The Bell Tolls for Thee
When I was a teenager in Boston, I worked after school at Harvard Medical School in the old Physiology Department. I did menial work. I would run errands, do odd office work, or wash glassware in some laboratories. I came to know, in the head office, a true lady in the old sense of the word. She was the administrator to the head of the department and had plenty of responsibility. The secretaries of the department office held her in awe and considered her a small ogre, however just, to be frightened of. They never understood how she and I got along so well. There was a sense of equality between us that always made me remember Anne of Green Gables and her "kindred spirits". After my work was done, generally after normal office hours, I would sometimes go into her office and we would talk. She was Egyptian. But she spoke French, was Catholic, and had a French given name. She could speak Arabic, which she spoke with some friends in her childhood and on the streets, but she couldn't read it because she had been schooled in a French Catholic convent school. In Cairo. Blame it on Napoleon. She and her husband (a doctor) emigrated to the U.S. when Christians began to be unwelcome in Cairo. She was slightly younger than my mother, but still old enough to be my grandmother. If she still lives, she is probably a great-grandmother by now.
At that time, in the late eighties, Beirut was known as the center of the civil war in Lebanon. All I knew of it was what was on the news. Fights and clashes between Moslems and Christians. Division of the city. An enormous attack on a barracks and hundred of Marines dead. I thought it was something that would go on forever, like so much of the fighting in the Middle East. I remember one evening that Egyptian lady told me she had gone on summer trips to Beirut when she was a teenager. She recalled it as a lovely city by the sea and was very saddened by the war. She also mentioned that back then it was known as the Paris of the Middle East. It had been cosmopolitan and chic with beautiful buildings and people. She couldn't understand how it had all degraded into a civil war. She blamed the ever-growing Moslem radicals who wanted to ruin everything good she had ever known in the region she had grown up in.
Since then the civil war has ended and Beirut is being reconstructed. Slowly. The area of the world it is in is still not stable, and to return to its former self it needs people and confidence. Still, it is once more a city of families. And daily lives going about their business. Even if it is no longer a shadow of its former self, no longer the Paris of the Middle East. But even that seems to be too much for the radical idiots, who seem to want it to revert to the ruin-strewn mass of rubble it was only thirty years ago. Last Thursday evening at rush hour in the Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood of Beirut, people were shopping and heading home. An idiot decided that was a good time to kill himself and everyone around him, so he detonated a suicide bomb. You can imagine the carnage, similar to that in Paris, but worse because this was a bomb and not bullets. A father, Adel Termos, was walking with his daughter. They were spared. But then Mr. Termos saw another idiot going towards a mosque to kill more people. He threw himself on the idiot, who set off the explosive. Adel Termos and his daughter were killed, as were others around them, but not the hundreds that might have died had the second idiot reached his target.
All in all, over forty people died on the street in Beirut while they were going about their business, just like the innocents in Paris twenty-four hours later. More than 200 were wounded. Entire families, doctors on their way to their shift at the hospital, law students, teenagers working at a market to help out at home, normal people going about their normal business. The idiots hate anyone who is at peace. To them it doesn't matter if the people are Moslem or Christian. The idiots hate them all.
The deaths in Paris were horrifying. The deaths in the Paris of the Middle East were also horrifying. Both attacks were attacks on normal people just like us. We should remember that.
At that time, in the late eighties, Beirut was known as the center of the civil war in Lebanon. All I knew of it was what was on the news. Fights and clashes between Moslems and Christians. Division of the city. An enormous attack on a barracks and hundred of Marines dead. I thought it was something that would go on forever, like so much of the fighting in the Middle East. I remember one evening that Egyptian lady told me she had gone on summer trips to Beirut when she was a teenager. She recalled it as a lovely city by the sea and was very saddened by the war. She also mentioned that back then it was known as the Paris of the Middle East. It had been cosmopolitan and chic with beautiful buildings and people. She couldn't understand how it had all degraded into a civil war. She blamed the ever-growing Moslem radicals who wanted to ruin everything good she had ever known in the region she had grown up in.
Since then the civil war has ended and Beirut is being reconstructed. Slowly. The area of the world it is in is still not stable, and to return to its former self it needs people and confidence. Still, it is once more a city of families. And daily lives going about their business. Even if it is no longer a shadow of its former self, no longer the Paris of the Middle East. But even that seems to be too much for the radical idiots, who seem to want it to revert to the ruin-strewn mass of rubble it was only thirty years ago. Last Thursday evening at rush hour in the Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood of Beirut, people were shopping and heading home. An idiot decided that was a good time to kill himself and everyone around him, so he detonated a suicide bomb. You can imagine the carnage, similar to that in Paris, but worse because this was a bomb and not bullets. A father, Adel Termos, was walking with his daughter. They were spared. But then Mr. Termos saw another idiot going towards a mosque to kill more people. He threw himself on the idiot, who set off the explosive. Adel Termos and his daughter were killed, as were others around them, but not the hundreds that might have died had the second idiot reached his target.
All in all, over forty people died on the street in Beirut while they were going about their business, just like the innocents in Paris twenty-four hours later. More than 200 were wounded. Entire families, doctors on their way to their shift at the hospital, law students, teenagers working at a market to help out at home, normal people going about their normal business. The idiots hate anyone who is at peace. To them it doesn't matter if the people are Moslem or Christian. The idiots hate them all.
The deaths in Paris were horrifying. The deaths in the Paris of the Middle East were also horrifying. Both attacks were attacks on normal people just like us. We should remember that.
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