Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [111]
“You must be a Saudi!” one exclaimed.
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve got so much passion for Palestine!”
The praise gave me such a sense of honor that I couldn’t contain myself. There was nothing better, as a Muslim leader, than to be recognized as an Arab; after all, Muhammad, the preeminent Muslim leader, had been an Arab, and Islam had emerged from the land of the Arabs. Furthermore, I had been promised to Islam in the land of the Arabs. If Arabs were now recognizing me for being one of them, then surely I had to be on the right path.
I traded my bland black-and-white kafiya with a young boy who had one in the Palestinian colors of green, black, and red. I wrapped it around my head and ran around screaming, “No justice! No peace!” I wanted to be heard through the thick walls of power that CNN represented. I wanted union with the weak and the voiceless of the world.
I wanted Wolf Blitzer to do a story about me.
6
Until now the extent of Sam’s own activism had been rather limited, because he lived in his mother’s basement. However, he was always looking for a chance to play with the “big boys” at elite universities. He had a gold mine in me. Since I was, in many ways, tabula rasa, a clean slate, when it came to activism, but had access to a great deal of money through the MSA, he figured he could work through me. One of his great ambitions was to get the big three of pro-Palestinian activism—Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Edward Said—in one panel discussion.
“How amazing would that be?” he said. “Two Jews and a secular Christian laying out Israel’s injustices.”
I was just coming to learn each thinker’s importance to the cause and nodded excitedly. “That would be special.”
“Trouble is, they all cost a lot of money. I can’t finance it, but I think your organization has the pull to get that sort of funding.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. Over the next few days I contacted Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Said and inquired about their honoraria. The news wasn’t good. “With the second intifada heating up,” I explained to Sam, “they’re all really busy and really expensive.”
“How much did you offer? They’ll come for the money.”
“Chomsky’s baseline is five thousand,” I said, reluctant to disappoint Sam, who was playing such a role in my greater visibility. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay out that kind of money to just one guy. Maybe six thousand for all three.”
“That’s not going to work,” Sam said. “Let me see if I can find other speakers.”
After a few days Sam returned with information about a pair of lesser-known lecturers. One was a professor who would argue that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were detrimental to the peace process. The other was a speaker coming from Europe.
“The professor is obviously solid,” Sam said. “But the European is the more intriguing prospect. He’s an observant Jew who formerly served in the Israeli military.”
“So a pro-Palestinian Israeli European?”
“Pretty much.”
“Is he cheap?” I asked, going straight to the bottom line.
“Very.”
I told Sam I’d manage to get the funding through the MSA, and we came up with a schedule for both speakers.
“Send me their writings,” I requested before hanging up.
Shortly before the European’s talk, which was scheduled first, Sam sent me a sample of his writings. Despite being creative and evocative, they were aggressive and polemical. The writer was a veritable machine gun of rhetoric. He turned everything into Jew versus Gentile and claimed that the very idea of Jewishness was a conspiracy. Although he made seemingly sophisticated literary references to characters and authors such as Don Quixote and Thomas Hardy, he never moved far from his main point: putting the entire blame for Israeli actions upon Judaism.
Something about the articles didn’t sit right with me. Reeking of bigotry, they argued that as long as Israelis were Jewish, peace wasn’t possible. The obsession with trying to impose certain inherent tendencies