Some Thoughts As Spring Arrives

March 19th, 2015  |   

ISIS Recruits—Why Are They Going?

I hear the question frequently these days: What motivates people, particularly young people, to leave home and join up with ISIS?

There are many responses to that question; psychologists, counselors and commentators on television are all over the subject, like ants swarming over a picnic on a summer day.

I resist saying, “Well, the bottom line is…” Why? Because I don’t believe there is a bottom line to anything in life. Bottoms have a way of crumbling with time. There is always more to learn, more beneath the surface of any thought-to-be-final conclusion. The mystery is found in the more-to-come.

Likewise, I refuse to say, “Well, at the end of the day the answer is…” Why? Because there is always another day that follows the end of every day. Everything isn’t over-and –done-with after twenty-four hours. Sunset doesn’t stop the clock; it merely precedes and anticipates another sunrise, another day. Nor do seasons end with a frozen winter.

So without pretending that I have the power or wisdom to close down any question with a simple conclusion, here’s my take on the question about ISIS enlistment. As always, it invites responses that add depth and new light to my view.

What motivates people, particularly young people, to leave home and join up with ISIS?

Here’s a start on the answer. Deep down inside of everyone, I do believe, is a desire to amount to something, to make a difference, to have one’s life matter in a worthwhile way.

One way to do that is to join forces with others on a mission that is larger than one’s self, a cause that’s bigger and more important than a dead end, boring, unfulfilled, day-to-day life that too many people endure.

We may not like to say it, or hear it, but some people will join the military for the same reasons people join ISIS. Both are fighting the enemy, as they perceive it. Both are willing to use violence to achieve their goal. Both kill people because they see their enemy killing people. Both do what they do because they have a desire to fight back against evil as they see it embodied in the bad people they are willing to kill.

Maybe they lack real personal knowledge of their enemy, or maybe they have a great deal of knowledge about what their enemy has done by way of violence. We have had 9/11 and beheadings, while many of them have had their family and friends killed by American bombs and troops. If not from that vantage point, they may very well despise their own country’s war against Sunni Muslims.

People, who join ISIS, and the military, here and abroad, may just need a job. Some may have had little or no personal or professional success. Discouragement, depression, and isolation often contribute to disturbed decisions, even violent acts.

And so we are all left with the violence and the enemies, seen and portrayed in the news, in places where, as Matthew Arnold wrote in Dover Beach, “ignorant armies clash by night.”   

And still the question hangs in the air, like early-morning fog, waiting for sunrise, so that the enemy might be seen as flesh and blood human beings, every one of them, both here and abroad.

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

Bugs have a way of sticking, splat-splat, to the front windshield of a car. They are like certain memories from the past that go splat, splat, sticky splat on our brain.

I don’t know when Maw, my grandmother on my mother’s side of the family, said it, or where she said it, or how old I was when I heard her say it. I just remember the words she quoted from that Scotchman writer, Robert Burns. They are stuck on my brain.

And would some Power the small gift give us

To see ourselves as others see us.

I thought of those words the other night at our local synagogue, while listening to the rabbi. He was telling a small gathering, of mostly members of his congregation, about being in Washington at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Convention, and hearing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address a Joint Session of Congress.

Of course the subject of Iran and the U.S. attempt to hammer out a nuclear treaty was hot on the front burner. It was clear, throughout the session, that the rabbi, and everyone willing to speak had opinions about Iran and Iranians.

A woman across the table from me finally asked a question, and it felt like a door had opened and Burns, the Bard of Ayrshire, had entered the room. I can even imagine Maw holding his hand.

We certainly are taking a hard look at Iran. I wonder,” she said, “how they look at us. It would be interesting, don’t you think, to know what Iranians see when they look at us?”

Stepping Into A Pair Of Persian Shoes

When a person puts on a costume, or different clothes than the ones she or he usually wear, their behavior is often transformed. There are too many examples of this for me to spell out here. One will suffice.

Take a nine-to-five guy who dons a suit and tie five days a week. Suit him up in a horned- helmet and gladiator attire; paint his face with his favorite team’s colors; put him in a football stadium end zone seat, with other screaming fans, and you have a totally different dude than the one who sits behind a computer at work.

