8 Fighting Back

I remember how, when I was a little kid, I loved to watch morning cartoons. In one of them—I forget which—a Middle Eastern sheik figure sometimes appeared, with his flowing robes and turban. He was always up to no good—sometimes lecherous, sometimes conniving, always greedy. At the time, I did not see the stereotype that was being portrayed—I just thought he was funny. As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of being stereotyped myself, but it never seemed to occur to me that I was just as ready to stereotype other children.

The abuse I endured at Killarney Junior High had made me very unhappy, and so my parents decided it was best to change schools in Grade 8. Dickinsfield Junior High had a substantial minority of Muslim students who came from the large Arab Canadian community in the area. The reason for this larger Arab presence in the area was, in part, because many refugees were allocated government housing in the Castle Downs or Dickinsfield neighbourhoods when they arrived. Other immigrants followed them there to be closer to communities in which they felt more welcome. I used the change of school to change my image, as I wanted to be seen as cool rather than as a loser. Besides, my best friend Bashar attended Dickinsfield, as did my cousins.

However, the First Gulf War broke out shortly before the start of the new school year, and that brought a new set of problems that pulled me right back into the cycle I had tried escape by coming to Dickinsfield. One morning, not too long after the school year started, I saw a white student taping a picture of Saddam Hussein to the door of his locker. Anti-Saddam sentiments were running high in Canada, and the poster was intended to be a target that other students could spit and throw things at as they shouted things like “Dirty Arab.” Others shouted, “I hope they kill that Paki!” I didn’t know a whole lot about Saddam Hussein, but I knew he wasn’t from Pakistan. I also knew that I wasn’t an Iraqi. That didn’t seem to matter, though, and it bothered me a lot. If I ever confused Canadians with Americans, I’d be in trouble—so how come white people couldn’t keep their Arabs straight?

Life at school was hard. If we had had support from the adults at school, things might have been different, but the teachers, principals, and community were openly racist towards us. I do not remember having any teachers in Dickinsfield or later at M.E. Lazerte who was a person of colour. This racism led me to develop an animosity that bordered on hatred for white people in positions of power. We were the real outsiders; we were the unwanted. I was at a rebellious age, and in this atmosphere of hatred spurred by the Gulf War, the only outlet that some of the Arab kids could find was to engage in gang culture. The Black, Italian, and Chinese students all had their groups, and so Arab kids gravitated towards each other in the same way.

Outside of school, things were much the same. Wherever I went, I could hear people talking, saying things like, “Saddam Hussein! Such an awful man, such a tyrant, such a murderer!” That was all I heard on the news and all around me in Edmonton. Stories circulated about how he and his sons tortured people for fun. How he was like an Arab Hitler and how Canadians were proud that their country was sending troops to help defeat him. It seemed like a lopsided encounter to me—this huge coalition, led by the United States, heading into the desert to rid the world of one evil dictator.

At home, whenever family and friends visited, there would be long discussions of the Gulf War. As I understood it, Iraq claimed that Kuwait was part of its own territory—that the British had created an artificial country—and it was also accusing Kuwait of siphoning off oil from Iraqi oil fields. The United States was no friend of Iraq, and it wanted to prevent oil-rich Kuwait from falling under Iraqi control. It seemed to me even then that the fight wasn’t really about Saddam Hussein: it was about oil.

My parents and their friends were concerned about the long-term ramifications of the war, and the implications it would have for Palestinians. Over the years, the PLO had received support from both Iraq and Kuwait, and Yasser Arafat had learned to balance his Palestinian interests and broader regional interests well. Now, however, the region was divided, and Arafat found himself in a difficult position. Iraq was insisting on a resolution of the “Palestinian problem” as a precondition to its withdrawal from Kuwait, while Kuwait supported Western military intervention. If he supported military intervention, he’d lose the support of Iraq, but if he didn’t, he’d lose the support of Kuwait. To make Arafat’s dilemma even more complicated, Kuwait was home to some four hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and siding with Iraq could affect Kuwait’s attitude towards them. Arafat was opposed to Western intervention in what he viewed as an Arab crisis, and in the end he decided to throw his lot in with Iraq. Kuwait publicly condemned the PLO for opposing Western military intervention.

