And five years later…

September 2006, Al-Qalam

It was a tragic day, five years ago. And it heralded the beginning of a new period in the history of our world. The date I’m referring to, of course, is the 14^th October 2001, when the US attack on Afghanistan began. Five years later, the world’s superpower has managed only to secure the better part of the Afghani capital, Kabul, leaving the rest of the country to the mercies of warlords, tribal leaders and the Taliban – who were supposed to have been crushed within weeks.

Five years later, it is clear that Afghanistan was the beginning of a global war against Muslims and against all those who stand in the way of the expansion of the American empire. Whatever the pretext that was used to justify the war to the world, there was no justification for the bombing of an entire country into the Stone Age, for the murder of civilians that accompanied that bombing and for the illegal detentions and torture that formed part of that war.

But Afghanistan was not the only target of the Washington warlords; it was just the beginning – and the world will never be the same again. Not long after, Iraq was invaded and occupied too – this time on the basis of absolute lies. And most other countries of the world were browbeaten into accepting US president George Bush’s war of terror as their own. Many, like South Africa, enacted odious and draconian legislation in order better to deal with the – in many cases non-existent – ‘terrorist threat’.

The ‘War on Terror’ has now also become a franchise. Whether it is Israel wanting to justify its atrocities against the Palestinians and Lebanese or India wanting to make excuses for its clampdown on Muslim activists, all their domestic agendas can be easily tailored to fit into their explanation of the ‘War on Terror’. This gives them carte blanche to use whatever methods they think might be necessary and it allows them to become a US ally. The war against the Palestinian people very quickly became part of the ‘war on terror’. So did the war on Hizbullah, and the war against the Kashmiri people, and the war against the Chechen people, and the war against the Iranian people, and the war against activist Muslims living in the West…

In Gaza, Israel’s war of terror has reduced large numbers of Palestinians to scrounging in bins for food, to mothers suffering that their breasts are not able to produce milk because of their malnutrition and then having to give their babies formula milk. But, not having money, they mix much less of the formula than is required. The result: a generation of malnourished babies. It is a sobering and disturbing thought in the month of Ramadan!

But Bush and Blair’s military war of terror is just one dimension of the overall strategy. And becoming obsessed with that dimension – as critical as it is – is to forget other more insidious dimensions, something we cannot afford to do. One of those more insidious dimensions is the recent repeated rhetorical attack against ‘Islamic fascists’ or ‘Islamo-fascists’ (both Bush and Blair have used these terms recently) and the attempt to cultivate ‘moderate Muslims’. Sadly, a number of Muslims in the West have fallen into the trap, falling – in the process – over themselves to be seen as the ‘moderate’ Muslim voices.

This is not to deny that there do exist ‘fascists’ within our community (just as there do exist ‘terrorists’ within our community). But we certainly have no need of people of the likes of Bush telling us what Islam is and who is a good or a bad Muslim.

The past five years has guaranteed that we can never go back and undo what has happened. It is also a wake-up call for Muslims, a jolting reminder that we need to take responsibility for our community and the actions of its members, that if we are willing to tolerate unIslamic behaviour from within it, then we will be faced with consequences when others are affected by that behaviour, that if we are willing to simply overlook the actions of those Muslims who want to project Islam as a hate-filled, violent, misogynistic religion, then our passivity in the face of this distortion of Islam will result in our being constantly under attack and under the microscope by those looking for the vaguest excuse to get at Muslims.

As the world becomes an increasingly difficult place within which to be a Muslim, as Muslims languish in Guantanamo Bay and numerous other secret and not-so-secret prisons scattered across the globe, this Ramadan must force us to reach new realisations about who we are and how we are to live in this world. It should force us, too, to make renewed commitments about how we relate with the people we live with – in this country and beyond.

One of those realisations needs to be the understanding that, as we do not live alone, so too can we not fight our battles alone. While many of the governments of the world might be pursuing an imperialist agenda that is drafted in Washington, the peoples of the world do not necessarily accept such agendas. It is these people – Muslim and, especially, non-Muslim – that are our allies. Those Muslims that think that they can (or would like to) continue living in little ethnic cocoons will find – if they haven’t already – that such spaces are more dangerous than being comfort zones. And those that have not yet discovered this truth will one day find out – with a rude shock. And, then, it might just be too late.

