Iraq | Cultural Glimpse

April 20, 2013

9/11 Recurs Every 3 1/2 Months

Early Thursday morning, April 11, gun violence survivors and families of victims finished reading the names of all the people who have been killed by guns since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting less than four months prior. The list of over 3300 people took 12 hours to read.

The total number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks was 2977. With the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government responded within a blink of an eye. They made plans for the War on Terrorism, thus began the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Many lives were lost and destroyed. However, if you were to ask any government official who gave their consent to the wars, they’d likely say, “We think the price was worth it” – the exact answer that their colleague Madeline Albright had given decades ago when she was asked if the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the UN imposed sanctions on Iraq was worth it.

Over 1,057,000 have been killed in the United States by gun violence since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980. That’s 1,054,000 more people than those who died in 9/11, and that’s only counting the last 22 years. Yet a few days ago, something as simple as President Obama’s background check reform plan failed to win enough votes by the senate.

My question is this: are not your average everyday victims of gun violence, who outnumber the victims of 9/11 by more than a million, worthy of consideration when making the slightest changes regarding the very thing that took their lives? And, why is it always so much easier to pass laws that destroy people (war) rather than laws that help save people (health and gun reform)?

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April 13, 2013

Meeting Little Sarah in Germany

http://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=647860281896641
Video of my cousin Ayad with his daughter Sarah and his niece – talking in Aramaic, he shows them a church in Germany

The Frankfurt Book Fair held in Frankfurt, Germany in 2004 welcomed the Arab League as Guest of Honor. I attended the book fair, which was an interesting ten day experience. But what I remember most about Germany is my cousin Ayad, his wife Furrat, and their little daughter Sarah, who at that time was about a year old.

I stayed at my cousin’s home, and I’ll never forget what great hosts Ayad and his wife were. I’ll also never forget how much my cousin loved his daughter. I was engaged at the time and when I returned to the United States, I kept in contact with him and his family. I ended up getting married shortly afterwards and having my first child and he had a son and then another daughter. Then suddenly, one day I heard he was diagnosed with cancer. He died within weeks. I couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. His last request was that she be well taken care of, given how much she was accustomed to him pampering her. In the above link to the video, her cousin calls her “Sarah, the pampered one.”

Well, I know that his little family had one hell of a time after he passed away. But today I got news that Sarah, who has since moved with her mother and siblings to the United States, woke up this morning unable to see. She was taken to the hospital, and they discovered she has brain cancer. She is now in critical condition and doctors are not sure if she will make it.

Her aunts, uncles and cousins have posted pictures of her, praying for God to save her. It has been nearly nine years since I saw Sarah, but I remember her enough for my heart to go out to her and her family and to pray for her well being.

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January 20, 2013

Saddam

I was watching an Iraqi documentary screened at a local restaurant when I received a call from a friend. I had to take the call. I walked out of the restaurant and stood outside in the cold. My friend, who had suddenly become very ill last fall and has been in and out of the hospital on a regular basis, shared some good news. She’s been feeling great lately, despite having gotten off of her pain medications. A lot of her healing was due to holistic therapy and maybe a little bit, or actually a lot of, love.

I was glad to have been briefly pulled away from the documentary, which was about the suffering of the Kurdish people in Iraq during the Baath regime – the stuff Iraq is made of. I found a couple of things interesting in this documentary. One, the Al Anfal campaign which Saddam was accused of. Al Anfal was a military operation allegedly launched by the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war. Yet although in December 2006 Saddam was put on trial for the genocide during Operation Anfal, he was quickly executed for his role in the unrelated Dujail massacre, which killed 143 men. The Anfal trial, which supposedly killed thousands, recessed on December 21, 2006 and when it resumed on January 8, 2007, the remaining charges against Saddam were dropped.

During Tareq Aziz’s trial, the Iraqi Foreign Minister said that the U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the Anfal and Halabcha incidents, took the official position based on examination of available evidence that Iran was partly to blame. A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time reported that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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January 16, 2013

The Forbidden Yoga

Yoga at Manresa Jesuit Retreat Center

Last year, I asked my editor if I can write an article about a Chaldean American yoga instructor that held classes at my gym. She said okay, except she wanted it to address the belief that yoga is against our Catholic faith. I thought, oh my God, I may have been committing sin for over twelve years!

