Oklahoman who covered the Middle East for CNN before he returned to teach journalism on the Norman campus.
Dabbour reports that he took a year off after graduating from OU and then enrolled in a study abroad program that George Mason University in Washington DC operates.
As part of that program he was in an internship in a media center in Israel for Arab citizens of that nation and eventually he became a regular contributor to MIFTA.
He also began a blog on the internet in which he writes about his experiences and the people that he is coming into contact with in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In his writing those individuals are often shown to be people who are willing to engage in dialogue with those that oppose them.
It is possible that Nijim Dabbour will, in time, write a history that will detail the end of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN is an Oklahoma City attorney.
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Oklahoma scholar may someday chronicle peace in the Middle East
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