Perhaps we might, so to speak, don traditional Persian garb. Put on a pirahan, the colorful blouse worn by men and women. Or a sarband, the headdress worn by men. Decked out in colorful Persian attire, then step into the galesh, a pair of dashingly bright shoes from the Vakil Bazaar in the historic city of Shiraz in southwest Iran, there since 2000 BC.

Now, what would we see, looking at the United States of America, with the identity we have grafted upon ourselves by this role-playing exercise?

Do We See What They See?

Begin by recognizing what looks good to us as an Iranian. I’ve been told to always begin a conversation by saying something positive, something nice, you know, something complimentary. So, here goes.

·      The United States has welcomed people from Iran. Many have been educated in the States and have returned to live and work back home. Some have stayed in the U.S. and made a home there. People like Dr. Jamshid “Jim” Bakhtiar, who was an All American football player in the 1950s at the University of Virginia. Nicknamed “The Persian Prince” in those days, he went on to serve as a doctor in the Vietnam War, and now practices psychiatry in Martinsburg, West Virginia. 

There is a lot more good that could be said about our country, as seen through the eyes of Iranians. because there have always been close ties between Iranians and Americans. I see it in folks here in West Virginia with family heritage rooted in Iran. But the bad and the ugly must not be ignored. So, here goes.

·      Americans love democracy and want other nations to love it as well. But wait a minute. In 1953, the United States was behind the military coup that ousted Mohammad Mosaddeq, the first democratically elected Prime Minister in Iran’s history. Written all over the overthrow were American dollars and CIA covert involvement. And it was covered with bloodshed—Iranian blood.

·      Replacing Mosaddeq was Washington’s man-in-Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah (King) of Iran. Responsible for torture, dictatorial and repressive policies, and corruption, he set the stage for his own ouster in 1979. Along with that came Iranian hostility toward the U.S. for having manipulated the puppet strings attached to the King.

·      The United States supported Iraq with money and arms in its war against Iran. It was a war that began in 1980 and lasted for eight years. Iran suffered enormous losses in a war that resulted in at least half a million casualties, extensive use of Iraqi chemical weapons, and billions of dollars worth of damages. Anyone remember the picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein?

·      Consider the number 655. That’s the flight number of Iran Air 655. Toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War, an American F-14 jet fighter that took off from the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf and shot down Flight 655. All 290 passengers were killed. Americans were told that shooting down the plane was a ‘mistake.” Iranians saw it as one more attack on their country.

I think we may have seen enough, but before we go back to work or watch March Madness basketball, there’s this: America supported Israel in covert efforts that killed some of Iran’s nuclear scientists, and poisoned Iranian government computers with the Stuxnet virus. And now 47 U.S. senators have signed a letter to Iran that might possibly undermine diplomatic nuclear talks, saying it might not be worth the paper it’s written on.

I Hear Judy’s Instructions

My basement is filled with books, papers, albums filled with pictures and newspaper clippings, videos and tapes, notes, rough drafts of stories, clippings, letters, diaries, and files stuffed with spent sermons and lectures.

Judy was always urging me, time and time again, to tend to the wealth of papers, written material and records in the basement, a collection of my life’s work, fifty years worth. Even though I was doing a lot of writing, I was too busy living and creating, through my work, more material for the basement rather than tending to what was piling up there.

It is a painful recognition, but one I can’t avoid, that Judy’s absence now offers the space for me to hear her voice guiding me; “Get to the task, Jimmy. Go to the basement. You have more time to do that now, without me there with you.”

Yes, but I would willingly destroy what’s in the basement, turn it to ash, as her body was melted into ash, and never write again, if I could call her back to my side. That’s impossible of course, and she would not want me to even talk like that, as unselfish as she was. So I am paying attention to her directions.

The jaundiced papers, the tattered files, the faded photographs, the boxes full of musty material, cry out for attention, as well as Judy’s instructions.

A Convergence Of Time Past With Time Now

For the past month my dining room table has been set for a feast. I’m not taking about roasted this, or baked that, or lovely plates, or good silverware, or candles and a fine linen tablecloth. I’m talking about stacks of papers I’ve hauled up from the basement, over thirty years worth of Notes From Under the Fig Tree, and an assortment of other writings, finished and unfinished that stretch back into the past. And there are plenty more where these came from, waiting for me to lug them upstairs.  