Many of the Muslim adults I overheard in our home approved of Saddam Hussein’s strategy. I would hear things like, “He may be a brutal dictator, but at least he has the guts to stand up to Israel.” But some worried that if it came to military action, Iraq would surely be defeated by the US-led coalition. Then what would become of the Palestinian population in Kuwait, especially now that the country had turned against the PLO?

The imam of the Al-Rashid Mosque, Youssef Chebli, was among those who refused to portray Saddam Hussein as wholly evil. Although he was critical of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he openly praised Hussein for his continued support of the Palestinian cause. Chebli was also an outspoken critic of Western militarism. As he saw it, military action against Iraq would inevitably put civilian lives at risk. When the assault on Iraq finally began in mid-January 1991, Chebli publicly castigated Canada for its role in what he called the “satanic coalition.” The local press had a field day. “Local Muslim Cleric Sees Saddam as God’s Agent” the Edmonton Journal announced; “Muslim Backs ‘Hero’ Saddam” screamed the Edmonton Sun. Suddenly, our imam was a Saddam-lover. He was also the recipient of death threats, and it was not long before the Canadian Security Intelligence Service paid him a visit.

The local Muslim community was divided over Chebli. Some of my parents’ friends admired his willingness to dissent from mainstream opinion and to present another side of the story, while others were embarrassed by his outspokenness and attempted to distance themselves from his views. Yet others were angry. They argued that he was too antagonistic and blamed him for inviting attacks on the city’s Muslim residents, as well as for the vandalism at the mosque. Some seemed uncertain about how they felt.

For my part, I always had a lot of respect and admiration for Imam Chebli. When my parents were going through their divorce, he spent many nights at our house trying to help them reconcile. He was always generous. But, regardless of whether Chebli was kind to me and my family, or whether his remarks made matters worse for Palestinians, the fact remains that what was happening in Edmonton was happening all across the country.

In the end, no Canadians died fighting in the Gulf War. The victims were right here in Canada—ordinary people who happened to be Muslim and/or Arab. Or who looked like they might be. On the streets, Arab teens were getting jumped by white gangs, and women wearing hijabs were harassed or sometimes outright assaulted. Mosques were being desecrated, Muslim homes and businesses were being vandalized, and imams were receiving hate mail. Even Sikhs were getting called “Lebs” or “dirty Arabs.” It was as if the war had tapped into a wellspring of racism, giving people permission to let loose.

I was too young to analyze the situation fully and to understand why “us” needs a “them.” But I did understand what it felt like to be insulted and shoved and why my father was worried about letting my mother go out alone. Watching students at my school spit on a picture of Saddam Hussein, I felt like they were doing it to me.

My parents began spending more time at the mosque, and so did other families we knew. People felt isolated, unwanted, angry, frightened, confused, and often bitter. They needed a place to cling together, to talk about what was happening and to support one another. The mosque offered such a space. Even my father started to attend the Friday sermons and the weekday evening lectures. Before the Gulf War, the focus at the mosque was mostly spiritual; now it was political.

Although Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, fighting between Iraq and the Western coalitions forces did not start until January 1991. The intervening time was spent preparing for the war and consolidating support in the West. During that time, a couple of Arab students from Dickinsfield Junior High were beaten up by a group of white students while they were on their way home from school. At that time, I was one of the more outspoken students at the school, and many of my peers looked to me as a leader. Their bruises didn’t prevent these kids from walking or talking, and they came and told me what had happened. Although they were more scared than hurt, I could feel things changing.

I was angry about the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that the invasion had unleashed, and I reacted by asserting my Arab and Islamic identity. At school, as a symbol of rebellion, I started to wear the Palestinian keffiyeh, the scarf that Yasser Arafat always wore. Somewhere in all of this was a desire to show that “Arab is cool.” I started to attend events at the mosque more often with my family. I even requested that the school allocate a space to students for the weekly Friday prayer. To my surprise, my requested was granted. So there I was, fronting like some thirteen-year-old imam, giving Friday sermons to my fellow students. I wasn’t even sure how to perform the Friday prayer ritual, but I did it anyway, recycling lectures I heard at the mosque.

