T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019| 11
to take cover behind a garbage con-
tainer. Raed also hid. When everything
had gone quiet, I emerged from my
hiding place and saw the two men who
had been standing right next to me
moments earlier lying on the ground in
a pool of blood. Raed was standing over
a body with a point-and- shoot camera.
We had both survived and the two men
had not. Their names were Ali Masri
and Moussa Zouki. I still can’t shake off
the memory of that day or how sense-
less their deaths were.
By the end of May 2008, I had had
enough of Beirut. Like the toxic fumes of
burning tires that constricted my lungs,
the conflict had become psychologically
suffocating. I decided to take a break
and enrolled at the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University in
New York City. When it was time for me
to leave for graduate school, Anthony
asked me to marry him and I said yes.
After graduating in June 2009, I
moved to Baghdad to work as a reporter
for The Washington Post. I was anxious
about my new job, and about working
with Anthony, who was widely consid-
ered the most successful foreign corre-
spondent covering the Middle East. I
fretted about the stories I would write
and those I would miss and whether
anyone would read anything I wrote at
all. Anthony, now my husband, was the
bureau chief. We had been married for a
year but hadn’t lived in the same city
yet. He was a great partner, in marriage
and at work. Together, we brainstormed
ideas, planned reporting trips, and
sounded out the best translations of
quotes from Arabic to English. On quiet
evenings, we watched American televi-
sion shows while eating pints of vanilla
ice cream.
It was easy to sometimes forget that
we were living in yet another country
deep in turmoil.
In January 2010, three bombs explod-
ed within minutes of one another in
three separate neighborhoods in the
city. The targets were hotels frequented
by foreign correspondents and busi-
nessmen. The third blast was close
enough to our house to shatter many of
our windows.
It had struck the Hamra Hotel, which
was across the street from the Washing-
ton Post building and home to many of
our friends and colleagues. Anthony
and I had left The Post in December and
joined the New York Times bureau in
Baghdad. I was seven months pregnant
that day, and for the first time in many
years, I did not want to go to the bomb-ing site. At that moment, I felt a bigger
commitment to motherhood than to any
news story.
By the end of 2010, Anthony and I,
along with our newborn son, Malik,
were living in Beirut, where Anthony
had been appointed the bureau chief for
The Times and I was a reporter. The
situation there and in the Arab world in
general — save for Iraq — was stable.
But on Dec. 17, 2010, a young fruit
vendor set himself on fire in a Tunisian
village following a dispute with the local
police. A rebellion soon broke out, and
protests then spread to Egypt, Libya,
Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. I covered
many of these events and whenever I
had to leave Beirut, I worried that I
might not return to see Malik.
On Feb. 4, 2011, I drove to Damascus
to cover a planned “Day of Rage” pro-
test for The Times and headed to the
Parliament building, where it was to be
held. But no one
showed up. “Syria is
the last country
where regime change
will occur,” a Syrian
political activist and
dissident told me
later that day. I didn’t
want to believe him.
Seven days later,
Anthony called me
from Cairo’s Tahrir
Square, where he was
on assignment for
The Times, so that I
could listen with him to the jubilation
that had erupted among protesters
when President Hosni Mubarak’s re-
gime was felled. I was in Beirut and he
wanted to share with me this epic mo-
ment in the history of the Arab world.
I sometimes think of Anthony’s death
as an unintended consequence of the
Arab revolts. In February 2012, he
sneaked into Syria for the second time
to interview armed rebels and opposi-
tion activists for The Times. The smug-
glers who agreed to take him arranged
to hike and travel by horseback across
the mountainous border between the
two countries. Anthony had asthma and
was allergic to horses, but he had his
inhalers and had never needed more
than that.
The last time I spoke to him was on
Feb. 14, 2012. He was in northern Syria
and called me from his satellite phone to
wish me a happy Valentine’s Day. He
said he was to leave Syria in a day or
two, again traveling by hiking and
horseback, and that the trip had been
the best one of his entire career. Malikand I traveled to Antakya on the night of
Feb. 16 to meet him.
