Searching for ‘My America’

An Iraqi Muses the
Post 9-11 World

by Raed Jarrar

Iraqi author Raed Jarrar.

I was sitting with my grandfather in Baghdad, watching television, when the second airplane hit the World Trade Center in 2001. Both of us were totally shocked because until that moment we thought the first plane crash was an accident; we quickly realized it was not.

A year-and-a-half later I woke up at four in the morning while sirens in Baghdad announced the beginning of the U.S. invasion. My two brothers, my parents and I gathered to have breakfast and watched on our small kitchen TV as President Bush declared war.

Less than three weeks later, I remember fleeing our house with the rest of my family while U.S. jet fighters bombed our neighborhood, a day before the big battle for the Baghdad airport. We ran while ambulances transported scores of Iraqi civilians killed and injured in the bombing.

Four years after the September 11 attacks, I entered the U.S. as a new immigrant, an immigrant who had lost his home and country because of war.

Many people back in Iraq were not sure I was making the right decision by moving to the U.S. “They don’t like us there,” I was told. But based on my political and cultural beliefs, I insisted that the U.S. was not the enemy. U.S. foreign policy may be an enemy, but the U.S. seemed a good, immigrant-friendly choice for me.

“I will find my America,” I told my friends, the place where new immigrants have their rights protected by the Constitution; the place where working for a new foreign policy will make the entire world a better place.

When I was stopped by four officers this month in JFK airport and asked to change my t-shirt because it had some Arabic script on it, “not in my America” was the first thing that popped into my head. Not In My America.

I know the games of oppression played by authoritarian regimes. I spent all my life living in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, so I know what a dictatorship looks like.

I was told by one of the airport security officers, “Wearing a t-shirt with Arabic letters and coming to an airport is like visiting a bank with a t-shirt that reads, ‘I am a robber.’”

Was I shocked because of this treatment? Yes, but not because it happened to me. I am used to such things happening to me. I was shocked because this happened to me in New York. I was intimidated and threatened at JFK because I am an Arab.

One week before this incident, I was shouted at in Syria and Jordan for being a “U.S. taxpayer who supports sending bombs to Israel.” I was kicked out of one of the Lebanese refugee camps in Syria when people found out I live in the U.S., because they said I paid for the bombs that destroyed their homes and killed their loved ones.

Welcome to the post 9-11 world: the world of fundamentalists. The world where people like me, who are supposed to be bridges connecting different cultures, get attacked by everyone.

An African proverb says: “When elephants fight, grass gets trampled.”

Raed Jarrar is the Iraq Program Director at Global Exchange, www.globalexchange.org.

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