What a story ........really, one for the books. We need a million like Mark. What a journey.
My Muslim background left me unprepared for this shocking discovery
Growing up in Kuwait, I had the best of everything. My father owned a successful construction company, and provided us five children with amenities like piano lessons, swimming, calligraphy and trips all over the world. Although we were Muslims like everyone else, we were totally secular and my father always aimed to shield us from religious people whom he described as crazies.
I grew up being told that Israelis and Jews were the lowest type of creature in existence, put on Earth only to kill us Arabs. In math class the teacher would say, “If one rocket killed X number of Jews, how many would six rockets kill?”
My father was rabidly anti-Israel. He was a product of Nasser's school of thought: secular from a Muslim point of view, yet deeply dedicated to the idea of pan-Arab unity. Israel, he believed, was an American proxy in the post-colonial Middle East.
My
father was a supporter of the PLO since the 1960s when Yasser Arafat (who
founded the PLO while living in Kuwait) was raising money from wealthy
Palestinians working in Gulf States. As an engineer, my father participated in a
program where the engineering association in Kuwait would deduct money from his
monthly salary to be sent directly to the PLO. He insisted that war and
resistance was the only way to deal with Israel.
In the summer of 1990, when I was 12 years old, our lives changed completely. We were on vacation when Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. My father's business -- along with much of the country -- was ravaged. Our savings became worthless pieces of paper. We could not go back to Kuwait, so we immigrated to Canada. My father did manage to sneak back in for a few days to retrieve important business documents that would later be useful in recovering compensation from a United Nations fund.
Read it all......................
