Often, people of other races will pick-up the same characteristics we think of when we think of occupation. The engineer, the athlete, the lawyer, they all have stereotypes in our mind and since I know no race looks all alike, then I know that people look different. My friend from baghdad wants to be a dentist and he looks like a dentist. But, he doesn't look like the "typical" iraqi. In fact, I remember on many occasions, racist bigots would imply that he was mexican and that they didn't have trabaja for him. I wish he would have said something about what he thinks the average american person looks like. He said that he has spent eight (?) years surrounded by americans and so he couldn't answer. Even then, I would still like to know, because it would have given me more insight into how people think of us either from Iraq media or personal experience.
Instead, it made me realize what he must think of college students and young people in America. We don't all think that they are all terrorists, we don't believe that the war was right and we don't all think that oil wasn't the reason for war. But I'm sure media over there is just as bad. A common idea is that thousands of Jewish people didn't show up to work on 2001, in order to avoid the attacks in new york and washington. The way I see it is that that information would be going around the "foxnews" of Iraq. That formed with the internet and that info will remain as long as some americans believe Obama wasn't born in Hawaii. So what Basum did by answering that "We're not all terrorists," only makes me doubt that the information being fed over in Iraq is as bad or worse as the info we receive here every day. To go back to Basum's appearance, he didn't surprise me at all.
Was I surprised by any of Basum's responses or his appearance? No. I've met plenty of middle easterns and many of them didn't look like a muslim caricature. And his responses were definitely what I expected. What interested me was not what he said but how he phrased things. For the most part it reinforces my perseption that the country he is from is very similar to ours. That like us, they have issues with media and extremists disrupting rational communication. If anything it sounded like Basum had it worse than we did, or at least he didn't address things that would imply that their media has a little variety like ours. Not all of us watch Foxnews. When he said, "we're not all terrorists," it had almost no impact on my opinion of iraqi's.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict rages on a common defense of each side is that the land belongs to only one side. This is a very complicated conflict, but we can see how the conflict is not just our own and how complicated these things can get. When we look at the Native American groups we don't see a violent resistance, but a passive defeated culture. How can we accept that? As the greatest power in the world, and supposedly the "land of the free," a culture should never be treated like the Native Americans are. We need to celebrate their culture and bring the actual lives of these people away from the caricature of their lives and to real lives. Lives that the country can see and bring to our level and love like the country we are meant to be. What are my thoughts on everything we saw and heard? That we are a country that is supposed to be united and is instead just a pompous country held up by the indecencies it imposes on others.
We can argue over what guilt really is or the Webster's definition, but guilt to me is the feeling that someone gets deep in their stomach when they see something terrible and when that person knows that their life is monumentally better than someone elses. I call it guilt, and guilt makes me feel empathetic and cry for change. To the young lady who said she knew her ancestors weren't responsible, she is correct, but we live in a country where the only way to above other people in society is to be resting on their shoulders. Somehow down the line, they are being exploited. Also, why can't we ask for forgiveness and treat them how we would want to be treated? In present day, the US is and will remain as a country of immigrants. But, can't we acknowledge the land we are on?
What are my thoughts on everything we saw and heard in the lecture about Native Americans? Honestly, leaving the lecture hall, I felt guilty. We had discussed the concept of guilt in our discussion group (report to the redundancy department of redundancy) and before I thought it silly to hold guilt. We aren't directly responsible for what our ancestors did, right? I remember a Jewish girl in our group said that she didn't feel responsible and she felt offended by the class blaming it on her. This is all true, in my life I haven't forced a Native American out of their home and taken it as my own. It's also true what the young lady said too. My ethnicity is probably more responsible than hers. But, after our class I realized that I did feel something, even if my ancestors did the harm or not, there is a problem with how our country has treated a culture and it doesn't sit right with me.
I hope that students really tried to do what Sam said and "be" Muslim. I hope that people put away their overzealous internalized voices and tried as hard as they could to be the enemy. I beg for people to really grasp the pain that can be done by either side, both Muslim and Christian, which can confuse and mislead us to act inhuman.
When he said this it made me sick to my stomach and frozen because I was confronting what the media had told me was my enemy and he was in the skin of my friend. So I've come to contact with this issue and I've heard his story, so personally I think some of his other lectures, ones that the topic I wasn't familiar with, were better. But I do completely agree with Sam, not because it was the best lecture from my stand point but that it was the most important one and a topic that so many people can be completely turned around from. I know when Rafi, a friend from Baghdad, first put me in his shoes; my life that I had constructed from years of pressure was obliterated.
When he said this it made me sick to my stomach and frozen because I was confronting what the media had told me was my enemy and he was in the skin of my friend. So I've come to contact with this issue and I've heard his story, so personally I think some of his other lectures, ones that the topic I wasn't familiar with, were better. But I do completely agree with Sam, not because it was the best lecture from my stand point but that it was the most important one and a topic that so many people can be completely turned around from. I know when Rafi, a friend from Baghdad, first put me in his shoes; my life that I had constructed from years of pressure was obliterated. I hope that students really tried to do what Sam said and "be" Muslim. I hope that people put away their overzealous internalized voices and tried as hard as they could to be the enemy. I beg for people to really grasp the pain that can be done by either side, both Muslim and Christian, which can confuse and mislead us to act inhuman.
He might have also said this because of the topic of the lecture. The topic had a lot to do with our place in Iraq and I think that it is very important that we understand this lecture because it is such an important image of ourselves as a part of this country. The world looks on us in different ways and a lot of people see us as Christian invaders. This affects our lives even when we don't see it. Personally, I've thought of this a lot already and as I mentioned in my discussion group, I've come full-face to the other side of this conflict. When my roommate over the summer said with a sparkle in his eye, "the second day was when we really fought back, when we saw a chance of winning. We weren't taking prisoners; we were slitting throats on the streets."
![[Avatar]](/images/avatar26.png){kind=avatar}
Contraption