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As Qatar Emir Visits Canada, Just What is Doha Up To?
By HENRY SREBRNIK (Sept. 19/24) Qatar…home of Hamas leaders, Al-Jazeera, host of soccer’s 2022 World Cup, and wealth beyond measure. And everyone’s favourite centre for “negotiations” to end the war Hamas unleashed on Israel a year ago. It’s become everyone’s go-to country, a veritable “light unto the nations.”
However, as the 1946 song “Put the Blame on Mame” has it, in a different context, of course, “That’s the story that went around, but here’s the real lowdown” … about this duplicitous Persian Gulf emirate.
Even before the Gaza war began, there was an upswing of commentary celebrating a shift in the policies and behavior of Qatar: away from promoting and subsidizing radical Islamist groups, and towards “deconfliction” and moderation.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the country’s emir, has been basking in the glow of international approval, depicting the country as a global influencer and peacemaker. The Qataris want to make themselves indispensable.
It plays into Doha’s ongoing attempts to create an illusion of rebranding as a moderating actor in the Middle East and beyond, pushed by various propagandists in the West on Qatar’s payroll, including more than a few American university centres and departments awash in Qatari money.
The emir and other officials spent two days in Canada Sept. 17-19, meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and cabinet ministers. The Gaza war was on the agenda, of course. Indeed, Jewish-Canadian leaders urged Trudeau to criticize him over his patronage of Hamas. But being able to tap into Qatar’s wealth via business and trade was more likely on Trudeau’s mind.
Qatar has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at $110,000 a year. And while its total population is some 2.7 million, most of these are guest workers, including European lawyers and consultants at the top of the scale, and at the bottom South Asian labourers. Only some 313,000 are native Qataris, the ones who benefit from the riches it derives from the sale of oil and gas.
The Peninsula, an English language daily newspaper published in Doha, ran an article on the occasion of the emir’s visit by noting the expanding trade and investment cooperation between Canada and Qatar, especially with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June between the Qatar Financial Center and the Canada Arab Business Council, a non-profit organization that aims to enhance trade and investment relations between Canada and the Arab world.
The MoU “aims to establish an integrated framework for cooperation and coordination in specific sectors through joint initiatives and the exchange of information and expertise, with a focus on stimulating growth and promoting innovation in areas such as financial services and professional business services.” Ahmed Hussen, Minister of International Development participated in a signing ceremony with Lolwah bint Rashid Al-Khater, Qatar’s Minister of State for International Cooperation.
More than 9,000 Canadian expatriates live in Qatar, working in Canadian and Qatari companies and institutions. From January to July, Canada exported goods valued at $103.45 million to Qatar, while Qatar’s exports to Canada amounted to $90.27 million.
There is also a partnership in academic programs, as the University of Calgary has been in Doha since 2006, offering a Bachelor of Nursing program, along with the College of the North Atlantic, which transformed into the University of Doha for Science and Technology. Furthermore, there are several Doha-based schools that offer Canadian curricula.
In their meeting, Sheikh Tamim expressed his aspiration to work with Trudeau to advance their bilateral cooperation across multiple sectors in order to “contribute to enhancing regional and global peace and stability.” Bilateral relations between the two countries were discussed, especially in the fields of investment, economy and international cooperation, “in addition to developments and situations in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Qatar has been very successful in its efforts to shape public opinion in Canada, as well as in the far more important United States. The amount of money that Qatar has poured into universities, schools, educational organizations, think tanks, and media across America, and the number of initiatives that Qatar uses to influence American opinion, is overwhelming.
According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar is the largest foreign donor to American universities. It found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. They include Carnegie Mellon University, Ivy League Cornell University, Georgetown University in Washington, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Texas A & M. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities. (Texas A&M decided earlier this year to shutter its branch campus in Qatar.)
Georgetown University in Qatar, for instance, was hosting the “Reimagining Palestine” conference Sept. 20-22. The event engages scholars, experts, and the public “in timely and relevant dialogues on globally significant issues,” according to a description of the gathering. One of the speakers, Wadah Khanfar, “was active in the Hamas movement and was one of its most prominent leaders in the movement’s office in Sudan,” the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, tells us. In the months following Oct. 7, the campus has hosted a variety of seemingly anti-Israel events.
Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University, whose journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, to establish a school of journalism in Qatar. The Northwestern University campus in Qatar and Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera in 2013 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “further facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between two of Qatar’s foremost media organizations.” Are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar?
