All photos taken by Nadia Afredi.

10th Anniversary of 9/11 Series: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV |

XVI | XVII | XVIII

I sat in the hard cushions of the school bus trying to keep awake as our bus drove to school. “Quiet down…there’s been attack!” exclaimed the bus driver as she turned up the volume on the radio.  At nine years old, I didn’t think too much of it at that moment – what were the twin towers anyway?

Prior to 9/11, my family lived a pretty non-political life. My parents were Reagan-lovers in a fitting environment: perhaps all of the 600 homes in our equestrian-styled community were staunch supporters of the establishment, self-proclaimed flag-waving patriots.

Before I got onto the bus, labels such as “Afghan” or even “Muslim” did not prompt many responses except for confused faces or fake gestures from people who pretended they knew what “Afghan” meant. When my sister was a young girl, she was playing outside when suddenly one of neighbors ran up to her and asked “IS THIS YOU?!” pointing to the recently-published National Geographic which featured the famous portrait of the Afghan girl with piercing eyes. To their credit, my sister does have blue eyes.

To summarize, no one really knew much about Afghans or even Muslims.

But when I got off the bus, I entered a post-9/11 world where the words Muslim and Afghan became labels which prompted curiosity or even fear.  I entered class that day – a substitute.

“There was an attack on our country today. They flew planes into our buildings. We aren’t sure who did it yet.”

“I heard they were Muslims” said one student.

“Do we have any Muslims in the class?” the teacher asked. I raised my hand and was asked to explain my beliefs.

I became a spokesman for 1.4 billion people in my class, in my school. The way I would act, dress, behave all reflected the Muslims.

“Are you Afghanistan?” asked one of my classmates a few days later.

“Your name means terrorist” remarked one girl on the school bus.

The ensuing years didn’t come by easy although I had a few breaks here and there. One of my 5^th grade teachers expressed sympathy when I told her when she asked where my parents were from.

“They’re from Kandahar in Afghanistan”

“I’m so sorry, yesterday on the news I heard they started bombing Kandahar. It must be very hard.”

In sixth grade, I moved to a new school where the racist comments came regularly.

The most challenging experience was having to listen to all of the fear-mongering rhetoric from the media that permeated the education system. I felt that it was my responsibility to counter these claims. When I was 11, I argued with my class (including my teacher) that it would be wrong to invade Iraq claiming that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Although obvious today, at the time this was tantamount to arguing that the world was flat. “Even if Saddam does have weapons of mass destruction, it’s only because we sold it to him” I remember citing the unfortunate historical fact that the U.S. sold chemical weapons to Saddam which would later be used to gas the Kurds and Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War.

“Where is the proof that we sold to him the WMDs?” asked the teacher

“The proof is that we have the receipts!”

My 8^th grade history teacher became my next opponent. I kept my copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me on my desk for easy reference.

After her, followed my 9^th grade biology teacher. After him, followed my 10^th grade history teacher who had great sympathy for Afghans, even making The Kite Runner a required reading in her class. But even she promoted fear-mongering and propaganda to which I frequently objected to in class.

Then came my first class as an official college student in which a student claimed in my women’s study class that the reason why there are few female CEOs in the U.S. is because “corporations have to deal with Muslim countries and Muslims don’t do business with women and do not respect them.”

By the time I transferred to UCLA, I had enough experience to retort confidently to the never ending stream of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic rhetoric which was often used to justify an egregious foreign policy.

Many great Muslim figures were mocked, belittled, and trivialized. Do we not find time and time again in the Qur’an that many Prophets were ridiculed and ostracized? They were accused of being under the influence of magic or simply crazy. Despite this, the Prophets when responding to these people were calm, rational, and patient.

It would be arrogant to claim that I experienced even half of such great figures. But there is something unique about undergoing a small taste of the tests that were given to some of our greatest role models.

Despite these difficult 10 years, I will not let this Islamophobia define the legacy of the tragedy of 9/11. I will wear black on this day and will remember the brave men and women who heroically sacrificed their lives to rescue their fellow Americans regardless of their backgrounds.

The fact is, however, that America is still occupying Iraq. Americans were forced to confront the reality of brutal nature of this occupation once again when a U.S. military video depicting the slaughter of two Reuters employees and ten civilians in Baghdad was released on the internet by the non-profit news organization, WikiLeaks, last week.

The video was shot from an Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007. Reuters has since been agitating for the release of the video, which “consists of 38 minutes of black-and-white aerial video and conversations between pilots in two Apache helicopters as they open fire on civilians on a street in Baghdad.” Reuters employees themselves had been allowed an off-the-record viewing two weeks after the killings, but they were barred from acquiring a copy of it and their Freedom of Information Act requests were not approved.

WikiLeaks obtained a copy of the video through whistle-blowers in the military, and was able to view it after breaking the encryption code.

The video begins with the two journalists amongst a group of people milling about on a street in Baghdad. The photographer’s camera is mistaken as a weapon. Thus the crowd itself is misapprehended as an insurgent group, and the pilots open fire. Most of the men are killed almost instantaneously and the pilots then proceed to crow over the killings — “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot remarks.

One of the Reuters employees, however, is seriously wounded and begins to crawl away from the scene. The pilots hope for reasonable justification to resume firing at him again — “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon — if we see a weapon, we’re going to engage!” one pilot says.

A van drives up a while later, and several men who are clearly unarmed, jump out to rescue the fallen. The pilots seek and receive permission to engage — within a few minutes, everyone is apparently dead. U.S. armored vehicles move onto the scene and one of them drives over a corpse, causing one of the observers in the helicopter to chuckle and say, “I think they just drove over a body.”

The situation was not hostile, and “[t]here was no threat warranting a hail of 30 mm [caliber gunfire] from above,” Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. army officer who has watched thousands of aerial footage from Iraq, has said. U.S. military inquiry into the killings, however, has absolved the officers of any criminal acts, even though firing at those rescuing the wounded is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.

This brutal massacre is not an isolated anomaly, Mike Prysner, an Iraq war veteran and co-founder of March Forward!, told me. “You can tell by the way they are talking and communicating with each other that this is just standard procedure — just another day in the field. I’m not surprised that this happened.” The only unique facet of this incident is that it was caught on tape and released to the media. “And it’s not as if they were a bunch of rouges — everything that happened was condoned by higher authority.”

This is what is happening all over Iraq, and this is why so many civilians have died — because this is the way we choose to go about fighting our wars. “This is a colonial occupation,” Prysner said, “which means that the civilians are our enemy.”

http://collateralmurder.com/