AlterNet: Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

AlterNet: Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

World of Hate

Maybe I’ve been living in a bubble, but it took something really simple for me to understand what’s going on in the world today, no, not understand, just realise. I was visiting Amazon last night reading up on a book that I found through a series of random links, after I read the reviews, I went onto the discussion forum, and was shocked and sickened, saddened by what I saw. Hate. Pure unadulterated hate against Muslims.

I know, anyone reading this must think I’ve had my head buried in the sand. I guess I’ve been too wrapped up in life in Egypt, and all its goings on, and too wrapped up in loving and trying to raise my child, and watching too many kids programs where life is a garden of flowers, butterflies and fun.

Living here has changed me profoundly, I am not proud of it, but I have become much more inclined to ignore things that disturb me. Pretend they don’t matter. But tossing and turning last night, not being able to sleep from utter disgust, I know these things do matter, now that I have someone else’s life to consider other than my own, my son’s life, his future as an Arab, Muslim male.

The question that kept forcing its way into my head was, where can we go? Where can I take my baby so that he can have a good normal life, free of racism, corruption, hate, murder, rape, terrorism? Where? The answer was nowhere, because anywhere we go, there will always be other human beings involved... continued in next 3 posts (for the reason why, see here)

World of Hate 2

When I lived in London, I knew I didn’t want to bring up my future kids there. The education is good, but the life is hard. Racism in schools is rife; I suffered it myself, because I wasn’t white, or black, but somewhere in the middle. That was a long time ago, and now, post 9/11 and the London tube bombings, I can only imagine what a nightmare school life must be like for a Muslim kid in a British school. I was lucky, I got taken out of middle school and sent to Egypt for a couple of years, where I was allowed to have a real childhood, free of worries and cares, and then back to London to attend an Arab school. That saved me, I am totally and absolutely positive.

Growing up in London, all I knew was the UK media, UK TV, UK press. There was no Al-Jazeera in those days. I remember one day watching the news as a preteen, and discovering for the first time that Israel had existed for over 40 years. All I kept saying to myself, was, why hasn’t anyone done anything about this? It’s been 40 years! I wasn’t politically aware, I didn’t know anything except raw emotion, and all I had seen on the screen was Palestinians being killed daily, by the Israeli occupation. I had until that moment thought it had only been going on for a few years.

Next I remember crying as a teenager at the images of Kuwait burning. The gulf war affected me directly because many Kuwaiti’s ended up running away to London, and their kids were in my school, in my classes. We had a test the morning that Iraq invaded Kuwait, but we couldn’t concentrate, because so many of the girls in my class, Iraqi’s, Kuwaitis, Arabs were crying.

World of Hate 3

My school made me proud to be an Arab. We didn’t care that much for religion, we were Muslim and Christian, we just loved that we could all speak the same language, we were normal teenage girls, with usual teenage concerns, but we didn’t have to suffer racism or discrimination, except once we stepped outside the school grounds.

As an adult, I remember the images of 9/11. I was at work that day, working for an Arab publishing house, we all gathered around a big screen TV, and watched in horror as the second tower went down on CNN. But before it even hit the ground, I swear, the news scrolling across the bottom of the screen was stating as fact that Osama Bin Laden had done it.

The next couple of days are a haze of these horrific images, that I could not stop watching, flipping obsessively between channels each time the coverage ended to see some more. I had a really well educated British friend with me throughout that time, who never knew anything about Palestine until we had talked about it. He had spent his whole life thinking that Palestine had occupied Israel. The publishing house had opened my eyes to things I hadn’t known before, namely access to AP pictures of what was really going on in Palestine, at this point I had close Palestinian friends, I was pro-Palestine now more than ever before, I attended meetings, went on marches. Then something happened, that made me question my beliefs, my entire existence. Let’s just say, life threw something at me, God threw something at me, a test of my humanity.

World of Hate 4

The morning after 9/11, on the tube going to work, I saw for the first time people looking at me in fear. I thanked God that once again I was safe, because I worked in an Arab company I wouldn’t have to deal with this at work. In the days that followed people went crazy, attacking anyone who looked even remotely Arab or Muslim on the streets of London, even the Indians that wore turbans, it was sick.

A year later I moved to Egypt. By then I had stopped watching the news, because it just made me feel useless, and worthless.

Since then, I have lived in a bubble, broken only by last night’s escapade into the forum of hate.
When I think about taking my child back to London, all I see is a country where child abuse, kidnappings, rape and murder, even kids killing each other with guns and knives, is an everyday occurrence.

I lived in the US for a while, it was more of the same, except on a bigger scale. There is where for the first and only time I saw a real gun, where a drug fuelled acquaintance offered to take me on a drive-by shooting, like it was something to do for fun, where news of a dead body found in the alleyway behind my uncle’s business wasn’t so shocking, where swimming in my uncles pool with my young cousins I could hear guns shooting, and he lived in a nice area!

Now in Egypt, where most of the population is walking around with an amputated humanity, I face different problems, problems of ignorance, indifference and defeat. So where do we go from here? What will I tell my son when he starts to ask me questions about the world, about life, about religion?