Qatari state-financed entities also often fund individual scholars or programs in the United States without official disclosure or being directly traceable to a government source, thus avoiding public scrutiny. For example, Ivy League Yale University disclosed only $284,668 in funding from Qatar between 2010 and 2022. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in a report released in June, though, found that this amount reflected only a small fraction of the money and services the university and its scholars had in fact received over that period. The most common channel for hard-to-track Qatari support for Yale came from individual research grants originating from the Qatar National Research Fund, and their report found 11 Yale-linked QNRF grants which came to at least $15,925,711.
Recent research from the Network Contagion Research Institute indicated that at least 200 American universities illegally withheld information about approximately $13 billion in Qatari contributions. Also, according to the report, from 2015 to 2020 institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.
Overall, the report found that “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
Much of Doha’s engagement with the world is run out of the Qatar Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition (MICE) Development Institute (QMDI), which promotes Qatar as a good place for business. The annual Doha Forum gathers major policymakers from around the world.
Qatar’s influence-buying strategies are a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power. The relationship between one of Washington, D.C.’s top think tanks and Qatar, for example, began in 2002, when the emirate underwrote a Doha conference featuring then Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, at the time the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. (Hamad oversaw Qatar’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund until 2013.) In 2007, Brookings followed up by opening a centre on Doha. It didn’t end well. In 2021 the institute ended its relationship with Qatar amidst an ongoing FBI investigation.
Still, Washington treads carefully when it comes to criticizing Qatar. It’s not just about money. After all, the Al-Udaid Air Base is home to the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), and the country is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. In fact, Washington’s relationship with Qatar is so close that in 2022 the White House officially designated the emirate a “major non-NATO ally.” The Qataris, realizing that their very existence would be threatened were the U.S. to relocate its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, in January hastened to nail down the agreement for another decade.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told the Jewish News Service (JNS) that the Gulf country is more dangerous than Hamas or Hezbollah since it is extraordinarily wealthy and thus in a position to influence U.S. administrations.
Qatar has for many years been involved in financing the campaigns of the Democratic Party, he claimed, “especially Hillary Clinton’s campaign” in 2016. He added that former U.S. President Bill Clinton is known to have flown to Qatar to bring back suitcases full of cash.
According to Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Qatar has portrayed itself as “indispensable to U.S. interests in the Middle East, including negotiations with the Taliban, reconstruction aid for past Gaza conflicts, and building the massive Al-Udeid base for U.S. forces.”
Yet although it hosts the Pentagon’s regional command, Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords and African insurgents. Doha housed the Taliban’s political office before that group returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Beginning in 2012, the Israeli government allowed Qatar to deliver cash to Gaza. Over the next nine years, Qatar provided $1.5 billion. Prior to the outbreak of the present conflict, Doha subsidized Hamas to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar bought Egyptian fuel that Cairo then shipped into Gaza, where Hamas sold it and pocketed its revenue. Another third went to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third paid the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
The leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Mashaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, who was chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau until assassinated by Israel in July, have been regular guests in Doha, living in luxury. (The emir sat in the front row with mourners during Haniyeh’s funeral in Doha.) Qatar has defended Hamas’s presence in the country.
“This was started to be used as a way of communicating and bringing peace and calm into the region, not to instigate any war,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last October. “And this is the purpose of that office.” Blinken seemed to buy this. At a press conference in Doha in February, he asserted that “we’re very fortunate to have Qatar as a partner.”
As far back as 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza, Qatar recognized that “adopting” the group would be a worthwhile opportunity: connections with Hamas in Gaza grants Qatar influence and status in the Middle East and beyond. In addition, they bolster the popular Arab perception of Doha as working for the Palestinian cause. In 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza, pledging $400 million to Hamas. At the same time, the Qataris became the exclusive mediators between Israel and Hamas.
The U.S. has accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). But at the same time the Qataris are an important intermediary between America and Iran. Doha has enjoyed good relations with the Biden administration, which it helped in the American hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.
While organized as a private company, the Al-Jazeera television network is the voice of Qatar’s regime. Founded in 1996 and financed by the then-emir of Qatar, it has described terrorist attacks that killed Israeli non-combatants as martyrdom operations and even posted articles describing Israel as “the Zionist entity.” For years, Al-Jazeera aired all of Osama bin Laden’s speeches. The late Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was based in Doha and for years hosted a prime-time program on the network. The war on Israel was declared on Al-Jazeera by Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif last October 7. Its operations in Israel were finally terminated by Jerusalem in May.
