Gail Alexan­der

For­mer Ari­ma may­or Ghas­san Youseph has tak­en of­fense at var­i­ous re­marks by Op­po­si­tion PNM gen­er­al sec­re­tary Ash­ton Ford and PNM sen­a­tor Faris Al Rawi which he said seeks to bring him and T&T's Arab com­mu­ni­ty in­to neg­a­tive spot­light.Ghas­san, a COP front­lin­er, was com­ment­ing on re­marks by spe­cif­ic re­marks by Ford in con­nec­tion with Ghas­san him­self last Fri­day and Al Rawi's com­ments in the Sen­ate last week

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan, in the Sen­ate last week, had joked Al Rawi was a "prophet" since Al Rawi was quot­ed in a news­pa­per in 2010 say­ing he was de­scend­ed from the prophet Muhammed. Al Rawi had re­tort­ed if Ram­lo­gan "had a prob­lem with Arabs."Ford, com­ment­ing on an Ari­ma park which was named for him, de­nied Ghas­san's re­cent let­ter that Eden Rahim Park was re­named for him (Ford).

The Ari­ma cor­po­ra­tion clar­i­fied an­oth­er park was named for Ford and the sign for that was er­ro­neous­ly placed on the Eden Rahim Park.How­ev­er, Ford al­so said he was born in the area where the park was named for him and out­lin­ing his work in Ari­ma, added, "When I was an Ari­ma coun­cil­lor at age 26, Ghas­san Youseph was now learn­ing to talk Eng­lish!"On that, Ghas­san said he and Ford were friends, but Ford's state­ment bor­dered on hav­ing racial con­tent.

"Don't come to me on per­son­al as­pects, my size or so, or cast in­sin­u­a­tions about per­son­al things. Talk about is­sues. If PNM is do­ing this now, what will hap­pen if they be­come Gov­ern­ment?" Ghas­san added."With all due re­spect to T&T's First Peo­ples, all of us came here to T&T. We need to un­der­stand that and move for­ward. The song 'Caribbean Man' should be ring­ing in every­one's ears, we should cel­e­brate our di­ver­si­ty, not den­i­grate each oth­er,"

Say­ing Ford had been among Arim­i­ans who backed cur­rent may­or George Hadeed for the may­or­ship, Ghas­san said his prob­lem with the park was prin­ci­ple, since a pe­ti­tion to the cor­po­ra­tion was no sub­sti­tute for open pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion, such as a town hall meet­ing

"Nor­man Kistow, Rose Jan­nierre, Leroy Mor­ris all served as may­ors much longer than Ash­ton. If no park was named for them and one was named for Ford who served less time then they did, it could be per­ceived as po­lit­i­cal pa­tron­age and nepo­tism," he added.

On Al Rawi's Sen­ate re­marks, Ghas­san said, "No­body was speak­ing about Arabs that day un­til Al Rawi brought it up. Why bring the Arab com­mu­ni­ty in­to the ar­gu­ments he was hav­ing? He was us­ing mi­nor­i­ty sta­tus to de­fend him­self and one shouldn't use the is­sues."