Talk to an Iraqi

I am blessed and honored to call Haider Hamza Abdulrazaq my friend.  Each of the past three years, he has taken time from his busy schedule as a PhD candidate, Rhodes Scholar, Program Officer at Open Society Foundations, and award-winning combat photo journalist to share a bit of his story with my Social Justice and Peacemaking students at NYU.  He shares photos he took as an embedded photo journalist with ABC News during the "Shock and Awe" war in Iraq. They are graphic. They are horrific. They are beautiful. They are powerful and profound.

They are challenging and  invite my students and me to examine the devastation and destruction that is war. They humanize the Iraqi people and remind us of the real cost of war and violence.

They remind us that the children and the people of Iraq, Babylon, are beautiful, that they have lived in the cradle of civilization for thousands of years and have given the world some of its most sacred and precious art and culture.

He invites us, in the spirit of great peacemakers like Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr.), to look and listen deeply to the voices of our "enemy," to the voices of the voiceless, to the voices of those who, on both sides, every side, are the victims of war and violence.

Haider leads by example.  After graduating from Baghdad University in 2006, Haider won a Fulbright Scholarship to study global security and conflict resolution in the United States.  

"New to America and wanting to understand what the American people felt about their country's involvement in Iraq, Haider decided to travel across the US to talk to people about the war. He drove through 35 states setting up a mobile booth with a sign that says 'Talk to an Iraqi.' 

Haider said, 'I always wondered, what do people in American know of what is happening and do they feel responsible...did this war change their lives at all, since it has for sure changed ours dramatically.' 

Part of Haider's journey was aired on NPR and Showtime's 'This American Life'. Haider's powerful and fascinating lecture includes poignant and touching film clips from his road trip in America, a slide of photos he took of post-war Iraq, thoughts on the conflict in his country, the presence of US troops there, his personal struggle to heal the wounds of oppression and commitment today to raise awareness among the young people and send messages of peace and reconciliation."(See: Haider Hamza, Telling the story of his country)

I invite you to 'Talk to an Iraqi', to listen to Haider's story and let it speak to you in the depths of your heart. Let it challenge and inspire you. Let it invite healing and sacred reconciliation in your soul.

May we see in the Iraqi people our sisters, our brothers, and know our well-being, our liberation and peace in our world, to depend on the well-being of our sisters and brothers.