Posted by panch from ? (204.120.48.3) on Friday, June 07, 2002 at 8:22AM :
June 7, 2002
Mr. Homer Younan, Vice President
Executive Board Members
Advisory Board and General Members
AAA of San Jose, CA.
Dear Mr. Younan,
I was sorry to receive the letter signed by you stating that unless legally required you were not obliged to respond to my inquiries. I had thought till now that Ms Bejan’s actions in denying me equal access to the people at our conventions and presenting me with a bogus and discriminatory contract were something the rest of your organization would not have supported had you known of her plans and the real reasons behind them. I see now that I was mistaken. You would no doubt have responded the same way back in August, if Ms Bejan had shown you the letter from my lawyer warning your organization that you could face a lawsuit if she proceeded. Then too your response could have been that you were under no obligation to make any response, unless “required”. There is a way to require just such a response, and it was in order to avoid entangling your entire organization in legal proceedings that I tried to get a response from you before you would be “legally required” to give one. I suppose that in a way you are inviting me to do my worst, and while Ms Bejan may have abstained from voting, clearly her interests were best served in this, and not those of your organization and its general membership.
Let me remind you that I must defend myself in a two million dollar lawsuit Ms Bejan has brought against me and a completely innocent college student in Detroit she has never met and who has never set foot in California. I am being sued in part for having stated that Ms Bejan was negligent in her duties as your president for not informing you all that a letter from my lawyer had arrived addressed to her in her capacity as your president, something which in any other organization would have been shared immediately. In order to defend myself I must show that her actions were something the rest of the organization would not have supported, or at the very least, would have expected to have been notified of so that you could have had the full and open discussions now you didn’t have back in August. By influencing you all to vote unanimously she has merely enlisted you in her attempt to present herself as having acted properly, for you are saying today that she was under no such obligation or responsibility towards her organization, that you do not expect a president of yours to steer your organization in such a way as to avoid unnecessary legal problems as well as unfair and reprehensible actions taken on her part solely because of a personal disagreement. Is this the position you would defend in court and before the public at large?
I am forced now to bring your organization into this and proceed against it as well in my counter complaint.
Let me just add that not Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles or any other Assyrian organization anywhere behaved with such callous disregard for the betterment of our people as did your organization, caught up as you were in the single-minded and narrow goal of making more money than any other convention. Nowhere was I any kind of a troublemaker. I have worked for twenty years and more to enhance our reputation and visibility among the greater public only to have been treated as I was by your organization and for the simple reason that I displeased your president over a personal matter. While you all take nothing away from me as an artist, you nonetheless give your approval of the way I was treated. This not only affects me but sends a warning to others good enough to be professional, that they could be in serious jeopardy should they choose to work for our people because the day may come when one person will take a personal dislike to them or their work and they could face what I had to endure.
I belong to no club or faction or region. The day will come when we will hold hands across these artificial barriers we have set up between each other, when loyalty to one’s friends or neighbors, when these tribal customs, will no longer dominate our every move, hindering us from uniting and magnifying our strengths, setting aside our petty and personal jealousies. I had hoped your organization could have led the way instead of presenting the most dismal example yet of how far our people can go in pursuing personal vendettas at the cost of all else.
This action of yours will resound among all our people eventually. Thinking yourselves to be among the most advanced you have instead chosen to follow your leader in one of the worst examples of petty factionalism I have ever witnessed. There is a bright future awaiting those of us who can work past these kinds of things. It would have been good to see your organization take that path instead of the one you have chosen for it.
Sincerely,
Fred Parhad
-- panch
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