American and Arab

American and Arab
Ali Hossaini

Can I be at war with myself? Watching the World Trade Center collapse, then living through the aftermath, begs that absurd question. I’m American, with a Muslim name but nondescript appearance. No one takes me for Middle Eastern—I was born in West Virginia, and I’m only a quarter Arab. But thanks to the peculiarities of history, and naming, I have an Arab-American identity.

The attack on the World Trade Center puts me in an awful place. On the one hand, I’ve been deeply fortunate. Neither my loved ones nor I were injured. Like everyone else, I am horrified and angered. I could have been there, munching a bagel on the observation deck. I can’t imagine how someone could have planned such an attack, and my shock is turning into anger and mourning. At the same time, I feel excluded from the national unity that happens after such a tragedy. Why? As an Arab-American, I’m subject to reprisals. I’m nervous, wondering if I will somehow share the blame. Slurs, threats and even violence have already been leveled against anyone associated with Islam, and I wonder what will happen to me. I’m looking for work—will I be denied a job? What if a wider war breaks out? Will I lose my liberty?

Some friends have said I should go to Egypt for safety. They meant well, but their comments betrayed a misunderstanding that verges on racism. Hard as it is for the safely white to comprehend, there is only one place for me and other hyphenated Americans: the United States. America produced me. My grandparents hail from four different countries. Where else could they have created a family? If I’m out of place here, thanks to my name, I’m certainly out of place in the Middle East, where I stick out as an American. What is left for me? Do we have to pick sides in the end? And what can I do if neither side will have me, if both treat me as the enemy?

I’m at a loss to answer these questions, at least under the current logic. Some of my fellow citizens are striking out at American Muslims. Some are even calling for a firestorm to be rained upon Islamic nations. Don’t they see that the terrorists had the same inspiration? The Afghanis were caught between the Soviet Union and the United States for decades. Their country has been reduced to rubble. They have no hope. Violence occurs in cycles, and, if we respond senselessly, striking innocent people in our search for criminals, then we’ll create more radicals, more suicide bombers who embody the despair of poverty and war. The monopoly on violence is broken, and I shudder to think what comes next.

I’m living in fear, and my identity leaves me no shield. I often fly from Newark to San Francisco. Was the attack a one-time event or the first of many? Will our cities ever feel safe? Then, again, what will I face in my day-to-day existence? Will I get mocked and beat up? Are my tears for the dead less potent? Will my name become a Yellow Star that excludes me from society? Will I share in the collective healing that must come?

My situation brings a special clarity, one that opposes the clarity of choosing sides. What do I see from my hyphenated perspective? The absurdity of labels, indeed, of the whole idea that race, religion or flags divide humanity. I have a Muslim name, but my grandfather was Serbian. How would that fly in the Balkans? Is the world becoming a vast Balkan state?

I’ve wondered if I will ever have to choose a side. If so, here is my choice: pacifism and dialog. I choose love, I choose humanity. I may symbolize Islam to some, and America to others, but I transcend these distinctions. I am proof that love conquers hate. My grandparents conquered tradition to found my family, and I stand tall as an American born from a unique and tolerant soil. What race produced me? The human race. Let me plead for understanding and compassion. Chase the criminals if you must, but let us then begin to fight. Let us fight not for oil, money or revenge, but for a world where hatred and weapons belong to a distant, barbaric past.

Filed Under: Geography, News Tagged With: , ,

From an Afghan American

From an Afghan American

Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist in San Francisco who is a native of Afghanistan

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?”

Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.”

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.

When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.”

It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rat’s nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan–a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban–by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout.

It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants.

That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?

Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

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Tamim Ansary

Filed Under: Geography, News, Operations Tagged With: , ,