Now that I'm back in Katy, that place in Texas where I grew up, I see more and more why it is I think like and act like I do. I was always friends with those non-white kids. They were a minority in Katy. But in 4th grade my best friends were Vietnamese and Iraqi. Last summer, I visited my best friend who I met in 2nd grade who's Taiwanese. I was always eating Indian food at my friends' houses. And of course me and my neighbors were Latino. When I graduated from high school, an old friend told me, I was the kid who went up to her on the playground her first day in school and asked if she wanted to play.
Yesterday, at the DPS, I started talking in Arabic to a woman who was covered. She was speaking something close to Lebanese with her kids. When I asked her son where he was from, he said, proudly, "Philisteen. Al-Quds (Palestine, Jerusalem)." But it turns out, she and her children were born in Kuwait; her siblings were born in Lebanon. None of them have ever been to Palestine. So I easily made friends with her. She's going to take me to the local mosque, so I can continue my Arabic and Quran study. And we'll study poetry when I go to her house. I can already hear the cries from my detractors--"terrorist sympathizer"!!!
When I get a car, I plan to go the Jewish Community Center and continue my introductory studies of the Talmud, which I started in Boston a couple years ago. So call me a Jewish-sympathizer, as well. I would study Hebrew, but I've decided against it, because it will just confuse my Arabic, and I'll end up speaking kind of whacky and having to think too hard, like when I speak portunol.
So here's the problem. For somebody like me, who's naturally curious about other cultures and languages and has spent my whole life traveling and studying and teaching Social Studies, it's obvious that I'm going to make friends with all kinds of people. Many of these people make those majority-culture, affluent (Katy types) uncomfortable. Not that everyone from Katy is a closed-minded bigot, though I did grow up here, and do know how Many, but not All, of these people think.
I'm always defending the underdog and trying to bring the outsider in. I've done it since I was born. It's just a matter of personality. So in a way, it just makes sense that when I became an evangelical Christian at the age of 15, and rejected the atheistic ways of my upbringing, I soon after read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and decided I had to understand Islam. If I was going to go to a church that claimed that Jesus was the only way, and if I was going to bank my whole life on a personal encounter I had with Jesus, then I couldn't dismiss other people's personal encounters with God through Islam. I HAD to understand Islam better, considering it's the fastest growing religion in the world. And that's what set me off on this course. That's why I studied Arabic at Harvard when I was 18. That's why I studied Arabic with an Egyptian woman for a couple years in Boston. That's why I went to go live in the Middle East.
I'm reading See No Evil--a book by a former CIA agent, Robert Baer, who worked in Beirut and the Middle East in the 80's. (The movie, Syriana, is based on the book.) It's so enlightening. And it's very clear that I would never want to be or ever could be part of the CIA. He talks about how and why the organization has failed in its mission to collect good intelligence and didn't prevent September 11. Basically, they are in a Catch-22. If anyone is Arab or spent significant time in the Arab world, they will not pass a security clearance. I guess anyone who's spent any amount of time there would end up having friends or acquaintainces who might be, let's say, Shia from Lebanon (considering they are at least 40% of the population) and then they become "terrorist sympathizers", which is what some people call me.
So the CIA has to train people with no connection to the Arab world in Arabic and Middle Eastern culture, and what you get is very few people with a very low-level of competence. They say it takes at least 10 years for a person to get to a usefully competent level in the language. Last week's Newsweek reported that 40% of CIA employees who were supposed to be fluent in Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese failed their language tests.
In Baer's book, he talks about how he was one of two CIA operations officers working in the Middle East in the 80's who had decent Arabic and any experience in the Middle East. And even the kinds of things he does and the mistakes he makes are crazy. After two years of being in Lebanon, I knew the place better than he did. (Because he wasn't based out of there, but he'd have to go in and do stuff.) It's kind of shocking the level of incompetence.
