For Immediate Release

Source: The San Diego Union - Tribune
Date: April 5, 2004

By By Michael R. Blood

As a high school government teacher, Ferial Amin Masry can talk about democracy with the conviction of a founding father. But it's no textbook discourse.

The mother of three has lived an immigrant-makes-good story that took her from a childhood in politically repressive Saudi Arabia – where women at the time could not be educated, much less drive or vote – to an America where she lectures classes on "the only workable constitution in the world."

But lately, she's not just teaching democracy.

She's living it.

The 55-year-old Masry won the Democratic nomination for a state Assembly seat March 2 in a last-minute write-in campaign.

If elected in November in the suburban Los Angeles district, she would become the first Saudi-American to hold an elected government office in the United States, according to the Arab American Institute in Washington.

"For me to run, it's unheard of," Masry said, reflecting on the limited role of women in Saudi society. People in Saudi Arabia "see me as a symbol."

"My mother was herself very ambitious but . . . she didn't know how to read and write," Masry added. "I learned from her, 'You just stay to what you want and keep doing it and believe in it and continue. You are going to get what you want.' "

Masry is considered a long shot in her Republican-tilting district, where eight of every 10 votes in last year's gubernatorial recall election were cast for Republican candidates. She has little in the way of campaign cash. And the other side of the ballot is occupied by Audra Strickland, wife of the term-limited incumbent Assemblyman Tony Strickland, R-Moorpark.

"It's going to be hard for a Democrat to prevail, irrespective of who he or she would have been," said Art Torres, the state Democratic Party chairman.

But Masry's "story is attractive not only to women, but to people across the board," he said.

As a member of the California Assembly, Masry would have a hand in domestic issues from education to environmental protection. But as a Muslim raised in an Islamic country, she also sees herself in another role – a sort of emissary bridging two cultures.

"I'm trying to get Americans to understand the Middle East," she said.

At a time of conflict in Iraq and heightened fears of terrorism at home, Masry is an unrelenting critic of Bush administration policies in the Middle East.

She calls Saddam Hussein "a thug, a dictator," but faults the United States for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. She said in many ways, this country is to blame for the crisis in the Middle East through years of unsteady diplomacy and shifting alliances.

At the same time, she is the mother of a U.S. Army sergeant in Baghdad, Mohammed Omar Masry.

"I feel like I'm involved with him in a way," she said, noting that while she often finds herself explaining Middle East thinking to her fellow Americans, her son is trying to explain American thinking to Iraqis.

"We are doing the same thing in different places," she said.

There are other Arab-American politicians, such as U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, who has a Lebanese background. Some say Masry's Saudi heritage may factor little in voters' minds on Election Day, since Assembly races typically turn on close-to-home matters such as taxes and schools, not Middle Eastern politics or national security.