I was supposed to be on "hiatus". I made a solemn vow to my love that I would stay off the internets for a while. But events have a way of testing your character to the breaking point. I broke.
So sue me.
Here's the question:
How many "terrorists" have you met? How many do you know? Are you sure?
Explanation and Exposition after the fold.
I went back to University to finish my grad diploma in Education. This was in the early 90's. I was a good five to ten years older than most of my fellow students, and I found them at times either refreshingly unspoiled, or tiresomely naive. It wasn't that bad, but at times I was reminded of that saying by Bill Bennett, that hypocritical right-wing US values merchant: "No one who has ever slept with an Education Major need wonder why the school system is in such a mess." Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Example: the Departmental Lecturer assigned to shepherd us through our section thorugh "Philosophy of Education" was a kind, caring, provocative, erudite, and brave and very capable Palestinian woman named Samia. About a third of the class were Jewish women from Forest Hills and Bathurst in Toronto, slumming it at McGill because they couldn't get in to the OISE program at U of T. Another third were Jewish women from Montreal, only distinguishable from the former because they dressed better and smoked more.
Samia's introductory address laid out her philosophy - educational, political and personal. She did not pull any punches. One of the lines that caused a great deal of indrawn breath was her statement that she "Did not believe that God was a Real Estate Agent".
I could tell a longer story about how this woman won over the whole class through the term, slowly, almost one student at a time, and without anyone abandoning a single philosophical point or position - Zionists remained Zionists, Samia remained Samia, yet we all were welcome to repair after class to the Grad Club down the hill and continue our arguments over beer and sandwiches.
Samia wrote me one of the best letters of reference I had ever received. I hold it as a privelege that, years later, I got to return the favour when she ran afoul of University politics when it came to a promotion.
A couple of years ago I saw her name mentioned in a newspaper wire story. I had known that Samia had had an unhappy marriage and that her first husband lived somewhere in the Middle East. The story was about her first husband.Mohammed Zaidan had died in American custody in Iraq. My good friend's husband, my good, decent, humanistic friend's husband was Abu Abbas, among other things, mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking and indirectly culpable in the murder of Leon Klinghoffer.
"We can live without religion or meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection." -- Dalai Lama
There is a Muslim woman who teaches at my middle school. She is ethnically French-Canadian, and comes from the same neighbourhoods I frequented in my mis-spent young adulthood in Montreal. She wears a head scarf and conservative clothing, always with her arms amd legs fully covered. She is shy and soft spoken - not traits that lead to success in middle school teaching.
Normally, at my school, her religion would be a plus, since about 20% of our students are Muslim, and most of teh Muslim students are deferential to authority and academically ambitious. But she teaches in the French Immersion section of the school. For cultural, demographic and organizational reasons very few Muslim students go into the French Immersion stream. Indeed, very few FI students are of the sort that defer to any teacher at all.
She has had a rough go of it, and I have done what I can to make things smooth for her. She is so meek and unassertive that her kids walk all over her. Yet she has a heart of gold, and a lot to offer. Her mind is keen and she overcomes her shyness when given the opportunity to debate, or to truly teach.
Last fall we were talking and she told me of a friend of hers that was having a rough go as well. This older Muslim woman, an immigrant to Canada, was a member of her mosque. This kindly woman had helped countless younger mothers with their families, with counselling, small loans and gifts, and free babysitting. Now the woman was depressed and desperate, with cause - her husband had been killed a few years ago, and most of her sons were exiles, prisoners, or wanted by the law.
The woman that my friend idolised and saw such good in, the woman that this shy and meek coworker cared so much about was Maha Elsamnah. This woman's daughter had had, as a wedding guest, Osama Bin Laden. One son was killed in a shootout with Pakistani security forces, one son paralyzed. One son was in Guantanamo, the youngest inmate, a teen who allegedly killed a US Medic.To most of Canada, and the Americans who pay any attention to our news, my friend's matronly mentor is next to the devil himself.
To my friend, Maha Elsamnah is just an old woman who needs help.
