I had the privilege of growing up
in a family with roots in the Middle East. As such, I grew up with
an appreciation of its cuisine, which, to anyone who has experienced
its richness and variety, there would be full understanding as to
why as an adult, from time to time I feel the need to indulge myself
in a gut-busting extravaganza of some Old World cooking. However,
getting ingredients can be difficult at times. I mean, it’s not like
buying the ingredients to make pizza, tacos, or Chinese food, where
you can find the basics at just about any grocery store. Depending
on what’s on the menu, you may need to visit 3 or more different
stores. This invariably leads to asking a clerk or manager whether
or not they have this or that, and depending upon within which area
of the country this is occurring, you’re liable to get some
surprised expressions, which can only accurately be translated to
mean "never heard of it."
The other day, in the ethnic foods
isle, a fellow stocking the shelf with bottles of Extra Virgin Olive Oil
who had given me the expression described above, (yet wanting to be as
helpful as possible) asked what I was planning to make, and whether or not
there was some substitute. When I told him it was for a Middle Eastern
dish, I got "the look."
It wasn’t the first time, although I
must admit with relief that it has died down a bit since about 6 months
after September 11. That look that betrays the thoughts going on in the
other person’s mind, where they quietly begin going down the list:
"Italian?-No. Mexican?-No. Native American?-No. Arab? Yeah, probably."
The look lasted for only a split
second, but it had been there, nonetheless. My friend helped me out
anyway, leading me a few meters over to the section that contained the
specific item I needed, bur’ghul wheat, and then hung around for a few
seconds that indicated to me he had something on his mind.
"Lotsa trouble over there, huh?" Not
meeting his eye, but pretending that I was studying intently the wheat I
had just found, I said, "yeah, lots of trouble."
"What’s it all about?" he asked.
Without moving my head, just raising me eyes to his, looking over
wire-rimmed glasses and black, bushy eyebrows, I said "what do you mean?"
"The Arabs, why do they hate us so
much?"
I could tell by the look in this man’s
eyes that he sensed that there was something missing in the flood of
disinformation that he had been fed about the situation. It seemed to me
that he smelled something rotten in the daily reports put out by the
Ministry of Truth, whether it came from Bush, Peter Jennings or Rush
Limbaugh. He wasn’t confrontational, I think he just really wanted to
know. I tried the symbolic, flowery explanation mandatory of any Semite.
"Imagine going up to a nest of bees,
swatting it, and knocking it out of the tree in which it had peacefully
rested. Are you going to be surprised when they get mad and sting you?" He
just blinked with a slight movement of his head.
This was one of those opportunities
that one runs into now and then, so I decided to make the best of it. I
asked him if he had children. When he responded with the number 3, I asked
him if he had any pictures.
Ask any parent, anywhere in the world,
if they have pictures of children, and you will be witness to the
flawless, one-handed act of producing a wallet that magically opens to
reveal a family album. True to form, my friend drew me into his circle of
trust by displaying to me pictures of his tiny kingdom. I asked him their
names and about them. And again, as is mandatory with any parent, he gave
their names, ages, and a few of their peculiarities that to the rest of us
are unimportant but to him are vital pieces of information. If I had
wanted to know, I ‘m sure he could have told me their favorite foods,
colors, cartoon characters, when they cut the first tooth, when they cut
the first knee, and what they dreamed of being when they got to be big
like Dad.
I pointed to his eldest son, who was
12. "I just saw a picture on the internet 45 minutes ago of a boy his age.
His arms had been blown off, most of the skin had been burned off his
body, and his entire family had been killed in the instant that an
American bomb landed on his house in Iraq. For the rest of his life, he
will not be able to eat, dress himself, bathe or go to the toilet without
the aid of someone else, provided, of course, that he lives through this.
Imagine someone doing this to your son."
I flipped to another picture of his
daughter, aged 6-"I saw a picture of a girl this age, in Palestine. She
had been shot in the face as she played in the schoolyard. She, and
several others, including a man who had been killed trying to shield them,
had been killed by a group of Israeli soldiers who were firing into a
crowd of school children as target practice. Imagine someone shooting
your daughter in the face with a high-powered rifle, just for target
practice, taking pride in his accuracy, as he and his fellow soldiers
trade high-five’s in the air for each bull's-eye.
My hand moved over to his other son,
aged two- "Yesterday I saw a Palestinian man, holding the tiny body of his
2 year old son, who had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. The
little boy had a blood soaked bandage around the top of his head, and
although his eyes were open, he was dead. An Israeli soldier had shot the
two year old in the head with his American made M-16 machine gun, given to
him free of charge, paid for by the US taxpayers. Head shots are a popular
thing among the Israeli soldiers. Imagine holding the body of your 2 year
old son, whose life had just been robbed from him, whose love had just
been robbed from you. In this case, the Israelis were throwing these
people out of their homes that were to be bulldozed in order to build new
ones for Israeli citizens. I guess these people were not as "cooperative"
as the Israelis would have liked them to be."
There was one more picture, that of his
entire family. I related to him an incident I had read about the night
before, where a group of Israeli soldiers defecated and urinated into the
water system of an apartment complex in the Occupied Territories,
infecting an entire family with typhus. This wasn’t a new thing. The
Israelis had been contaminating the wells and water systems of the Arab
peoples since 1948, the year that Israel declared her "independence."
He was a sensitive man who loved his
family, and in that instant he understood, albeit in a minuscule way, how
it must feel as a parent to have to bury a murdered child, pick up the
pieces that remained of a child, or visit a child in the hospital,
whose face had just been burned or ripped off, or whose arms or legs had
been blown to bits by bombs. Imagining as a parent, trying to keep a child
from sinking into despair in having just been crippled for life with
assurances, "It’s okay honey, everything will be alright. Daddy is here
and I will take care of you," all the while holding back the tears and the
rage that surge through the soul.
I could have gone on with instance
after instance of what goes on there and has for the last 50 years, but I
knew I had made my point.
His eyes slowly left the pictures of
his children, and after meeting my eyes, I asked him, from one parent to
another, "Do you remember the birthdays of all your kids? Do you read to
your kids at night? When your kid falls down and scrapes his knee, do you
console him and help him get patched up? So do they. Why would these
people, all at once, for no understandable reason, decide to abandon their
peaceful, happy lives, just to begin a war against us for no reason? They
love their children too, just like we do. If someone had done the things I
just described to one of yours, what would you do?"
Looking for an answer to one remaining
question that lingered in his mind he asked me "What about Islam? Is this
a religion thing, another Crusade?" "No," I responded, "there hasn’t been
a war between Islam and the West for over 300 years. They’d like to get
along with the West, and were it not for the fact that we have been
murdering their women and children for the last 50 years, we probably
would get along pretty well."
And with a slight nod of his head, as
he returned to stocking the shelves with bottles of Extra Virgin Olive
Oil, I knew he understood a little better. He was just one man, a man with
a wife and children, just like those men thousands of miles away, who to
the rest of America are not considered anything more than blood thirsty
savages, sub-humans, untermenschen, an image that has been cleverly
crafted by a media and government sympathetic to the Zionist dream.
I paid for my bur’ghul wheat, went
home, and ate the most wonderful and undeserved meal with my tiny kingdom
that I have eaten in a while.
Mark Glenn is an American and former high school teacher turned writer / commentator. He contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN).