Around the same time as these world events were unfolding and I began to retreat into myself in an effort to cope, some of my friends and I started hanging out at the Canadian Arab Friendship Association, which was located in the Dickinsfield Mall, just a few blocks away from the school on 144 Avenue. CAFA was established in 1965 by several members of the Arab community who wanted to ensure that their cultural heritage would be preserved for their children. The association also worked to promote an appreciation of Arab traditions in the broader community. One of the people who volunteered at CAFA was Uncle Yazan, who became the father figure I needed at the time. Uncle Yazan is not related to me, but he treated me like a son, and I respected him as though he were family, so I called him Uncle. Uncle Yazan became my mentor and taught me more about Arabic culture and history than anyone had done up to that point in my life.

I’d first met Uncle Yazan before I started going to CAFA, and I confess I started going there mostly to be with him. We met when I got into a fight with a Turkish boy named Baha. Baha and I were going at each other outside the Happy Pop store at the Dickinsfield Mall when the police showed up. Baha fled, and I ran into the Burger Baron restaurant, further down the mall. I had heard that an Arab man called Yazan owned the store and thought I might be safe there. Even though I didn’t know him, I trusted him based on the things I’d heard about him. Uncle Yazan hid me in the restaurant storage room. When the cops came into the Burger Baron to ask questions, Uncle Yazan told them, “It was nothing—just a couple of young kids having a fight.” The police asked for names, but Yazan said he couldn’t give them any.

After they left, Yazan called people he knew and tracked down Baha. He made him come to the store and then sat the two of us down to resolve the problem. I hadn’t realized that Baha was Muslim—he looked more European than Arab. We made our peace, and I went home, feeling rather remorseful. It was that day that Uncle Yazan took me under his wing. “Come and see me,” he said. “Every week if you can.” And I did.

By Grade 11, we had built a close friendship and he used to tease me when he saw me come through the doors at CAFA, by call me “Mr. Arafat” because I wore a keffiyeh, just like Yasser Arafat did.

Maybe a month after my fight with Baha, I was at the North-gate Transit Centre near the Northgate Mall with my pal Bashar and another friend, Chadi, who was older than we were. They were cool, good-looking guys, smart guys—but also guys who wouldn’t back down from a street fight. Chadi was in a bad mood that day because he had just broken up with his girlfriend and needed someone to blame. “Let’s pick a fight,” he said.

Bashar objected, but I wanted to impress Chadi. I did not want to do it, but I was desperate to belong and besides, I’d been taught to respect my elders—and Chadi was older than I was. As a young Arab boy growing up in northeast Edmonton, which had a reputation for being a tough area, I understood instinctively that people did not mess with the tough guys. I hoped that getting into a fight alongside Chadi I would build my reputation as a tough guy and improve my social standing. So, to prove how tough I was, I looked around for the largest white guy, who happened to be about seventeen and stood three inches taller than me. He looked like a skater—all laid-back in a crowd of white kids who thought they were very cool. I sauntered up to him and said, “Hey buddy, gimme a cigarette.” He stared at me. “I don’t smoke,” he answered. Then I pushed him, and he pushed back.

That was all Chadi needed. He jumped in and started to fight with the guy, who fought back, hard. It was short but violent and resulted in bruises and bloody noses. As the guy climbed onto his bus, he pointed at me and shouted, “You coward! Just you wait—I’ll be back!”

I will never forget his words as the bus drove off, “I am coming for you.”

A few days later Byron and his friends did come for me. At lunch one day, Bashar and I headed out to the Dickinsfield Mall. We planned to get slushies at the Happy Pop store and play Mortal Kombat in the arcade. As we were on our way, two young Arab kids who were in Grade 7 at Dickinsfield came running up. They told me that some white guys were cruising around, looking for me.

“Let’s go back to the school,” Bashar said.

“Come on, I have a reputation to protect. I don’t back down.”

The kids were staring at me, waiting to see what I would do. I’d been stung by being called a coward, and if word got out that I’d run from a fight, that would be it for my image at school. So I took off my jacket and said I would defend myself.

“No!” Bashar shouted. “Go back to school and wait it out!”

I should have listened to Bashar.

Three cars pulled up at the side of the road. About ten white guys got out and started walking towards me. They were older than me, obviously in high school. Bashar was yelling at me, “Run, you idiot!” But I stood my ground, trying to convince myself that I could take it. Suddenly I was surrounded. Some of the boys had sticks, while others were rotating their fists in the air. Out of the middle of the mob came Byron, the guy from the Transit Centre.

“I told you I would come back for you,” he said.

I thought they were all going to attack me, but he told them to stay back. The only thing I remember after that was that Bashar and another student, Linda, picked me up off the ground and me walked me to the nursing station at the school, where I was cleaned up. The principal called my father to come and pick me up from school.

