CDC panel of advisers supports broad rollout
A boy plays at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum during the commemoration the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.LAist reporter Yusra Farzan looks back on how growing up post 9/11 in the United Arab Emirates led her to a career in journalism.
Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The attacks in New York City, Arlington, Va., and Shanksville, Pa., killed nearly 3,000 people.all of a sudden, the people I knew, the communities I grew up with became the enemy," Farzan writes. In America, a culture of surveillance and othering came to define the American Muslim experience.The family WhatsApp group pinged this past Sunday night with a message from my father, who had sent aI was confused — it was not my mother’s death anniversary and there was no recent death in the family. Then I glanced at the calendar: it was already 9/11 in Sri Lanka. When the two planes crashed into the World Trade Center 22 years ago, I was around 8,700 miles away at my grandmother’s funeral in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I was 11 years old wearing a black skirt and purple button-down shirt with a black chiffon shawl loosely wrapped around my head, wondering if my father would make it to his mother’s funeral. He was working in Dubai at the time and since mobile phones weren’t as widely available then, it was after work hours when my father got the news that his mother had passed. And under Muslim beliefs, we bury our dead within 24 hours of their death. My father did make the funeral, and we buried my grandmother on September 12. While we passed around Marie biscuits and cloudy lumps of sugar crystals, America was reeling from one of the biggest terror events of the 21st century, one that would in time profoundly impact foreign policy and change life as they knew it for American Muslims. Little did I know the events taking place in New York would inform my career choice and influence how I report. Yet, at the time, I only truly understood what had happened a few days after the funeral because for my Sri Lankan Muslim family, when there is a death in the family we turn off the TV for three days. And this was before the age of social media. Growing up in the era of the Sri Lankan civil war, I was no stranger to bomb blasts and suicide bombers. My first memory of one was when I was 6, watching on TV as plumes of black smoke quickly took over the sky while people scampered away from the site of the Central Bank bombing in Colombo. With four journalists in my immediate family and my father working for a newspaper, I was de-sensitized to the news pretty early on.Maybe it was the sheer audacity of it? Maybe it was seeing the Bin Laden name at construction sites quite often as a kid in Dubai and the disbelief that someone from this family could commit such a heinous crime? Maybe it was because this was all we heard about on the news or read about? If you ask me who the Secretary of State and Defense Secretary is right now, I need a moment to think. But, back then, with my father playing CNN on a loop everyday, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld were household names. Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I also became hyper aware of how American media was portraying the Middle East; the very place that offered my parents a safe space to raise their children away from the terrors of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I have a complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia, where I was born, and the UAE, where I have lived the longest. But in the media I saw a place I did not recognize from my own experiences: an unsafe, backward, almost barbaric place where women are oppressed and locked away by men who are terrorists.Yes, some countries in the Middle East still have a long way to go in terms of affording human rights to all residents. America present and past has its own bad history. In the UAE, I watched movies, went bowling, and sat in food courts alongside men, who looked like those shackled at Guantanamo Bay. I never once felt unsafe in the 20 years I lived in the Middle East. The very women branded as oppressed I looked up to, I aspired to be like — they were my teachers, my aunties, my mother.It wasn’t until I was 18, living in Malaysia, that I fully comprehended how 9/11 had shaped my formative years. Wanting to escape a future in the sciences, I completed the Ontario Secondary School Diploma in Malaysia. My teacher, Ms. Sutter, showed us a video in our “World Issues” class about the media’s role in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. I watched how the words “weapons of mass destruction” were repeated, over and over again. Television channels ran the story, without fact-checking. Muslims — and the Arab world — became the enemy.In 2017, a few months before I boarded a flight to LAX to begin life here, a former colleague told me I should change my name and remove my headscarf so I could have it easy. His name was Amir but he went as Alex when he was in America. The culture of surveillance, the othering, has defined the American Muslim experience (read about how it affected my friend Salma in this
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