Shortly before midnight, I was awak-
ened when my cellphone rang. It was
Jill Abramson, who was the executive
editor of The Times. “Anthony had a
fatal asthma attack,” she said. I re-
peated the sentence in my head, but it
took some time to understand what she
was trying to tell me.
I curled up on the bathroom floor and
cried. I wanted to scream but Malik was
asleep, and I didn’t want to startle him.
In her book about the death of her
husband, “The Year of Magical Think-
ing,” Joan Didion writes that “people
who have lost someone look naked
because they think themselves invisi-
ble.” Invisibility is a comforting feeling
when your heart is so heavy. After
Anthony died, I preferred places where
I knew no one and where no one knew
me.
This was more than seven years ago.
And yet on some days, it still feels as
raw as it did that night in Turkey. I quit
journalism, left my home in Beirut, and
moved thousands of miles away from
everyone I knew and everything famil-
iar. Motherhood has saved me from
making the wrong choices and forced
me to get out of bed when I had no ener-
gy, will or desire to do so. Along the way,
I became someone I don’t recognize. I
lost my balance and the discipline I once
had. Being a journalist and being in the
Middle East are both constant remind-
ers of my loss. I needed the distance
from both to be able to grieve and feel
alive again.
I often remember the phone conver-
sations I had with Anthony from Idlib
before he died. He listed all the reasons
the Syrian revolution would not suc-
ceed. Following his death, it became
clear that he was right about Syria and
that the Arab Spring had failed to realize
the dreams of Arabs to live in free and
democratic countries. Instead, it left
great losses, all senseless, including my
own.
When major events take place, we
tend to think of them in sweeping terms,
as movements involving masses of
people. When they pass, we move on
too. Only those who have lost a dear life
will carry the scarring from those times
and become defined by it.NADA BAKRIis a former reporter for The
New York Times. This article is adapted
from an essay that appears in the book,
“Our Women On the Ground: Essays by
Arab Women Reporting from the Arab
World.”What the Arab Spring cost me
That night
in Antakya,
I lost all hope.
I became
a widow.
And almost
instantly
I decided
to quit
journalism.B AKRI, FROM PAGE 9NASHVILLE Residents of a quiet work-
ing-class neighborhood in the Her-
mitage section of Nashville woke up
very early on July 22 to find officials
from Immigration and Customs En-
forcement trying to arrest one of their
own.
An unmarked pickup truck with
flashing red and blue lights had pulled
into the man’s driveway, blocking his
van. Two ICE agents armed with an
administrative warrant ordered the
man and his 12-year-old son to step out
of their vehicle. The man, who had
lived in the neighborhood for some 14
years, did exactly what the Tennessee
Immigrant Refugee and Rights Coali-
tion urges immigrants to do in such
cases: He stayed put.
An administrative warrant gives
officials permission to detain a suspect
but it does not allow them to enter his
house or vehicle. The ICE officials in
that Nashville driveway were appar-
ently counting on the man not to know
that. With an administrative warrant,
“there’s no judicial review, no magis-
trate review, no probable cause,” Dan-
iel Ayoade Yoon, a lawyer later sum-
moned to the house by immigration
activists, told The Nashville Scene. He
told WTVF, “They were saying, ‘If you
don’t come out, we’re going to arrest
you, we’re going to arrest your 12-year-
old son.’ ” The administrative warrant
they held did not give them the author-
ity to do either.
Neighbors witnessing the standoff
were appalled. “We was like, ‘Oh my
God, are you serious?’ ” Angela Glass
told WPLN. “And that’s when every-
body got mad and was like, ‘They don’t
do nothing, they don’t bother nobody,
you haven’t got no complaints fromthem. Police have never been called
over there. All they do is work and take
care of their family and take care of the
community.’ ”
Another neighbor, Stacey Farley, told
Newsweek, “The family don’t bother
nobody, they work every day, they
come home, the kids jump on their
trampoline. It’s just a community.”