I guess my coworker read my expression when it became clear whom we were speaking about. Since then there has been some distance between us, and for that I regret. But I can not get my head around to seeing this woman as anything but the head of a family that I have every reason to abhor. UnChristian of me, quite.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" Matthew 22:39)
I live with my family in a quiet suburban neighbourhood. Crescents and Courts of mid-rise town homes, apartment blocks, semi detached homes, linked by long rambling trail systems and parkland around flood control streams and reservoirs. In back of our place there's about 15 acres of schoolyard, playground and parkland, a baseball diamond and three or four soccer fields where the three and four year olds are brought by their Soccer-Moms to chase a ball around. Out on the western side of teh school there's a grassy and shaded area where young Muslim men meet every Friday and say their prayers in the open air. If I were ever to convert to Islam (not a chance) I think I'd enjoy meeting my prayer obligation in that way.
Last summer I was out watching my kids climb all over the jungle gym when a ball came flying up and knocked me silly. It wasn't a hard baseball, glad to say, or I would have probably been in the hospital. It was a cricket ball.
A cricket ball specially adapted for use on pavement; it was taped to soften it up and give it a more satisfactory bounce. The guys played cricket on teh school tarmac adjoining the playground because (as they told me later) there are no cricket pitches in the neighbourhood, so they have to improvise. There are plenty of basketball nets, soccer fields, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, jungle gyms, bike paths, swimming pools, in evidence, but nary a single wicket. The young men all said that they knew of no wicket in the whole area.
This seemed strange to me, and after talking to the guys for a while, and getting them to move a bit away from the playground, I left a message for my local city councillor asking if this was so, and what could be done about it. She replied that there were plenty of cricket pitches (though, strangely enough, she didn't name any, and in retrospect I could kick myself for not following up on that). When I later suggested that we turn some open field out beyond the baseball diamond into acricket pitch, she got an assistant to fob me off with some boilerplate about land use and planning for the whole community and future needs and blah blah blah. I lost interest and let it slide.
The fact remains that there are more and more South Asians moving into this neighbourhood. My daughter's first "boy" friend in kindergarten was a sweet faced courteous and well mannered boy from Islamabad. These young Pakistani, Afghani and Indian men all want to play cricket, or pray in the park You see their wives, clad in burqas, strolling with thier babies along the tree lined park trails. You see the beaming parents at the school dramas or awards ceremonies. The kids run through our complex to collect lilacs and pine cones. They are all like all of us - just trying to get along, just trying to fit in, just trying to live. Canadians.
Five hundred metres from my front stoop, where I like to sit in the evenings and watch the neighbourhood go by, there lives another man. From all accounts he likes to take full benefit from the neighbourhood as well. He bikes teh same trails I bike, his kids play on the same swing sets and run along the same trails and toboggan on the same hills. I am not sure of this, but he may have been in the group of men who bowed to the qiblah in the park behind our house. He too likes to sit on his front stoop at the end of the workday.
He was arrested last week with 16 other Muslim men on various charges related to terrorist activities
"O people! We have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another" (Koran 11-49:13).
What's my point, beyond a certain obvious need to express the frisson one feels when larger events and issues touch a life? Well, I think that what I've learned from these and other experiences is to trust my own judgment of people more than ever. Its very easy to fall back on a belief in monsters. Very easy and very wrong. The people I know and trust I know and trust.
I know Samia to be a delightful, peace loving and just woman. That her husband was not her equal in this was not her fault. My coworker remains exactly what she seems to be - a good hearted soul. That she numbers among her other friends such people that I find abhorent may reflect upon her lack of judgment, or recommned her as a forgiving saint.
But it is in the third case that my point becomes clear (if only to me). This man was and is my neighbour. Whetehr he is guilty of the crimes attributed to him is not the issue... I would say though, and maybe this is a naive wish, that maybe the issue is that we may have shared the neighbourhood and shared experience, but I don't think we shared enough.
How can you look into the face of a neighbour and see a monster? If this man is a terrorist, bent on attacking teh very society he was living in, a society made up of quiet neighbourhoods and sitting on stoops, what does that say about how well we fit with each other? Can we ever truly welcome people? Can we ever truly welcome the other?
Maybe we all should learn to keep an eye on each other - not to see what we are up to, but maybe to see what we need...?
"May the LORD keep watch between you and me
when we are out of each other's sight. "
Genesis 31:49
I despair.
I'm going up to kiss my kids good night.
Life is good.