Preaching fundamentalism,breeds a terrorist…often inside us!!

Preaching fundamentalism, breeds a terrorist …often inside us!!!

I still feel at awe in writing about today. Maybe because I said it somehow in Arabic. Maybe more because it is done.

But somehow something is still residing. The lesson to be learnt.

Today, the whole family entered a state of panic as my 13-year-old niece disappeared for a few hours from her home.

The girl, who is a real sweetheart, shy, beautiful, quiet, well mannered, disappeared between going from her parent’s house to her aunt’s house, in the same building. The mother thought she was up studying, when suddenly they realized she wasn’t anywhere between the two apartments.

The whole family entered in a state of panic, roaming around every and any possible and impossible place, calling everyone, looking into every inch of a direction that she might be at.

After a couple of hours, her mother decided to go to the police. We all went into the direction of maybe she was willing to do a suicidal attempt. Her father was looking into even every soldier gathering in the neighborhood asking him or her if they encountered a child walking.

Her Facebook signals were frightening in the last week, writing sad posts about al-Aqsa, expressing helplessness. What makes it more of frightening was my sister’s attitude in the last few years. Her change was not because of the Israeli occupation, but because of the fall of Morsi. She suddenly turned into Brotherhood sympathizer that eventually made her unbearable. I personally blocked her from my Facebook; we came into many live arguments with her. Her compassion towards the injustice that has befallen on the Islamic Brotherhood was too extreme.

We never took it seriously, we made fun of her extremism, and we avoided discussing politics with her. In all levels, it felt stupid.

This whole preaching we were watching on TV for years, she was living inside her house enjoying probably. I am not sure; it was a result of a certain escape for expressing herself within her probably unhappy marriage. Somehow, maybe her husband and her found a way to express them in this way. They both allowed themselves and the other to run or manage conversation on social media with other sex, as long as this other belonged to their group of sympathizers. Those who promoted the raise of Islam and didn’t belong to the secular infidels.

But somehow, again, it was a way to escape reality behind the screen of a Facebook, promoting emotions and sentiments that kept evaporating into what became fundamentalist approaches to a closed vision.

When the girl disappeared, we all entered a state of panic, imagining the worse scenarios, what if she was talking to some terrorists whom we hear about recruiting young people. What if she intended to stab a soldier or somebody convinced her to wear a bomb. So many what ifs of the impossible seemed possible in moments of living a life on Facebook?

Every word she wrote, every picture, every unknown friend to her family, suddenly became a suspect in what imagined of a recruitment plot.

Her latest essay she wrote crying al-Aqsa. Her provocative pictures, her sharing even my youngest daughter status on appreciating death in a horrible life.

My daughter Serena has been in such a state of mind recently. She has been questioning the meaning of our lives infront of such injustice. She keeps asking if we will be sad if she dies exploding herself. Each time I manage to make a joke out of it, I intend to do my lecturing episodes of how ineffective, and harmful to our cause these things could be.

This thing of trying to maintain an alive worthful cause of homeland, identity in your child is one thing, and convincing this child that it is your presence; your life that is resistance is another thing. Trying to keep this drive in life for these children is becoming harder inside this tremendous cycle of terror. Terror of killing from all directions. How difficult it is becoming to pull the strings of life in your child, in explaining that killing a by-passer is not a heroic act, even though innocents from your side are killed daily.

My niece, apparently, simply decided to support al- Aqsa according to her 13 year of life deemed her to do. She honestly thought that going there and praying is an act of defense to the mosque that no one is able to defend. It was her very first-time to ever take a bus on her own, to go to the old city on her own, to find her way to the Aqsa on her own.

She simply went there, prayed, followed some screams along the space of that place, and came back home. Actually she came back to my home, trying to camouflage her escape with her “naughty” aunt infront of her parents. To her lack of luck, she didn’t know that the entire city was looking for her including the police.

As she went to the police, and still laughing at the situation. She also managed to put a show infront of the investigators, whom she proudly expressed her pride in the Resistance of Al Quds Brigades for firing rockets, and that her hero was one of the latest martyrs of Jerusalem incidents. For the Israeli investigators, she was a timed bomb. A real suspect.

For many reasons, I was thinking, maybe they were right.

At the end, we always say this, that we are all a suicidal project/ But somehow, no one want to see his own child as the next suicide attack.

It was a state of complexity, filled with irony I could say, that we were rushing to the Israeli police, asking there help in preventing something this little girl may be willing to do against them.

At the end, our fear was from our own preaching, not from what this girl had even in mind.

We were the victims this time of our own preaching of fundamentalism, that luckily, in this house it didn’t breed a terrorist. But it definitely bred an imagination of a terrorist inside us that was so concretely visualized in a moment of fear for a possible loss. A loss of a life…. A life that is more valuable in reality … more valuable in our senses than anything. Than a nation. Than identity … because this life is all what we have. This life is what makes a nation … an identity … this life is the life we want to have …