More neighbors joined the scene and
urged the man and his son not to listen
to the agents. As temperatures rose in
the hot Tennessee sun, they brought
water and food and cool rags. They
refilled the van’s gas tank so the man
could keep his air-conditioner running.
“We stuck together like neighbors are
supposed to do,” Felishadae Young told
WZTV.
ICE officials sum-
moned the Nashville
police for backup,
but the officers who
arrived stood nearby
but did not inter-
vene. State law
prohibits any Ten-
nessee community
from designating itself a sanctuary
city, but the police here don’t get in-
volved in civil immigration cases.
“We’re not here to enforce any federal
script,” Sgt. Noah Smith told The Ten-
nessean. “We’re just here if anything
major happens.”
More than four hours later, ICE
agents finally abandoned their efforts
and drove away, though everyone on
the scene expected them to return.
Neighbors and activists linked arms to
form a human chain from the van to
the door of the house. The man and his
son dashed inside. A woman came to
the door and in Spanish tearfully
thanked bystanders for their help.
Shortly thereafter, the family fled.
This story of one undocumented
family in one hardworking neighbor-
hood of one growing Southern city
generated national attention, witharticles appearing in outlets as dis-
parate as Essence, The Washington
Post, The Miami Herald, The Cut, CBS
News and The New York Post. There’s
a reason for the widespread interest.
Small as this story might appear to
be when balanced against the great
travesty of American immigration
policy today, it nevertheless gives us
hope. It is the story of David and Goli-
ath, of Hansel and Gretel, of Robin
Hood. It is the story of weakness de-
feating strength. It reminds us, in this
cynical age, of what is still good in us,
of what we are yet capable of, even
against great odds.
From our earliest days, we feel the
suffering of our own kind. A tiny babe
in arms, hearing another infant’s wail-
ing, will begin to cry for no reason
other than shared distress. Instinc-
tively we understand the truth of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s state-
ment in his great “Letter From Birm-
ingham Jail”: “Injustice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere.”
So we salute the heroes of Hermitage
— the ordinary people who, like the rest
of us, are absorbed by their own wor-
ries, contending with their own trou-
bles, but who nevertheless turned from
their own lives to protect their neigh-
bor, to shield him from the lies and
tricks of the very government that was
formed to protect his rights. We cele-
brate their courage in the face of un-
warranted authority, and we take heart
from their commitment to justice. We
replay the video again and again to
watch them link arms, to watch them
calling out words of comfort and en-
couragement. We remember a truth
that has lately been too easy to forget:
We belong to one another.MARGARET RENKLcovers flora, fauna,
politics and culture in the American
South. She is the author of the book
“Late Migrations: A Natural History of
Love and Loss.”Margaret Renkl
Contributing WriterNeighbors formed a human chain to stop an ICE deportation in Hermitage, Tenn., last month.UGC/NASHVILLE NOTICIAS, VIA REUTERSICE came calling. They said no.
It is the story
of David and
Goliath, of
Hansel and
Gretel, of
Robin Hood.opinion
with unalienable rights. We amended
the Constitution after slaves were freed
to make clear that black citizens were
entitled to equal rights and equal treat-
ment.
Our problem was what laid under-
neath all that: the way things really
were, despite what we taught in civics
class.
Cultures are dysfunctional when the
underlying assumptions don’t line up
with the values we claim to hold dear.
For a very long time, America was
seriously out of alignment. But we
slowly worked to change the underly-
ing assumptions. It became unaccept-
able to refer to black people by racist
names, to utter racist tropes, to run for
office on racist themes. It took decades,
but we got to a place where it generally
wasn’t tolerated, in board rooms or in
bars. Leaders who said racist things
were often ostracized, forced to apolo-
gize, to say publicly they were deeply
sorry that they acted in a way that
offended our culture.