Qatar has been using the immense wealth it has accumulated to turn Al-Jazeera into an international media conglomerate, spreading Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, Hamas’ original sponsor, on a global scale. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the cleric Hassan al-Banna as a reaction to his perception that the Muslim world had become week in relation to the West. The royal family of Qatar has since been using the Muslim Brotherhood to minimize political opposition against them. In exchange for allowing the Brotherhood to use the country as a base for its international operations, the Brotherhood makes sure that there is no political threat based on organized religion against the Qatari monarchy.
A major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members — Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — imposed an embargo on Qatar from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood.
Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. The London-based daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in June published an article entitled “War Criminal Blinken Wages Diplomatic Campaign to Eliminate Palestinian Resistance and Buy Time for Israeli War in Gaza.”
Qatar is not a neutral agent, despite its attempts to portray itself as such. Time and again, it has supported the region’s most radical nations and paramilitaries, all to the detriment of American and Western interests. Its malign influence activities the United States reflect the broader issue of foreign manipulation in America’s political landscape.
“Qatar has been playing a dual role since the beginning of the Gaza war. On the one hand, it is a well-known supporter of Hamas, and even finances it with a lot of money, and on the other hand, it is trying to help in the deal for the release of the Israeli hostages,” remarked Dr. Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in April. But the U.S. relationship with Qatar will continue as long as the American government finds it useful in the on-again off-again negotiations to have Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates
(JTA) — J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, announced that it will spend $3 million to defeat a handful of Republican candidates backed by AIPAC, joining the plethora of progressive groups targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this election year.
Such an attack campaign is an unusual initiative for J Street, which typically endorses candidates but does not target opponents on the basis of an AIPAC endorsement. Until now, according to J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, the likelier scenario for his organization was finding its endorsed candidates on the defensive against AIPAC’s spending.
“It’s a new era for us,” Ben-Ami said in an interview. In 2022, J Street targeted an AIPAC backed candidate — but only after AIPAC barraged the J Street endorsed candidate with negative spending.
In a statement, J Street said that this will be the group’s largest super PAC investment in its history, referring to political action committees that can raise unlimited funds but are forbidden from coordinating with campaigns.
The $3 million will be spent on ads targeting Republican Rep. Mike Collins, who is running for U.S. Senate in Georgia against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, and a handful of incumbents: Ohio Rep. Max Miller, who is running for reelection amid allegations of domestic abuse, which he denies; Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden; Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Mackenzie; and Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
Ben-Ami said J Street targeted those particular candidates in part because they each face competitive races as the Democrats look to take control of the House and Senate and they have ideological distance from J Street. Many of them were also connected to the movement to deny and overturn the 2020 election results, Ben-Ami said.
J Street’s campaign comes as AIPAC’s brand has become increasingly toxic among voters, and as a growing number of Democratic politicians cross its red line of supporting conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. J Street’s position, meanwhile, has recently drifted toward supporting a phasing-out of military aid to Israel in 2028.
AIPAC blasted the campaign in a post on X. “Is this from J Street or Justice Democrats?” AIPAC wrote, referring to the progressive organization that has increasingly aligned with pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“A dark money super PAC spending millions to defeat pro-Israel candidates and lie about AIPAC,” the group wrote. “Not a word about helping elect pro-Israel candidates further exposes the difference between J Street and actual pro-Israel organizations.”
AIPAC has been a heavy spender since it launched its super PAC, United Democracy Project, ahead of the 2022 midterms, and is the top outside spender in this election cycle, according to Open Secrets. A number of anti-AIPAC, pro-Palestinian groups have emerged over the past year to counter the pro-Israel lobbying group’s spending.
Unlike those groups, J Street and AIPAC have some overlap in which candidates they back: Both groups endorsed moderate, pro-Israel Democrats such as Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Dan Goldman. J Street’s super PAC has also previously targeted individual candidates for their AIPAC endorsement, such as Rep. Haley Stevens in 2022, citing AIPAC’s donations from right-wing megadonors.
An AIPAC spokesperson wrote that it is “disappointing, but not surprising, that J Street continues to amplify lies about our community.”
“AIPAC members are focused on helping elect Democrats and Republicans who will strengthen the U.S.-Israel partnership, while J Street is focused on turning support for the Jewish state into a partisan political football,” said AIPAC’s spokesperson.
Ben-Ami said this year’s campaign is not about “the relationship between us and AIPAC,” but is rather about emboldening candidates who may otherwise worry that they will be up against AIPAC’s war chest.
“We are very conscious that there are many candidates who are afraid of what AIPAC might be able to do politically, and therefore adopt positions and say things about policy because they are afraid, and their fear and intimidation is holding them back,” Ben-Ami said.
