The sad truth is that individuals like Hussein who reach out to Jews and change their negative views about Israel are all too easily branded as traitors and harassed by their own. Rachel Wahba tells his story in The Times of Israel:
Rachel Wahba
Hussein’s story is unusual to say the least. His courage, after he
unintentionally unearthed the truth in a land of censorship, is epic. He
could not stop, and he could not stay silent once he started learning
the truth about Jews, Israel, Christianity, and the world.
The middle child in a Middle class mostly secular Muslim family,
Hussein was eleven years old when he embarked on a religious path. He
began praying several times a day, getting more and more devout. He
found himself praying for the destruction of the Jews and Israel. By the
time he was a teen he hated us with a passion, a budding Jihadi ready to fight the good fight against the Zionists.
Obsessed with comic book Superheroes, Hussein channeled his hate in a wholly original way – He was
going to be a superhero. He, Hussein, would “learn everything about
the Arch Enemy, the Jew,” the ultimate evil in the universe, responsible
for everything wrong with civilization.
He studied Hebrew, first on his own via the internet and then in
university. He knocked on the door of the Israeli embassy in Cairo and
got a hero’s welcome (they don’t get many visitors). They gave him
books, a world opened.
Threatening calls came to his home, He was arrested for a night, his
father was arrested, he was told several times to stop visiting the
embassy. He didn’t take the arrests seriously enough, he refused to stop
blogging his new ideas.
His consciousness expanded, his friends thought his new ideas were
crazy, he kept learning. He studied Jewish history, and then
Christianity. There were no Jews in Egypt, but he saw how Egyptian
Christians (like Jews), were not the dirty, smelly, vile sub-human filth
he was taught. He read about Israel. He wrote.
Instead of becoming the Superhero he set out to be, he rejected Islam. He became a Zionist, an enemy of the state.
He was arrested and tortured for two months until he lost the
capacity to see color, to care about anything except dying. Eventually
he was helped out of the country, to flee for his life, into America,
where I first heard him speak on a panel with other dissidents from the
Middle East.
When I first met him, I asked about criticizing Islamic ideology
without being silenced as “Islamophobic.” He laughed, saying one cannot
care about that. It was validating, because I am accused regularly,
even when I am talking about my family’s experience. Even when I tell
the story of how my Iraqi mother, accompanying her father to Basra on
business, seeing the Shia merchant wash his hands to cleanse himself,
after doing business with the Jewish merchant, my grandfather. This
story is “Islamophobic.”
The validation I experience and every Zionist feels with Hussein is a blessing. We need our story understood.
I don’t have to explain to Hussein how sick to their core it makes
Islamists that although they got rid of us Jews in their countries all
over the Middle East, Israel rose and keeps thriving as a Jewish country
in their midst.
With Hussein I don’t have to find ways to explain the legitimacy of
Israel as a Jewish country, or how the Palestinians were and continue to
be inhumanely groomed by Political Islamic ideology as a means to get
rid of us after major aggressive wars to destroy the one Jewish country
failed. I don’t have to try to convince him that the “refugee” issue and
“peaceful protests” in Gaza that keep multiplying in numbers is a cruel
sham. He knows.
He knows first-hand, as did my family, as do most Jews from Arab
lands, as does anyone who refuses to live in ignorance of a reality we
have to wake up to if we want Israel to survive. This connection with
him means the world to me.
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