A personal essay about growing up in the shadow of 9/11 in the Middle East.
But, watching those planes fly into the buildings was different.
If you ask me who the Secretary of State and Defense Secretary is right now, I need a moment to think. But, back then, with my father playing CNN on a loop everyday, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld were household names. In the UAE, I watched movies, went bowling, and sat in food courts alongside men, who looked like those shackled at Guantanamo Bay. I never once felt unsafe in the 20 years I lived in the Middle East. The very women branded as oppressed I looked up to, I aspired to be like — they were my teachers, my aunties, my mother.all of a sudden, the people I knew, the communities I grew up with became the enemy.