By (This article will be published in the December issue of Living Well magazine in Jordan)
I’m going to be very frank. Self-delusion and fear of the truth had eventually cost us too many beautiful lives on that grim Wednesday night. But unless we face the distressing facts, we should expect more terrible surprises. My patient editor always advises me that readers of Living Well magazine generally don’t expect to read about religion or politics – and to her dismay, I have since found it almost impossible to write anything not related to either facets of our lives. I think this escapist Jordanian phenomenon is symptomatic of our dangerous head-in-the-sand attitude. Very few people are actually willing to acknowledge that religion and politics are, whether we like it or not, deeply intermingled in dominating every single breath we take in every second of our existence in this plagued part of the world. Even fewer are those ready to confront the lethal outcome of mixing the two by illiterate dropouts who believe they hold, and can bestow upon others, the keys to paradise. Until our 11/9, that is.
The sleeping tragedy had been ticking all along like a time-bomb. For too long we have tolerated elements in our society whose poisonous ideology had been tirelessly feeding a destructive culture of hate and death to schoolchildren and adults alike. For too long we have refused to admit that the seeds of hatred have been sewn in the classrooms and in the mosques by disturbed clergymen who have been let loose on our society to drown it in oceans of twisted interpretations of an otherwise great, compassionate religion. This is why the chickens have come home to roost. For more than two years the Iraqi people have been subjected to a daily routine of arbitrary murder with their morning coffee in a continuous horror story that has no parallel in human history (the closest precedent I can recall in terms of the absolute randomness of civilians massacred by members of their own people masquerading as friends of God is the campaign of slaughter by the Algerian Islamists in the 1990’s). Meanwhile, here in Jordan, very loud voices applauded these crimes as some perverted form of resistance irritating the American occupation by severely punishing any kind of unavoidable co-existence with it by the destitute, war-ridden Iraqi people. One writer sitting comfortably in peaceful Amman went as far as openly glorifying the frequency of the suicide operations in Iraq which he said would deter the would-be Iraqi collaborators and “draw in blood clear red lines to prevent political softness”. Tucked safely away from the bloodshed, he eagerly compared the regularity of these suicide attacks to the number of daily prayers, calling for the “heat of Iraq” to catch fire elsewhere – completely ignoring the fact that almost all the victims of these attacks have been non-combatant Iraqi civilians going about their insufferable daily lives in search of bread to put on their tables (the same writer even titled one of his obscene articles commenting on the London bombings and the execution of the Egyptian ambassador to Baghdad with the offensive headline: “Let them go to Hell!”). Numerous other Islamist and secular figures continued their brazen endorsement of the indiscriminate carnage of Zarqawi’s Al-Qaida in Iraq and elsewhere until, of course, it spilled over to our dear capital city.
What do they have to say right now? Well, their tactical lip-service condemnation should not fool any of us. The leopards have not shed their skins so easily. They are simply too embarrassed to peek their heads out of their holes. But rest assured that they still incubate the same vicious beliefs that molded the likes of Zarqawi and graduated his army of suicidal maniacs (thank you, by the way, George and Tony, for removing the sewage lid and unleashing on our region the most uncontrollable vermin known to mankind). These usual champions of terror in Jordan were just too disappointed that no Israeli or American targets could be identified so they can brush aside the collateral damage to Jordanians and start to rationalize the attacks by explaining their patriotic causes and by placing in a political context what can only be discussed in the realm of insanity. But they were not given such a chance – although some Arab stations shamefully reported that the hotels attacked were frequented by Israelis, a sinister linkage more disgraceful than the attacks themselves. Now listen to what these otherwise Al-Qaida sympathizers are saying today. The concentration in their discourse is on the fact that almost all those who were wiped out in the attacks were Muslims. Somehow for them, this is the element that makes these acts so repugnant. If the wedding that was literally crashed happened to be a Christian wedding attended by a few infidel westerners, I dare to guess, then the moral outrage would have been much milder, would it not? Do you see with me that the problem is still here with us? There are simply no clear moral lines that are strictly drawn against the taking of the innocent human life. It all depends on whose God the victims worshipped. This is the root of the disguised sickness secretly slipping through our back door and engulfing us these days.
