Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner message to Muslims: No suffering can justify terrorism
There are those who ask why more Muslims haven’t spoken out against terror, all the while covering their ears so as not to hear those of us who do.
After illegally seizing me from my family in Europe, the American government held me in an island prison for almost seven years. During those years, I experienced and observed unspeakable suffering and abuse. I was bewildered and angry; America was torturing and tormenting me for no reason at all. It was as though no one cared that I had never wished harm on anyone. My innocence made no difference.
My oldest son first learned I was in Guantanamo when his classmates, having read an article about me online, mocked him about my plight. Another of my sons, born a few months after I was interned, first met me on the telephone. I missed the first six years of his life. As much as anyone, I have earned a right to rage against an American government that acted out of fear and prejudice. A government that, as we saw with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ visit to Guantanamo last week in apparent preparation to refill it with prisoners, sadly has yet to demonstrate a capacity to learn from its mistakes.
And so I hope I have earned the right to be taken seriously when I say this, to any of my Muslim brothers and sisters, and to anyone else, contemplating violence: I beg of you, choose peace. Whatever complaints one might have about particular policies and politicians, and I assure you I have several, violence will only make matters worse.
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The bigots and fear-mongers, the Donald Trumps and Dick Cheneys, are emboldened and empowered by acts of terror. And no matter what you have been through, regardless of what hell you have been forced to endure, nothing could possibly justify propelling nails into a throng of teenagers, ramming a bus into a crowd, or flying a plane into a building. It is one thing to be upset, even enraged; it is another to be heartless. Neither Allah nor any god of any religion could ever support such cruelty to our fellow man.
I worry that this plea may fall on deaf ears, or rather, ears that are capable of hearing but unwilling to listen. And I wonder if my voice will also be ignored, as countless others have, by those who find it easier to think of all Muslims as bad.
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There are those who ask why more Muslims haven’t spoken out against terror, all the while covering their ears so as not to hear those of us who do. There are those who support unfair measures that prevent people from entering the United States because they are Muslim, and who defend or even promote Guantanamo. Those people, through their words and deeds, lend weight and voice to the extremists and drown out the rest of us. This is exactly what the extremists want.
But I am home again with my wife and family, and I have overcome far too much to give up hope now. Violence is not inevitable. I am a schoolteacher, and I know that children will only learn to hate if adults teach them to. Right now there are young Muslims deciding whether to hate the West, and young Westerners deciding whether to hate Islam. There are voices, including mine, urging them not to. Extremists and Islamophobes are trying to drown us out. Will we let them?
Mustafa Ait Idir, a computer science teacher in Sarajevo, was seized in Bosnia at the demand of the U.S. in October 2001, ordered released by two Bosnian courts, and illegally handed over to American forces who brought him to Guantanamo in January 2002. A U.S. judge ordered his release in 2008. Idir and Lakhdar Boumediene are co-authors of Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo. They were co-plaintiffs in the 2008 Boumediene v. Bush case before the Supreme Court, which gave Guantanamo prisoners access to federal courts.
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