The book and the movie make Lebanon out to be the scariest, epicenter of all terrorist evil and barbarism in the world. The movie and the book paint a picture of Lebanon that thankfully I never saw, and really wander to what extent it really exists. Maybe 2004-2006 Lebanon is not 1980's Lebanon. But what he describes is frighteningly resonant with what's going on in this war. It's the same players. Let's pray that it doesn't degenerate into the sectarian violence that happend in the 80's. Most Lebanese are too aware of this. Let's pray that people will work together to rebuild--and not destroy each other.
Like I said before, Hizbollah did win. Now the question is, will the Lebanese people all join with Hizbollah out of their hatred towards Israel and the United States who they see as having destroyed their country. Hizbollah was the only ones who successfully could defend them against such powerful aggressors. (This is how Lebanon and the Arab world perceives Hizbollah.) Or will some people, like my Druze friends, blame Hizbollah for what has happened.
The blogs are showing fear of potential civil war--Hariri and Jumblatt are calling on Hizbollah to comply with the UN and lay down its arms. This will never happen.
It seems that all the Lebanese people are helping the refugees. If they focus on rebuilding and starting over, then hopefully they can get to know each other, make friends (uh-oh more "terrorist sympathizers"--see how useless this stupid designation is) and live in peace.
"Terrorist sympathizer". . .How is the world supposed to be a better place, how can peace flourish, if we don't try to understand and even attempt to make friends with our supposed enemies?
***Notice I used HTML to underline!!!
3 comments:
I find this post somewhat disingenuous. No one has accused you of being a "terrorist sympathizer" because you make friends with Arab women in your town. While I agree with you that the designation is pretty unhelpful, at least you should realize (in the interest of seeing all sides) that it's your apparent sympathy for an organization that targets civilians and has called for the total destruction of Israel that angers people, not the fact that you talk to Arabs.
There was also one other thing that I found pretty disturbing, though a pretty wide-spread phenomenon:
When I asked her son where he was from, he said, proudly, "Philisteen. Al-Quds (Palestine, Jerusalem)." But it turns out, she and her children were born in Kuwait; her siblings were born in Lebanon. None of them have ever been to Palestine.
I've heard similar statements from people all over the middle east; one friend, an Egyptian, refers to himself as an "Arab in Diaspora," although he's never been to Palestine and is solidly Egyptian as far back as he can trace.
I, for one, find it hugely problematic that another generation (as epitomized by your new friend's son) is being raised to think of themselves as an oppressed class whose true home is a mythical homeland to which they have never been and to which they have no concrete connection. I have also observed that Arab governments and ngos alike often seem to perpetuate this idea among their citizens, as a way of creating solidarity among otherwise disparate groups of people and allowing Israel to serve as a scapegoat for the problems in the Arab world.
Here's what a friend of a friend, working for democratic reforms in Egypt, says (responding to a blog entry from a mutual friend):
"What you're describing in your artful words is, in my opinion. one of the main elements of Arab identity crisis; what you romantically call "diaspora"
For generations, Israel has always been the enemy, we knew no other enemy and it had never been anything other than an enemy.
It is the enemy, mind you, and for reasons that have no relation to religion, language, a presumed race, or a divine promise, but because of simple and plain old "just"
For most of the Arab people it has always been that Jew == Hebrew == Israeli == Zionist; associations created by Zionists, promoted by our fascist governments and followed blindly by our herds of citizens."
Perhaps your friend would be better off teaching her kids that instead of focusing their energies on the fairy tale land of liberated Palestine, they should all strive to demand responsibility, transparency and integrity from the countries they actually live in, as well as Palestine.
Just to clarify: I didn't mean to imply that any hope for or attachment to Palestine is unacceptable; for Palestinians, I can't imagine not feeling that! I was really speaking of the greater Arab world, the citizens of which seem to have allowed Palestine to become representative of all their ambitions and frustrated hopes.
Hi Jane,
Enjoying the forum. I wonder if you would comment on the statements attributed to the leader of Hezbollah:
If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.
"Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment..."
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