To truly uproot these murderers and shut down the arenas of their indirect collaborators, we have to uproot their uncompromising dogma and hold accountable their spokespeople who are roaming freely in our midst, openly preaching hatred and death. It is not enough to say that the real Islam is innocent of their alien creed. We need to begin ourselves an enormous undertaking to re-interpret Islam and purify it from the tons of literature that cannot be reconciled with our tired cliché that it is in fact a religion of peace. This will not be an easy task against the crushing weight of the mountains of ignorance that has enveloped the minds of Muslims over the centuries. But it is a war that needs to be fought or we will all pay a dear price. So let the first battlegrounds be the blood-stained rubble of the Hyatt, the Radisson and the Days Inn, and let us not relent in this sacred fight. We owe it in loving memory to all those who were abruptly taken away from us on that day by the disciples of the devil. Indeed, let us recall their names and their smiles at every occasion. Let us build a monument to imprint their faces in our collective memory. Let them stare us in the face at every street and ever corner. For it is only us who can make their lives so invaluable and their loss so immeasurable. Our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our husbands and wives were violated by cowards who put no value on human life and whose mentors are still bombarding us with their evil sect of death. Our counter onslaught should be no less vocal and our tools no less sophisticated. We should never forgive and we should never forget.
The great writer, the late Arthur Koestler – to whose work I have been belatedly but gratefully introduced – once wrote that “[t]he continuous disasters in man’s history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation. We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion”.
Indeed, such purposeless devotion reached new levels of cruelty and pointlessness when it was channeled to senselessly wipe out as many lives as possible in the heart of Amman. Everyone will remember where they were the moment they heard of the attacks. I happened to be driving in Amman when I got a phone call from my mother asking me to stay away from the Radisson because a bomb seems to have gone off there moments ago. It was as if I heard the advice the other way round. A few seconds later I found myself parked between the Radisson and the Hyatt, watching the tragedy unfold before my eyes. Amman felt so foreign to me that night. What we saw on TV in Iraq, Palestine and other unfortunate but seemingly remote locations, came home. The chilling brutality of death paid us a painful visit that evening and left a bitter aftertaste. Later on that night, destiny led me to be present with friends in one of the hospitals to assist the husband of Reema Akkad who had just arrived in Amman from Lebanon only to head straight to the hospital to search for his wife. The period of time between frantically checking the names of patients who survived and finally visiting the morgue on the fourth floor to realize that his two kids will never see their mother again were the longest and most heartbreaking in anyone’s life. Witnessing the apocalyptic situation outside the operation rooms, the multitude of similar moments of reckoning for my fellow Jordanians was overwhelming. I wished that every cold-hearted sympathizer with these murderers could be dragged to all the hospitals to look in the faces of those who lost loved ones. Standing speechless in the middle of that disturbing, turbulent sea of emotions, I realized that each single murdered soul is an unspeakable calamity in itself. It dawned on me that whether it is in Amman, Baghdad, Jenin, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Gaza, Sharm El Sheikh, London, Casablanca, Madrid, Bali, Istanbul, New York or anywhere else, for every human casualty there is always an inconsolable family who is as human as all of us and whose lives will never be the same again because some demented individual thought that his God is better than theirs.
In the aftermath discussions that gripped a somber Amman, I heard people talking about how the blessed survivors who closely got away were meant to live. I would respectfully add that all the victims were also meant to live. Mus’ab Khorma was meant to live. Mustapha Akkad was meant to live. His daughter too was meant to live. For Almighty God’s sake, we are all meant to live. The only ones who are not meant to breathe our same air are those who take pleasure in these atrocities, justify them, explain them and bring them to our streets and hotels. Indeed, we shall never forgive and we shall never forget.
