Virgil Goode, the “bad” American

NEW YORK – Virgil Goode is the perfect “bad” American of the imagination of many Muslims. His bigotry is the reason I’m always asked when I travel through the Middle East: “What’s it like for Muslims in America after 9/11?”

The Republican congressman made headlines late last year when he criticized the decision of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, to use the Koran during a swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 4.

Ellison, a Democrat who will represent Minnesota, is exactly the kind of American that more Muslims around the world need to see because if they did, they might not ask me that question so often. He is American and Muslim with neither noun vying for dominance.
Clearly, Ellison is the kind of American that Goode needs to see more often too.

In a letter to a constituent, Goode warned “if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran”.

Ellison is an African American convert who traces his U.S. ancestry to 1741. He gives lie to the notion that all Muslims in the U.S. are all immigrants or newcomers. And Goode gives lie to any complexity and nuance that that those of us who are Muslim and American have tried to inject into our discussions about the U.S. while traveling.

I was born in Egypt but moved to the U.S. in 2000 and am eligible for citizenship this year. During my most recent visit to Egypt in November, I came up with what I thought was the perfect answer to that near-universal “What’s it like for Muslims over there after 9/11?”

“It’s complicated,” I’d say.

And I’d tell this story.

On Sept. 11, 2001, my brother and his wife were visiting me in Seattle, where I lived at the time. They are both physicians who work in the U.S. We did not leave my apartment for two days after the attacks because we worried that my sister-in-law, who wears a headscarf, would be harassed or attacked as we had heard happened to Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim.

As it happened, she was treated very kindly. Other Muslim women were not so lucky. One Muslim woman was almost run over by a car and another woman I knew – a Pakistani American Muslim – told me while out with her husband one evening, a group of young men asked him “What’s it like to (sleep with) a terrorist?”

A few days after 9/11, a man poured gasoline in the local mosque’s parking lot and tried to set it on fire but was stopped by two men coming out of night prayers. He pulled out a gun and tried to shoot them but he was too drunk to aim straight and when he tried to flee in his car, he drove into a tree. He was arrested soon after.

The next day, and for weeks afterwards, two people from the neighbourhood around the mosque stood a 24-hour guard outside it holding placards that read “Muslims are Americans.”

If I had one, I would have sent it to Rep. Goode.

Here’s where the story gets complicated.

One of the two Muslim men who stopped the wannabe-arsonist visited him in jail and told him he forgave him. The Muslim told authorities he wanted to drop charges. They told him it was too late. So he testified in defense of the man who tried to shoot him. Instead of getting 75 years in jail upon his conviction, that man got six-and-a-half years.

It’s complicated, as I said.

On a more personal note, my brother was one of the 5,000 Muslim men interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11 and he had to submit to Special Registration that required he be fingerprinted and photographed for the records of Homeland Security.

This past summer, I was profiled while reentering the U.S. after several weeks in Europe. It was shortly after the alleged plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic. An apologetic Homeland Security officer asked me if I had ever received military training and whether I’d ever been a member of another country’s armed forces. A not so-apologetic custom’s agent almost turned my bags upside down with her searching. Sadly, one was Hispanic American and the other African American – two communities that have long complained of profiling.

After giving a lecture at Concordia University in Montreal in November, a U.S. Border and Customs agent said it was time for a “third Crusade” when I told him the subject of my talk had been the portrayal of Arabs in western media.

On a more positive note, my sister-in-law is the only female OB/GYN doctor in a small Ohio town where her waiting list is long and it matters little that she wears a headscarf. I am sure her patients would tell Rep. Goode that it matters even less that she reads the Koran whereas they read the Bible or the Torah.

Rep. Goode belongs to the America which is very familiar to millions of Muslims around the world. It is the America that has held without charge or trial hundreds of Muslim men at Guantanamo.

Such a simple America is easy to hate.

Keith Ellison’s America and the America that I live in is complicated and deserves to be heard out.

Most of all by Rep. Goode.

At times you can see the two Americas talk and argue and it’s a conversation more of us should hear.

I was lucky enough to be privy to it during my first visit to the White House at the end of 2005. There, kneeling outside the President’s residence a young man wore an orange jumpsuit, Guantanamo style. His hands were tied behind him and he wore a hood over his head. In front of him was a white sheet of board with the words “End torture now” written across it.

I was visiting Washington DC in the middle of a several month stay in Cairo. In Egypt, I had marched in several street protests against President Hosni Mubarak. None of them took place in front of our White House. None of them ever would.

There was another Egypt connection to the man’s simple, quite demonstration. Egypt is the number one destination for renditions – the process by which U.S. secret service agents abduct terrorism suspects and take them to friendly, compliant countries where human rights records leave much to be desired but enough to do what the Americans apparently didn’t want to do themselves – torture. My country was doing the U.S. administration’s dirty work.

So I wanted to thank this young man. As I walked up to him to start a conversation, a girl who looked like she was on a school trip approached him.

“Do you hate President Bush?” she asked him.

“Umm, no. I’d have to say I hate what he does but I don’t hate him.”

“Because of Iraq?”

“Yeah. We’ve killed a lot of people over there, a lot of women and children,” all this said from under his hood, with his hands tied behind his back.

“Well they’ve been mean too,” the girl replied.

“The woman and the children?”

At this point, an adult chaperoning the children took her away. I stepped in and talked to the young demonstrator.

“Do a lot of Americans talk to you about your demonstration?” I asked him.

“Not really,” he said. “Just those who disagree, like that man who just took the girl away.”

“Well I want to thank you for what you’re doing. Torture is systematic in my country and Egypt is the number one destination for rendition”

“Please go and tell him that,” the young man said, moving his hooded head in the direction where the man and the girl seemed to him to have walked away.

So off I went, looking for trouble.

I found them. “Excuse me. I want you to know that I really appreciate what that man is doing. Torture in my country, Egypt, is systematic and it doesn’t help anything.”

“So maybe we should send them all picnic baskets and flowers, then,” he said, referring to the men held at Guantanamo for years without trial.

“No, but torture doesn’t help. Egypt is the number one destination for rendition and I’m telling you torture doesn’t help anything.”

“They kill women and children in your country too,” he said.

“I know and that’s why I’m telling you that torture doesn’t help. It hasn’t ended any of that.”

“Well then maybe you should try democracy,” he said.

“We want to. Maybe if your administration stopped supporting my dictator we could,” I replied and walked away to tell the demonstrator of our conversation.

“Yes!” he squealed. “Thank you!”

And there again you have Virgil Goode and Keith Ellison – two Americas, two views.

Muslim Americans – precisely those very same people that Rep. Goode wants to keep out – are uniquely positioned to tell these stories of America. The local and the personal stories that give a human face to Muslims and to America. And Keith Ellison, precisely the very same Muslim and American that Goode refuses to acknowledge – is uniquely positioned to help erase the “bad” American from Muslim imagination.

Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based journalist and commentator and a frequent lecturer internationally on Arab and Muslim issues. Her Web site is www.monaeltahawy.com.
The title of this column, "Kifaya"(Enough), is inspired by the reform movement in Egypt.