An open letter to Fabian

an attempt for dialogue

Dear Fabian,

I know we don’t know each other, but I wanted to connect and share some thoughts with you. Life has been pretty rough these last years, hasn’t it?

People say one shouldn’t touch on politics or religion at the dinner table, yet we need dreams and fantasies to navigate the world. I’m not Muslim. I was raised with Buddhist and Christian teachings. But I have seen so much fear and hatred for Muslims. For “Blacks”. For the Indigenous. 

When I was seven, my mother would point at a house on our street and say, “Look, they’re Muslims.”

“What’s Muslim?” I had never heard of the word before.

“Muslims kidnap children. If you’re not careful, if you’re a bad child, they will come in a van and kidnap you. So don’t go riding out in the dark,” she’d tell me.

I’d discover later that Muhammad, the Muslim, attends my school and is in my class. Muhammad lives in that house. The house that his father built. He brought a model of his house to the class’ Show and Tell. 

“This is a model of our house, which my father designed,” said Muhammad. The model set of their house is complete with a removable ceiling. He showed us the rooms in the house. “This is my room, and this is my sister’s room. This is my mum and dad’s room. This is our kitchen.” 

I got to look inside the house of these so-called “kidnappers.” They lived just like everyone else. 

There was also another boy in my school, Isaac. “I’m an aboriginal,” he told me. I had never heard about Aboriginals before. 

Neither Isaac nor Muhammad ever showed the slightest animosity or hatred towards me, or tried tell me about their religion. Later, Kai, another aboriginal classmate in high school, told me that he was walking home from school, and a car of white boys drove by, threw beer bottles at him, and yelled out, “fucking Abo!” as they drove by.  

Later, on that same street, days after September 11, 2001, a 24-year-old Terence George Hanlon burnt down a Mosque 2km from my house. 

I was also friends with another boy, Andrew. He was a white Australian. We were friends. I went to his house one day and saw his parents. The next day, he came to me and told me, “Asians are taking over Australia.”

That was also news to me. Nobody bothered to tell me about this “invasion.” 

“How do you know?” I asked. 

“Haven’t you seen Chinatown? The Chinese are taking over,” he told me. From that day on, he looked at me with suspicion. “Sneaky fucking Asians,” the white boys would say.

I lived for four years in Milan, Italy. I had an Italian friend, Andrea. We were close friends. He’d invite me to his home in Brescia. 

“I saw these fucking Moroccans,” his friend told the group.

“We beat them good. Let’s go find some more negries,” another would say. 

Selfishly, I felt first, a concern for my safety. “Your friend knows I’m not white, right?” I asked my friend. 

“Yeah, but don’t worry. You’re not like them,” he told me. 

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not that kind of stranieri,” he told me. I didn’t know whether to be offended or scared. I was a model minority. 

They’d rile each other up. I can see the fear that they transform into aggression. They’d look for young black men walking alone at night so they could beat them up. 

“Go back to Africa!” They’d yell from their cars, driving by, throwing beer bottles at them. 

That was in 2006. It’s been many years. We were boys, but now as men, we no longer speak to one another. Guilt and shame is a difficult burden. Projection and narcissism to protect our ego is a poor substitute in times of turmoil. 

I respect and admire many aspects of the French culture and its constitution, to be guided by Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. I think there are values to secularism, democracy and freedom of speech. But when does freedom and liberty turn into fear-mongering and tyranny? How can we be of example and influence to our neighbors as opposed to using force or violence through propaganda? Where has the space for civil discussions and respectable disagreements gone?

France became the most popular Western country in the Muslim world in 2003, when President Chirac opposed, rightfully, the unlawful invasion of Iraq. But since then, France has fallen into line with the US-led neoliberal factory of nightmares to keep the machine pumping. 

Today, France has fallen to the least popular amongst the Muslim world. There has been an outpour of sensationalist and blanket statements backed up by false secularism by the same political forces responsible for causing the issues they created. 

Secularism is about the freedom to believe or not believe without outside pressure—a principle of separation of state from religious institutions. But in France, secularism has become an anti-Muslim weapon.

Scapegoating and hatred work as a temporary bandaid for the psyche, but they fail to resolve issues like unemployment, inflation, climate change and nuclear war. I hope we can find the strength to extend the hand of kindness to those who oppose us. 

Isn’t the true measure of our character revealed not in how we treat not just our friends, but enemies as well?