Syrian refugees lately have been reaching far and wide into the corners of the world. In some places, they haven’t been received with open arms, due to some very negative stereotypes. The brand new ‘I am Syrian’ celebrity campaign, launched by Moustafa Jacoub, has set its sights on erasing all of these negative images of Syrians, as well as all other Arab refugees.
Moustafa believes that the only way to change the perception of the West, is to use images from within the West itself. A few days ago, he told Rozana FM, ‘Unfortunately, westerns know nothing about Syria … they do not know that we were a civilized people and will always be, and that we have deep effect in the world cultural heritage, so the first duty of us as artists is to get this message and the convey this idea’.
And so, Moustafa put together a series of pictures of the most prominent celebrities that have Syrian origins. He captioned these photos with ‘I am Syrian’. After launching the first pictures on his Facebook page, Moustafa has attracted much attention to the Syrian cause. Check out the five celebrities that he chose for his campaign:
- Wentworth Miller, the famous Prison Break actor, has Syrian roots because his mother is Syrian
- Murray Abraham’s father emigrated from Syria during the 1920’s famine
- Jerry Seinfeld, creator of TV series ‘Sienfeld’, has a Jewish-Syrian mother
- Terri Hatcher’s mother is half Syrian
- Steve Jobs, creator of Apple, has a father who is actually a Syrian refugee himself
Moustafa simply says, ‘Maybe there is another Steve Jobs who is now just a Syrian refugee’. This campaign didn’t stop at just Western celebrities and famous people. Moustafa also targeted the Arab world in the second part of his campaign, ‘I Am Syrian 2’, by plastering the faces of well-recognized Syrian-Arab celebrities.
- Moustapha Akkad, Syrian director famous for the ‘Halloween’ movie series as well as well-known movie ‘The Messenger’
- Ali Ferzat, artist of over 15,000 political cartoons in Arab magazines and newspapers
- Dr. Faisal Al-Kassim is one of the most prominent figures for Al-Jazeera news channel
- Astronaut Muhammed Faris, the Arabian Armstrong
- Omar Hamoui, who founded AdMob while he was a college student and is now CEO
- Malek Jandali, pianist and musical composer
Check out the rest on Moustafa Jacoub’s official Facebook page.
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