Eid Saeed

It's Eid-al-Fitr, the several-day feast/holiday that celebrates the end of Ramadan. Whenever this time of year comes around I get a little weepy and homesick. I've discussed my religious upbringing on this blog at length, but for those just tuning in, I was raised Mormon by my Catholic father in Cairo, Egypt. Because of my dad's enlightened views on religious tolerance, my childhood home, and my many Muslim friends, I have a deep respect for Islam, and Ramadan is the most glorious time of year. It's hard to think about the incredible goodness that would penetrate every corner of society during the holy month and not get emotional. As an outsider, I remember having so many questions about a religion I didn't understand. Why were there tables set up on the street? (So well-off people could set out food for poor people to break the fast.) Why does the man with the drum come around singing at 3:00 a.m.? (To wake everyone up so they can eat before the sun comes up.) Why is there a sheep in the backyard? (They will slaughter it when the Eid comes.)

When I was 5, my family lived in a little town in Utah. I remember one afternoon, a friend of mine and I got into a spat in my bedroom, and I came out crying and curled up next to my dad on the couch. He asked me why I was crying, and I told him that my friend had called me a Muslim. "Why does that make you upset?" "Because I'm not a Muslim!" "No, you're not, but there wouldn't be anything to be ashamed of if you were."

He said "Do you know that Muslims love God so much that they all pray five times a day?" "They do?" "Yeah, five times a day, someone calls out from the Mosque for everyone to come pray, and people stop what they are doing and go pray." "Wow." "It's a beautiful faith," he told me.

I remember this conversation like it was yesterday. My dad then went in and had a little talk with my friend, and told her that insults based on religion, however inaccurate, would not be allowed in our house.

Every time my dad visits the U.S., he goes around spending time with our many relatives and family friends that live here. Invariably, he complains about how one or another of his relatives has become very anti-Muslim since living in the US. I suspect that something like what happened to my childhood self is going on: that when people call you Muslim as an insult, then you come to believe there must be something very bad about it.

On Friday, September 26, someone sprayed a chemical irritant through the window of the nursery at a mosque in Dayton, the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton. From a second-hand account:

She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the irritating substance there.

"The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help her breathe. The child couldn't stop sobbing.

"This didn't happen in some far away place -- but right here in Dayton, and to my friends. Many of the Iraqi refugees were praying together at the Mosque Friday evening. People that I know and love."

Just that week, thousands of copies of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, a horrific film that I, unfortunately, have seen, were mailed out across the country, including in Ohio. One person who got it mailed to them in NC, retired fourth-grade teacher Mary Gilbert of Raleigh, quoted here, got it right when she said, "Gee, if I was still teaching, this video could be a classroom aid to show how some use hate and religious intolerance to scare people...However, I would not want to poison young minds by having them watch it."

I don't know if we can make any kind of convincing case for the link between the mailing of the DVD and the gassing of the mosque, which is why I've delayed posting on this for a couple of days. But this evening, I decided that it didn't matter. It all came together for me when I read this post (via Pandagon) about how John McCain plagiarized a 2005 e-mail message "celebrating" the Eid, from George W. Bush, almost word-for-word for his 2008 Eid message. Not only is it plagiarized, it doesn't even actually wish the reader a happy Eid, instead explaining what the Eid is (which is odd, considering the poster received it after registering as a Muslim on McCain's website).

And it clicked for me. John McCain, George W. Bush, the Republican party, and the producers of Obsession don't understand that Muslims are just other people. No, in the post-9/11 fear-mongering hate-blowout-sale, Muslims are a group, they are a race, they are out to get us, they pose an "existential threat" to America, but they are not individual people. And so John McCain wouldn't dream of writing a letter that said "I wish you and your family a happy Eid, and hope that God blesses you with joy," because he can't even fathom an actual Muslim reader sitting out there reading his message. Further, he gives so little of a shit about his Muslim supporters that he couldn't even come up with an original message. Doesn't he have a staffer who could work something up in a half-hour, for Christ's sake?

Just like the news media can't really understand that Muslims are people. And when people are attacked at their place of worship, for no apparent reason other than to instill fear, that's terrorism. Yes, terrorism can be perpetrated against Muslims, in the United States. It happened last Friday. Instead of acknowledging this awful truth, the story has been basically ignored.

A Google News Search-culled sample of some of the news outlets that have covered the story: BeliefNet, Huffington Post, Israeli News, Wisconsin Progressive.org, MidEastYouth.org, DemocracyNow, and a handful of local Ohio outlets. Notice anything? Not a single major outlet. Not the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or even the Trib.

It's disgusting. I'd wager a week's pay with you that if someone sprayed an irritant gas into a church or a synagogue or a goddamn Girl Scouts meeting, where children were hurt, it would be a "story" for at least one day. But here, the story is inconvenient. Hell, all those Muslims just go around killing each other anyway, right? Isn't that what they're doing in Iraq?

So if you want to know what this is all about, you can just travel back in time to 1987, and ask my little friend why it is an insult to call someone a Muslim. And then you can fast forward to today, where Barack Obama is left fending off charges that he's a Muslim, despite the fact that Islam is about as mainstream a religion as you can get, and that there's nothing wrong with being one. And you can explain to John McCain that a plagiarized holiday greeting that doesn't actually offer any holiday wishes means that you're a huge asshole. And explain that terrorism is not something perpetrated by people who are brown and say "Allah" against nice white Christians, but the tactic of using fear to make a political point.

Or...maybe it's a strategy. I dunno, maybe John McCain can explain it to me.

(Thanks to reader David Clark for sending the e-mail that forced me to think about this in more than the "God, that's horrifying" way.)