It was the oranges

Al-Qalam, September 2006

The old man walked into the Beirut office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), parcel in hand, and asked for Leila Khaled. The PFLP guards refused. It was 1971 and, following her hijackings of two aeroplanes in the past two years, Leila was a prime target for Israeli assassination. The man explained that he had just returned from hajj and an anonymous Iranian man had asked him to deliver the parcel to Leila. After the regulatory bomb check, the suspicious guards opened the parcel to find an Iranian carpet.

Moving between three countries, trying to avoid Israeli attacks, repeatedly becoming a refugee, Leila always ensured that the rug travelled with her – even though she never used it and even though it sometimes meant leaving behind other valuables. Two years ago, during a television interview in Iran, she called for the rug donor to identify himself so she could thank him. Instead, a woman approached her, explaining that she was the man’s daughter. He had died two years previously. On his death bed, he had asked for Leila Khaled’s picture to be placed on his grave. And on his grave stone his family had had the following words inscribed: “He died without meeting Leila Khaled.”

Such was the love of people around the world for this Palestinian revolutionary. She has been eulogised in scores of languages, even referred to as the “female Che Guevara”. Counted among those who admire her are a number of South Africans who, over the past 37 years, have named their daughters “Leila” or, even, Leila Khaled.

But almost four decades after the courageous acts that Leila became famous for, many wonder what had happened to her. Had she mellowed? Did she become a “housewife” and a mother and disappear from public life? Does she have regrets about the hijackings that made her an international celebrity? Is she still an activist?

Leila Khaled’s recent visit to South Africa, as a guest of the Encounters Film Festival, answered many of these questions.

No, she has not mellowed; yes, she remains as revolutionary as she was in 1969; yes, she is a mother and wife but that has not changed her commitment to her homeland and the struggle for its liberation; yes, she remains an activist and a committed member of the PFLP and of its politburo, and a member of the Palestinian National Council – the Palestinian parliament in exile. No, she has no regrets about the hijackings; she patiently explains that at a time when the world had forgotten that there even existed a Palestinian people, some dramatic action was necessary to draw attention to the plight of her people. “And we didn’t kill a single person,” she adds.

Of course, everyone wants to know why she did it; what drove her, a 24- year-old woman, to embark on that daring adventure? What inspired her, as a 15-year-old teenager, to join the Arab Resistance Movement and, later, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine?

It was the oranges.

She cried at a public meeting in Johannesburg a few two weeks ago when the chairperson related how, as a child refugee in Lebanon, Leila was instructed by her mother not to eat the oranges because “our oranges are in Haifa” where Leila was born and from where her family was forced by the Israelis to flee in 1948. Her mother promised that they would one day return to Haifa and eat their oranges.

The yearning to realise that promise is also the reason that, to this day, Leila’s family does not celebrate Eid; they simply observe it as a quiet family affair: she, her husband and her two sons. Because, as Leila’s mother had told her children, a real Eid can only be celebrated “at home”, in Haifa.

And, in conversation with Leila, it is clear that these are the reasons for her tirelessness, her boundless energy, her fiery enthusiasm which easily could be missed because of her soft speech. It is the need to go back home. So there is really nothing extraordinary about this youngest of four children; she is just like any other Palestinian refugee.

Her quiet demeanour and determined efforts took South Africa by storm in the two weeks that she was here. She had numerous speaking engagements, even more media interviews, met with Nelson Mandela, Minister Essop Pahad, Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad, various other politicians, Cosatu president Willie Madisha and other trade unionists, various social movements and faith groups. And her message was the same wherever she went: it is foolish for South Africa to think that it can be a mediator between Palestinians and Israelis; South Africans must side with their historical allies, the Palestinian people; the South African government and civil society must take the lead in imposing sanctions and boycotts on the Israeli state; the South African government should listen to more Palestinian voices than just Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and should grant recognition to the democratic choice of the Palestinian people who elected a Hamas government in recent elections.

Her other message was of hope and love – for South African comrades in the liberation struggle and for allies of the Palestinian people in South Africa. Leila’s commitment to friends is as deep as her commitment to Palestine. That commitment is reflected in the reason she continues to refuse to use the Iranian carpet. She had promised herself that when Palestine is liberated, she would place the carpet in the Mosque of Al-Aqsa and bring her Iranian admirer’s family to Jerusalem to pray on it.