When we were mere teenagers, my sister Joyce and I were sitting in a theater watching a war movie. Several soldiers moved forward into a battle, while others stayed behind in a trench, listening and watching. There was an explosion, a lot of smoke. One of those in the trench observed sadly, “Somebody got it,” and the other said, “I hope it’s nobody I like.” I still remember Joyce’s gasp.
What brought this to mind after so many years was my effort to understand the obvious difference between the western world’s reaction to a terrorist attack by ISIS in Paris and the near non-reaction to a terrorist attack, from the same source, in Beirut. I keep wanting to explain it to myself and to help my Middle Eastern friends understand how much Americans identify with Europeans and why. Then I want to change my stance to represent the Middle Eastern view and say something to Americans to make them acknowledge our prejudices and misunderstandings. The latter was the hardest, I thought, because most people are slow to admit that some lives do matter more to them than others.
See, I thought today, even when there is no one involved but our own kind, if somebody is going to die, we have preferences. We would like it to be someone else, not the girlfriend we call when we want to share a juicy story, not the faithful church member who opens the doors and turns on the heat before the rest of us come. Even when it is only strangers, there are people who look like us, think like us, act like us. It is so easy to believe they dream and laugh and hurt the same way we do. And when some of them die, we identify, not with the dead, but with those left behind. We understand the anguish of parents who waved goodbye to kids going off to a concert and never would see them again. We see pictures of a beautiful young Parisian staring with tears in her eyes at the spot where her best friend died, and we want to cry with her.
It is harder for the average person in small town America or the suburbs of Atlanta to imagine the screaming horror of these people’s counterparts—the parents, the friends, the fatherless children, in a Muslim community in Beirut. Too few have been there. They never sat with a group of Muslim women refugees and heard their stories. They don’t know the taste of their food or what makes them laugh or how much the children who hover at their knees love to go to school. The Americans know a few things, of course: those people’s language looks like chicken scratches and it reads “backwards;” they always have war so they must be used to it.
In my own small church here in California a lovely couple read my book and afterwards the man told me, “You changed our whole view of the world.” Because I was so obviously surprised, he tried to explain and said, finally, “We just had not ever thought of the Arabs as real people.” An astounding statement. As honest as, “I hope it’s nobody I like.”
That’s the moment in which it became very clear to me what I can do for the Middle East.
Years ago, during the civil war in Lebanon I went to Egypt and participated as a student in a two-week course in writing for children. The course was sponsored by Dar al-Thaqafa, a publishing house owned by Egyptian Presbyterians (the Coptic Evangelicals), and the teacher was an American woman from New York. The other students were Egyptian, an assortment of literature teachers, ambitious young people and the pastor of a prominent Egyptian church, a wonderful, enthusiastic group of people. The plan was for each student to write a story for children during the course, and Dar al-Thaqafa would publish the ones they found usable.
I didn’t go there because I aspired to write for children. I went probably because I considered it very difficult and wanted to learn something I could use in our publishing house. Just today, for the first time in maybe 30 years, I remembered the story I wrote.
The setting was Beirut. There was a little boy; I think I named him Sami. Sami had an older brother who was in a militia group. There was a long battle. The soldier brother took his gun and went away, and Sami knew his parents were worried. The fighting lasted for days, and the family was running out of food. The father said they didn’t dare go out of the house, but during a lull in the fighting Sami decided that he could do it. He found a little money, sneaked out of the house, walked farther and farther until he actually found a vendor with a cart of oranges. Getting home with the oranges turned out to be a hair-raising adventure. I have forgotten the details, just know now that there were twists and turns in the plot. Sami saw troubling things, the scariest a body on the sidewalk, the body of a young man in blue jeans. It looked to Sami like his brother. He panicked and ran then, spilling oranges as he went. Back home with his relieved but very angry parents, Sami learned that his brother was actually alive and well. Still, for the rest of the day he was haunted by the memory of the dead youth on the sidewalk, something about him so familiar. Sami decided finally that it had to be somebody’s brother.
Dar al-Thaqafa hired an artist to illustrate my story and published it in Arabic. I wonder if I have a copy somewhere, not that I would care to read it to any American children. The sad thing is that when I wrote it, Lebanese children were living through gunfire and were learning from their elders to be afraid, Christians of Muslims, Muslims of Christians.
I guess I was thinking when I wrote it, that all a little boy like Sami could understand would be a relationship. He had a brother. Nobody wanted to lose his brother.
And I realize now that the story expresses my attitude when reading news about tragic events or looking at pictures of people who are very different from me. I tend to think, “Somebody loves him.” That’s what makes anybody valuable. He has friends who care. He has a father who wanted him to be an engineer. She has a best friend. Her fiancée is devastated. The dead man on the sidewalk has a brother who will miss him forever.
All of this pondering has brought me to some conclusions, some requests.
I am asking my Lebanese friends to give those prejudiced Americans a little slack. Most of them are not really bad people and don’t intend to hurt anybody, but they are so busy, and facebook made it fast and easy to color their faces with the French flag. America is very big, and that tends to make people provincial. (Notice that they didn’t spend any effort sympathizing with the Russians either, who lost more people on that plane than the French lost in Paris.) Also, try to understand that a lot of Americans are just scared. Provincial people scare easily; they are afraid of what they don’t know.
And I am asking my American friends to admit the ways you are ignorant and how you follow trends instead of stopping to think. Then you can acknowledge what you actually do know at some level: everyone who died was loved; everyone who is left is devastated. The Muslims in Bourj Barajneh are real people, as real as the French, as real as Californians and Texans, as good and as bad as all of us, as trapped as all of us in a culture of violence.
And then I am asking my Lebanese-American friends and readers, you with one foot on each side of the Mediterranean, to do what Lebanon herself does between East and West. Be a bridge. Speak to Lebanese out of the American part of your brain. Explain our shortcomings to those we have offended. And speak to Americans out of your Lebanese heart. Don’t let them get away with their narrow-minded prejudices. Tell them what they don’t know. Give the Middle East a human face. Be peacemakers.
Finally I am reminding all of us who are Christians of the admonition of our scripture to “weep with those who weep.” There is no room for discrimination in those words.