Now, he said, J Street is putting “the shoe on the other foot.”
“If you are going to oppose American democracy and provide carte blanche to this Israeli government, then you need to be afraid,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany’s far-right AfD, riding state win, targets more gains in elections from east to west
(JTA) — Germany’s far-right, riding high after winning an eastern state, seeks to capitalize on its momentum in a series of upcoming elections — starting with municipal voting this weekend, followed by two closely watched state contests.
The first test for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes Sunday in municipal elections in the western state of Lower Saxony. A week later, the AfD has its sights on state elections in the capital, Berlin, and the Baltic coast state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The AfD beat out other parties in Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6 with 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 state parliament seats, falling just short of a majority and marking Germany’s greatest far-right victory in a state election since World War II.
“From previous elections, we know that the AfD is currently able to mobilize almost totally its own constituency and potential voters, while its democratic competitors have much more problems,” said Gideon Botsch, the head of the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Unit on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at Potsdam University.
While polls do not predict the next state election results will match the historic win in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD currently leads other parties in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with about 35% of the vote. And in Berlin, long a stronghold of Germany’s political left, the AfD is jockeying with the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-wing Linke for first place, with all three polling around 20%.
The AfD, a nationalist, anti-immigrant party whose leaders have proposed rejecting Germany’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust, has regularly topped nationwide opinion polls for the past year. In surveys asking Germans which party they would choose if federal elections were held “this Sunday,” the AfD often receives the highest results, Botsch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The AfD has built a dedicated and growing base, said Botsch. Its popularity signals frustration with the mainstream parties in power, particularly the CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, amid a sluggish economy. The AfD is especially popular in eastern Germany, where voters are poorer and hit hard by high energy prices exacerbated by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
The AfD is likely to perform more weakly in the west, where Lower Saxony will hold a municipal election on Sunday. The party has stronger influence in the east, and Germany’s municipal elections tend to hinge more on well-known figures from established parties, said Roger Stöcker, a political scientist at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. Still, even if the AfD doesn’t transform governments, Stöcker said that making inroads to further entrench itself in Lower Saxony would be “a strategically significant success.”
“It’s conceivable that the AfD wins a town hall or a county administration here and there or strengthens its presence in local councils, expanding its local base,” said Stöcker.
The three upcoming elections are being closely watched for signs of the AfD’s wider-scale momentum, said Daniel Schuster, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office.
“Taken together, these elections can help show whether Saxony-Anhalt was an exceptionally strong eastern result or part of a broader national expansion of the AfD’s electoral base,” said Schuster.
Remko Leemhuis, the director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations, added that residents will feel the effects of the AfD’s success even if it falls short of its victory in Saxony-Anhalt. A “very strong AfD result,” short of managing to enter government coalitions, would still “raise serious concerns” for Jewish residents about the party’s influence, said Leemhuis.
Residents in Saxony-Anhalt are waiting to see the ramifications of the AfD’s election victory. Without an outright majority, the party needs partners to join a coalition. Its nationalist agenda in the region includes teaching children less about Hitler, banning Pride flags in public buildings and requiring artists and cultural organizations to sign a declaration that they will not “disparage Germany and its culture” if they seek state funding.
State governments also control domestic policing and parts of the judiciary. The AfD could use its power in these areas to “put pressure on minorities it dislikes,” including immigrants, Muslims and Jews who are identified with Holocaust remembrance, said Stöcker. At the same time, the AfD could direct policing and intelligence away from right-wing extremism in Saxony-Anhalt, which recorded the second-highest number of right-wing extremist crimes per capita of Germany’s 16 states last year, Leemhuis said.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt marked a “watershed moment” in German politics, according to Roland Abold, the managing director of Infratest Dimap, a German election research institute. Abold said that the result heaped pressure on Merz and the federal government, as “calls for a change in political direction and a reassessment of cooperation with the AfD are likely to intensify.”
The CDU for now is standing behind Merz, the most unpopular chancellor in modern German history after 16 months in power. But if the CDU faces further heavy defeats in the upcoming elections, questions about Merz as the party’s leader could escalate, said Stöcker.
The AfD already has its eyes on his job. Alice Weidel, the national AfD’s co-chair, announced on Monday that she wants the party to win “at least 40% of the vote” in Germany’s next federal election in 2029.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, said in the same press conference that his goal was “very clear.”
“As perhaps the next Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, I need a Federal Chancellor Alice Weidel here in Berlin, so that we can write here history side by side,” said Siegmund.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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