Even if they secretly harbored racist
thoughts, elected officials sent a mes-
sage that, whatever our differences,
this kind of crap wasn’t O.K. Racists
watched them closely for the wink, the
signal that they didn’t mean it. When
they didn’t get the signal, the racism
was suppressed by a new cultural
norm. Racism didn’t go away, of course;
the soup still bubbled. But the control
rods of our culture, our underlying
assumptions, reduced the danger.
Today, the control rods are being
lifted. With each racist assault — on a
judge, an athlete, a country, a member
of Congress, or a city — and with each
kind word for “very fine people on both
sides,” our president allows the stew to
boil and radiate more dangerously.
You can feel the effect: in the F.B.I.’s
burgeoning caseload of hate crimes and
white supremacist investigations, and
in a stadium full of Americans who,
even knowing they are on television,chant in unison, “Send her back.” That
burst of negative energy was met, not
by efforts to control it, but by 13 sec-
onds of presidential silence, the same
silence that his fellow Republicans have
adopted.
Our president thinks he is doing
something clever. He lifts the control
rods for a calculated and deeply cynical
purpose: to harness the political ener-
gy unleashed. It will heat his re-election
bid, he likely thinks. But unconstrained,
it will damage the nation, in all direc-
tions. Only fools believe they can ride
the gamma rays of hate.
According to a “manifesto” widely
attributed to him, the Texas terrorist
who killed at least 22 people in El Paso
on Saturday wasn’t directly motivated
by Donald Trump.
But he is a horrific
example of what can
happen when the
control rods are
lifted.
Every American
president, knowing
what lies deep within
our country, bears a
unique responsibility to say loudly and
consistently that white supremacy is
illegitimate, that encouraging a politics
of racial resentment can spawn vio-
lence, and that violence aimed at peo-
ple by virtue of their skin color is ter-
rorism.
Mr. President, because of what you
have done, you owe us more than con-
dolences sent via Twitter. You must
stop trying to unleash and exploit the
radioactive energy of racism.
You hold the biggest control rod of
all. You must push it back into place, for
all our sakes. The vast majority of
Americans believe the core ideals of
our founding documents and we expect
our culture to reflect those ideals. Show
us you believe in them, too.Trump exploits racism
C OMEY, FROM PAGE 1The U.S.
president
thinks he
is doing
something
clever.JAMES COMEYwas director of the F.B.I.
from 2013 to 2017.material support to designated foreign
terrorist entities like Al Qaeda. But for
domestic terrorist organizations, ma-
terial support charges are impossible
because there is no mechanism for
designating domestic terrorist groups
as such. Moreover, domestic terror
charges are harder to prove and carry
penalties inadequate to the gravity of
the offense. Even the Oklahoma City
bomber, Timothy McVeigh, the worst
domestic terrorist in the nation’s his-
tory, was not charged with any terror-
ism offense for precisely this reason.
Many of our allies have already
changed their own laws to allow more
robust investigations of domestic
terrorists. Britain’s domestic intelli-
gence agency, MI5, for example, can
now use many of the same methods
against domestic extremism that they
have long deployed against Al Qaeda,
thanks to laws passed following 9/11.
The F.B.I. should follow MI5’s lead,
with appropriate safeguards for our
constitutional freedoms. But this can
happen only if Congress updates our
post-9/11 legislation to allow domestic
terror groups to be designated in the
same way as foreign ones. This will
allow our law-enforcement agencies
access to the full suite of monitoring
tools and our prosecutors the ability to
bring meaningful charges for aiding
domestic terrorism.
Twenty years ago, we grossly under-
estimated the rising threat of Islamist
terrorism. That inattention cost us
dearly on Sept. 11, 2001. We cannot
afford to wait for the white-suprema-
cist equivalent.Jihadis and
supremacists
S OUFAN, FROM PAGE 9ALI H. SOUFANis a former F.B.I. special
agent and the author, most recently, of
“Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of
Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic
State.”Order the International Edition today at
nytimes.com/discover
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