Je suis Jabara
By Barry Friedman
I want to tell you about my friend Mo. Muhammad. Mo’s a car guy who sold me a Honda Element years ago. I thought then—think now—how odd and wonderful it was that a Muslim was selling a Jew a Japanese import in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Mo’s last name is Jbara.
A man named Jabara was murdered in Tulsa last week. Different spelling, but I heard the name before I saw the spelling.
It wasn’t Mo, I knew that, the man’s name was Khalid, but how do you ask a friend if it’s his brother, his cousin, his son?
Maybe you’ve heard the story. A neighbor who shouldn’t have had a gun, shouldn’t have been out of jail, who had already been charged with running over Jabara’s mother with a car, shot Khalid for the crime of being Muslim, even though—and this mattered little to the man who shot him—Khalid wasn’t Muslim, he was a Lebanese Christian. Murdering xenophobes, though, have a low threshold for hate and Khalid, whatever he was, looked like a Mooslem, an Ay-Rab, an Iraqi, ISIS They're all the same, right?
Khalid was sitting on his front porch when it happened.
Khalid’s family immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s from Lebanon. The family settled in Tulsa and raised three children. One of the brothers became a lawyer, the sister’s in marketing, and Khalid, the man who was shot and killed for the crime of dark complexion and a having a foreign name, ran a catering business with his his mother.
It sounds like an American story. It is one.
But was it Mo’s?
"He was hilarious, quirky, very intelligent, and really would give all of himself for anyone he loved," Khalid’s brother wrote on Facebook.
In October of 2008, Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain was told by a woman at one his rallies, "I can't trust Obama. He's an Arab.”
McCain retook the microphone and said, “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. He's not [an Arab]."
McCain got a lot of credit for that—we set the bar really low for him and he only rarely clears it—but this time, he did … sort of. He never told the woman—and really the point—that there’s nothing wrong with being an Arab.
Which brings us back to Khalid Jabara, who was killed because his name was Jabara, because he looked like Jabara look, and because he was sitting on a porch in front of a house next to a man who doesn't want an America where Jbaras live next door
Does it matter, is there a connection that the GOP nominee for president talks of barring all Muslims from our shores or mocks the parents of Humayan Khan.
Again, Muslims, Arabs, ISIS, Iranians—they’re all the same, right? They want to destroy us. They're here. They’re right next door. You want to know why America’s not great anymore? Them.
Trump isn't winking and nodding anymore to those who would kill their Arab neighbors or beat up protestors, or, for that matter, use 2nd Amendment solutions to get what they want.
The dog whistle is a siren.
Mo wrote me back. Nobody he knows.
My friend and his family were safe.
Good.
But not good.
Because somebody knew Khalid Jabara, somebody knew this family.
And there’s everything wrong with that.
I knew Khalid Jabara even though I didn’t know it— even though I didn’t know him.
We all did. Je suis Jabara.
For Mo Jbara—another Jbara, my friend—also sits on his porch in front of his house on a street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.