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Last Updated: May 24th, 2006 - 09:47:39 |
While the name Zacarias Moussaoui may be known to millions, it is highly unlikely that
millions of people know of his origins, and what kind of forces formed his world view and perspectives that led to the death and destruction of 9-11.
Three years ago, the progressive New York-based publisher, Seven Stories, released a slim volume written by the brother of Zacarias, Abd Samad Moussaoui, who told the tale of what growing up in southern France meant for the North African family.
If ever one wanted to see a non-Muslim family, the Moussaouis were it.
Their mother, Aicha, never taught the boys to speak Arabic, but as Abd Samad recalls it, on a visit back to their ancestral land, Morocco, friends and relatives would express shock and dismay that the Moussaoui boys couldn't speak Arabic. "Meskeen!", they would say, "Poor things!" Their mother would respond proudly, "... [T]hey're right little French boys, those two."
In the book, Zacarias, My Brother: The Making of a Terrorist, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), Abd Samad Moussaoui told of how being born in France, and speaking only the French tongue, didn't equate to feeling, or being treated as French by other French people.
Abd Samad's recollections are rife with alienation, both from the land of their birth (France), and from the land of their ancestry, Morocco. They knew no prayers, nor Islamic history.
As the explosions in the French suburbs showed us recently, they were not alone in their alienation.
But what radicalized Zacarias, Abd Samad insists, more than anything else, was the Gulf War. Abd Samad writes:
"Student debates inevitably gravitated not only to the Gulf War, but also to the situation in Palestine, and the civil war in Algeria. Decisive conflicts for all Muslims throughout the world. For hours we talked about the legitimacy of the intervention in Iraq. For us, Saddam Hussein had no right to invade a country the way he had; but neither was
anyone entitled to massacre the Iraqi people in response. We were shocked by the 'war show,' which was so overhyped by the media, and in such a one-sided way. The so-called surgical strikes sickened us." [p. 80]
According to Abd Samad, the 1st Gulf War was a radicalizing force in the life and mind of Zacarias Moussaoui, and for many others. It soured them, not just on the US, but on France as well. Abd Samad wrote:
"The war crystallized feelings against American imperialism, political and economic. Zac, myself, and our friends felt that the France that sent in troops to fight alongside the Americans was not our France."
Abd Samad believes that was the trigger to the man Zacarias Moussaoui
would later become. He writes:
"I think it was at that particular moment that Zacarias started to feel that he belonged to the 'blacks,' whereas people of French extraction were 'whites.' He became convinced that the French are racists. That generalization didn't scare him."
War, by its very nature, opens the mind to ideas that would've been unthinkable before. But, the war, waged as it was, as a 'war against tyranny' in defense of princes (who happened to be oil-rich!), embittered young people in France who found hypocrisies all around them when they tried to get a job, or tried to go to school.
There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Moussaouis, stewing in the banliuees, or Black suburbs of Paris, and other major cities.
If denied nationality, and all that this means, is there any wonder that they would wonder, and wondering, seek other sites which promise to make them whole?
The flames that lit the skies of Clichy-Sous-Bois still are simmering in young souls.
The flames lit decades ago in a boy named Zacarias still simmer to this day. It matters little whether the Imperial Court sends a man to death for a crime at which he wasn't present.
The flames leap, from match to match, until the real causes are addressed.
That, it seems, is still some ways away.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mr. Jamal's recent book features a chapter on the remarkable women who helped build and defendthe Black Panther Party: *WE WANT FREEDOM:A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from South End Press (http://www.southendpress.org
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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