Twice in recent memory have older men accused me of profound ignorance. The first occasion was when retired Col. David Hunt responded to a question that I asked following his ‘terrorism’ lecture. I asked why the U.S. continues to give weapons and billions of dollars a year to military regimes such as Egypt, authoritarian kingdoms such as Saudi Arabia, and apartheid colonial states such as Israel if it really wants to go after the causes of “terrorism.” I also pointed out that he had used Muslim and terrorist interchangeably.
In his response, he sidestepped a long history of Western intervention and war in the Middle East and his own role in encouraging the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and indicated that I was being ignorant if I didn’t think that Islam incited hate and misogyny.
The second time I was accused of ignorance by an older man was when Jeff Emerson ’70 wrote in last week’s Orient that I was ignorant if I thought that Israel was occupying any part of Palestine. From the small line that the Orient happened to quote me on, Emerson deduced about me: “Clearly he does not read the newspapers or watch the news.”
People can say what they want to say, but the platform from which you speak matters. Both men spoke from relatively powerful positions in society (one a retired colonel, the other a Bowdoin trustee) and had no qualms in making me appear young, naïve and ignorant. Certainly, I am that about a lot of things, but I grew up hearing the call to prayer five times a day, navigating cities and towns where Arabic and Hebrew were the norm, lazing around in the hot Egyptian summer, and farting through open air markets in Jerusalem on the way to soccer practice after a falafel sandwich. I know some things because I remember them.
I remember when, as I was anticipating my high school graduation, the U.S.-backed and armed Mubarak regime opened jails and cut off telephone services in an effort to repress protests and create chaos. My neighborhood, like others all over Cairo, organized into “popular committees” that defended against government-paid thugs and opportunistic looters. It wasn’t about religion; it was about trusting your neighbor.
I remember hitchhiking with Israeli hippies down the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea and witnessing the sheer amount of water used by luxury tourist hotels that cater to foreigners and rich people, while permaculture farmers in the neighboring towns organized to conserve water in one of the driest places on earth. I remember looking out the window of a bus to Al Karak, the nearby city and site of a 12th century Crusader castle, during Ramadan to renew my visa and buy a couple chickens for my host family to prepare for the Iftar (breaking of the fast).
I remember kicking rocks around my former East Jerusalem neighborhood this summer, where for days young Palestinians had engaged in street battles with heavily armed Israeli soldiers and police after a 16-year-old neighborhood kid was kidnapped, forced to drink gasoline, and burned alive by Israeli settlers.
I remember waiting in line with men and women at checkpoints in the West Bank for the soldiers to open the turnstile just long enough for a few people at a time to walk through and show them their papers and passports. And the lines of Palestinian men waiting by the side of the road while soldiers inspected their bags and checked their IDs. And the smell of the tear gas (manufactured in Pennsylvania) that soldiers and police shoot when young people vent their anger with the occupation by throwing rocks at the eight meter high concrete walls and watchtowers of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
But mostly I remember the countless conversations, interactions and relationships with living, breathing, loving, caring human beings—people who suffer from all the same human faults as we do, and who try to retain their dignity in the face of absurdity. I may be younger, and thus less “experienced,” than men like Hunt and Emerson, but I know that a place looks different when you look at it from underneath a military helmet, and I know that there is a double standard in the way a lot of us use the subjective and dehumanizing label of “terrorist.” Every society has problems, but it is not so easy to judge the faults of a culture apart from your own, especially if it only serves to exacerbate the problems of the other.
I just wish I could count all the times I was welcomed into strangers’ homes, and all the laughs with people who didn’t hold it against me that my government gives billions of dollars a year to pay for the guns and the gas and the bombs.