I interviewed several people: the yoga instructor at my gym; the yoga instructor at Manresa Jesuit Retreat Center; and a Jesuit priest. All talked about the positive health factors associated with yoga. I tried to get a quote from one of the half dozen Chaldean Catholic priests but they didn’t have an opinion on this matter, given it was a foreign subject for them. No wonder I never saw a Chaldean person in a yoga class.

After the article was published, a local non-Chaldean priest sent a letter to the editor stating that there are significant concerns about yoga’s compatibility with the Christianity/Catholic faith. The biggest problem with yoga, he wrote, is that one is going to a source other than Jesus for inner peace. There is no peace apart from Him “who is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). He also called its origin occult. This was all new information to me, especially since many of the postures we performed in yoga classes were common exercises we did in Iraq.

Well, sin or not, I ended up in a yoga class last night, and thank God for that. I have not been able to go for a while because lately the gym’s daycare is not my son’s most favorite place. My husband, seeing my frustrations, said he’d watch the kids and encouraged me to go out there and commit this “sin” – though he did not know that’s what it was. We’ll just keep that a little secret.

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January 9, 2013

Gone With the Wind

While cleaning the house and folding the laundry, I first watched a movie, The Words, and then a documentary about Margaret Mitchell who wrote my favorite book.

The first non textbook I ever read was Gone with the Wind, in Arabic. I was nine years old, had recently left my birth country of Iraq and was living in Amman, Jordan with my family. We were awaiting a Visa to enter the United States. I loved Gone with the Wind because despite my young age and eastern cultural background, I connected and fell in love with Scarlett O’Hara and the other characters which resembled my tribe. Seeing my attachment to this story, my siblings took me to the movie theater for the first time in my life where I watched a black and white version of Gone with the Wind, subtitled in Arabic. The book and film was my first impression of America. I thought I would come here and see “the South” as it was described by Margaret Mitchell. Well, I was in for a big surprise. Michigan in 1981 was not Georgia in the 1800’s. Still, this became the pattern in my life – being inspired by western storytellers while writing about the land, culture and descendants of Iraq.

Earlier this year, I read Gone with the Wind for the third time. I saw it with completely different eyes. This time around, I saw the politics of war that I’d missed as a child. Some of the most memorable quotes were:

Ashley Wilkes: “Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over no one ever knew what they were about.”

Rhett Butler: “All wars are fought for money. All other reasons men go to war are just false reasons, pretexts and empty words fed to them by stay at home orators.”

I guess we either do not want to learn our lesson, are too lazy to find other solutions, or war is just too good a thing to pass up.

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January 8, 2013

Food, Prayer, Marriage

Ever since snow arrived, my children wanted to build a snowman. So Sunday we gave them a substitute snow activity – sledding. Needless to say they had a great time. Myself, who as a young girl rode roller coasters at Cedar Point, simply videotaped their adventure. Yes, I was too scared to slide down the hill that my three-year-old and six-year-old thought nothing of.

Yesterday was so packed with activities there was no way I could write a new post at night. We bought the children snow gear, took them sledding with their cousins, I discovered black tomatoes at the produce market and we attended a small 500 guest Chaldean American wedding (usually they’re 700 plus). And most importantly, church!

“The Life of Abraham” lecture series started at Freedom Christian. As the pastor spoke of Prophet Abraham, I thought of my ancestors’ land, Ur of the Chaldees in Iraq, where Abraham originated. This city, which is mentioned several times in the Bible was one of the great urban centers of the Sumerian civilization of southern Iraq and remained an important city until its conquest by Alexander the Great a few centuries before Christ. Ur was eventually incorporated into Babylonia. The Ziggurat of Ur, believed to be 4,000 years old and originally a temple to the moon god, has become a symbol of honor for Iraqi ingenuity and culture, as well as being the birth place of the prophet Abraham.

During the lecture, the pastor said something very important about marriage.

“Your marriage is not your true identity. It is not the job or your wife or your husband to make you happy, not that they should attempt to do otherwise. Your hope of who you are should be based on your relationship with God.”

I agree. Many marriages fail today because a lot of pressure is placed on what spouses should do and not do for each other. In the movie Eat, Pray, Love, Julia Roberts plays a married woman who is not happy in her marriage. She wants a divorce to go out and find herself but her husband desperately does not want the divorce. He asks her, “Why can’t you find yourself inside our marriage?”

She could have.

“Enjoy your vacations,” said the pastor. “Enjoy your relationships, enjoy your work, but don’t make them the source of our joy or your status. God is the source.”

Tag: Iraq