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.