The past and the present bend and twist in directions that cause them to converge with one another in ways that have, for me, always linked time and events is a most mysterious way. How about a march in Selma fifty years ago converging on marches now in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, where racism is still present? 

I woke up to news that an attack in Tunisia that has left 23 people dead and 40 people wounded. It took place in the Bardo National Museum in Tunis that houses a collection of relics that trace history over several millennia. People who go there can see a collection of ceramics from North Africa and Asia Minor that include the blue Koran of Kairouan.

Call it a coincidence; call it whatever you wish, but I will call it another one of those splat-on-the-windshield-of-my-brain convergences. You see, I went to bed only seven hours before I saw the early morning news report from Tunis. Before bedtime, I had been reading the writings I had done after a night spent in Tunis on my way home from having visited Palestine/Israel, just three months before the First Intifada there in 1987.  

Mixed in with my papers from the basement was a picture of me shaking hands with Yasser Arafat. He is dead. I am 28 years older, alone at my dinning room table digesting papers. And now, here I am, alone in bed, waking up to bloodshed in Tunis.

Meeting With Yasser Arafat In Tunisia

Sitting in the same room in Tunis with Yasser Arafat from midnight until three AM, I whispered to Marshall, a Jew from New York, “I hope Israel doesn’t decide to bomb Arafat’s headquarters tonight.” 

Ten of us, a delegation of Christians and Jews, were representing the Fellowship of Reconciliation. FOR is an ecumenical organization founded in Switzerland in 1914 to prevent the outbreak of war in Europe. It has a grand tradition of peace and justice work that involved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in numerous civil rights and antiwar efforts. FOR was there when blood was shed at Selma.

Called from our rooms in the hotel where we had just arrived, tired from ten days of travel that had taken us all over Palestine/Israel. Having seen and heard so much, especially in the very refugee camps in Gaza and Nablus, where the Intifada eventually began, we took the elevator to the lobby, and climbed into cars bound for Arafat’s headquarters.

My writings from that entire trip, and that night in Tunis (Arafat had the reputation of regularly working all night.) are full of detailed information and impressions. One remembrance is worth reconstructing almost 28 years later, given what is transpiring right now in Tunisia and North Africa, with tentacles that extend worldwide in this moment when “terrorism” is paramount in people’s mind.

Marshall had a question for the Chairman. “Do you really think, given the violent history that has existed for so long between Jews and Palestinians, that these ancient enemies will ever meet and make peace?” I saw that question in an interesting way since the question and the subsequent answer involved two men who were themselves representative of these longstanding tribal enemies.

“Why of course we will meet and talk,” said Arafat. “We must. What good does it do to just meet with one’s friends? We must meet with the enemy.”

Marshall had told me, prior to the meeting, that he would not have his picture taken with Arafat. His mother would not look kindly upon such a picture. At the conclusion of our meeting, pictures being snapped, Marshall informed me that he wanted me to disregard his previous instructions. “Go ahead. Take my picture.” And I did, two pictures—one with his camera and the other with mine.

My photo, which I later mailed to him, was profound and amusing. When Marshall extended his hand for a handshake, Arafat did more than that. He embraced him with a huge Middle Eastern hug. Click. They were now on film. I laugh when I think of what I had captured—Marshall’s startled, bug-eyed face. I wonder, to this day, if he ever showed that picture to his mother.

A Fig Tree Begins To Bloom

One of my faithful Notes From Under the Fig Tree readers sent me a little fig tree back in early winter. Only about four feet tall, it was but a stick in a pot full of earth. I placed it in my downstairs hallway. Watered regularly, it has now begun to blossom. Green buds, followed by green leaves are marvelous signs that soon it will be time to let it go outside in search of larger space in which to grow and eventually bear figs.

I love this tree. It has done something marvelous for my sometimes-chilled body and soul, as I have lived through a frigidly brutal winter. Albert Camus’ words are fitting: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” That said, I must not rush to summer, for spring has now arrived, and I dare not bypass it, if I want to bloom like my little fig tree, 

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