Response to "Face to Face"

I listened to the stories of Golzar Kheiltash and Anjum Mir. They are both Muslim and were watching when the two planes hit the towers. One thing Mir said during one of her interviews that this was going to affect her child. He was not even a year old when the World Trade Center was hit. She knew that because they were Muslim, it wouldn't matter that he was only a baby at the time. That people would still treat him differently because of what happened that day.

During Kheiltash's interview she was telling us that she was at her college when the Trade Center was hit. She heard about it and ran to the student lounge because she knew they would have a television there. That was when she first saw all the images and videos of the crash. She watched as the people jumped out of the building and felt overwhelmed with grief. She then became aware of the people around her and started to feel claustrophobic. She realized how much this was going to impact her life at that exact moment. She could see the stereotypes that were going to evolve and what people were going to think or her and others like her. No later than a few seconds that she thought this a man a couple of feet from her said "They should just nuke the whole middle east."

The last account that I found interesting was Muhammed El Nasal's story. He went into work four days after the World Trade Center was hit with the airplanes. The first thing his co-workers said to him was "Hey Muhammed, why'd your cousins blow up the World Trade Center?" Then they said that his boss told them that he had to check Nasal for bombs when he came into work. Nasal thought the guys were just joking because they didn't really like their boss. Later Nasal's boss called him into the office and said that he had to check him for bombs. He meant it as a joke but Nasal was very offended and didn't think it was funny, especially since it was four days after the bombing.

All these stories were big eye openers for me. Being a white american and my family being white it obviously didn't affect us in the same way. I never realized how quickly it happened though. With the two accounts, Kheiltash and Nasal, it seemed very immediate when people started to stereotype and put them into categories. With Kheiltash someone not even five feet away from her mentioned bombing the middle east and with Nasal it was his co-workers. I can't possibly imagine the difficult obstacles that Muslims have to go through these days because of what happened at the Trade Center. Most of the Muslims in America are actually born in America and have nothing to do with the Middle East other than your ethnicity.