News of the beating spread like wildfire in the community. Many of the students at Dickinsfield were angry about what had happened to me. What they heard was that fifty kids, most of them white, had showed up to jump me. I didn’t bother to correct their version of the events.

When my father arrived at school, he was furious. He had brought a friend of his, Uncle Youssef Chehimi, with him. I’d been too scared to tell my father about the fight I’d started at the bus terminal, and now the two of them wanted the school to bring criminal charges against the attackers. The principal said that he was deeply sorry about what had happened but because it had happened outside of the school grounds, it was a police matter, and there was nothing he could do. Technically, he was correct: the principal’s authority stopped at the boundary of the school grounds. However, he could have offered to speak to the children involved, or he could have set up a program to foster greater understanding. But that was not how things went those days, especially not during the height of anti-Arab sentiment during the Gulf War. Uncle Youssef was a tough guy, like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas. “Listen to me,” he said. “If you don’t do it your way, we will do it our way.”

When my father and Uncle Youssef left the office, they were fuming. Yet, despite their threatening words, they didn’t actually do anything. It would just make things worse, they figured, what with the Gulf War and all. I was scared and regretted my actions. It was only recently, after I was diagnosed with ADHD, that I came to realize how much of my impulsive behaviour as a child may have been the result of that disorder rather than just my troubled family life and my anger at what was happening in the Middle East. My father and Uncle Youssef may have decided to leave matters be, but others were in no mood to do that, and since I was in the middle of the situation, I got pulled into planning the revenge. I simply did not have the courage or maturity to stand up to my friends at the time.

We met at CAFA under the auspices of a youth meeting. Our plan was to collect some sticks to use as weapons and then to gather at Northgate Mall bus terminal after school. From there, we would go together to Bishop O’Leary school, which is where Byron and his friends went to school. I did not want to go. I was hurting emotionally, and I was wrestling with the situation and my role in it. I still do.

By noon, about sixty of us were waiting outside the Bishop O’Leary. Some had walked; others came in cars. Ahmad, an old-school Palestinian, had managed to stuff more than twelve people into his family’s minivan. To my embarrassment, my father was there too, standing on the sidewalk outside the school. I could see some kind of metal bar in his hands. I couldn’t believe it. What did he think he was doing? My father was never violent. Whether I was embarrassed at the sight of him carrying a metal bar, or at my own presence in the midst of this violence when that was not the way I had been raised, I am not sure. My only course of action, I felt, was to avoid my father. I withdrew to the sidelines, out of view and wracked with guilt at the thought that the events that were unfolding had happened because of me.

I watched my father and the other people who had gathered approach the school. I watched my dad move to the sidelines, but still I was ashamed. I realize now that the only way my father knew how to show solidairty with the injustice that had been visited on his son was to be a bystander. But then I saw only that I had let him down and had forced him to engage in uncharacteristic violence.

Then a random white guy yelled at my father, “Get out of here before I beat you up, you fucking Paki!”

My father responded by waving the metal rod in his hands defiantly before getting back into his car and moving it to the other side of the street, further down the block. That was when I realized that my mother was with him. I don’t know why. The whole thing seemed crazy. Perhaps they were simply scared of what was going to happen and wanted to be there regardless. Or perhaps my father was content to stand by and watch while other people fought for his son. I could not tell. And did my mother want to witness this revenge as well? I remembered her strength when she ripped the Oilers cap off me and smashed my sunglasses and wondered whether she planned to join the fray. I could picture the headlines: “Avenging Arab Mom Unleashes Fury Upon High School Kids.”

Byron and his skater friends were nowhere to be seen in the schoolyard, so we headed inside the school to look for him. Still no luck. So we went after anyone we thought looked like a skater or a headbanger—basically, white dude with long hair parted to one side, baggy clothes, and skateboard became a legitimate target. We were an angry mob of youngsters who were determined to frighten anyone who would attack one of our own. After about ten minutes of fighting and mayhem, we ran off before the police showed up.

Looking back, it seems like a sad thing to feel proud of, but I felt proud. I had seen how our community could close ranks in defence of one of our own. Guys I didn’t even know had been willing to risk getting beaten up and maybe even arrested, just to deliver a message. It felt like our own Intifada, in the middle of the Gulf War.