Let the magic begin. So proclaimed the movie billboards I saw while driving alongside my mom and siblings. Settled over those words was Harry Potter’s scarred face and circular glasses. I was only 7, coming back from the first of an 8-movie sequel, The Sorcerer’s Stone, when I felt the first form of discrimination against my identity. Roughly a month earlier, the country watched the World Trade Towers crumble as terrorist perverted planes into weapons and murdered thousands in one morning. But who would have known that when President Bush warned of a “New Kind of War,” this war entailed intolerance to anyone who could associate his or her identity with Islam?
After the disturbance, trauma froze time, and I unknowingly walked like a fragile figure through the shambles of what used to be my innocent security. But I thought after a few years had passed, you, me, and every other American Muslim could start to feel as though life was returning back to pre 9/11 normality. Still, on February 10, 2015, the weapons of foul words and ignorant gestures evolved to weapons with bullets. My religion, your religion, the religion of .6% of other Americans, was the catalyst.
At a time where your wedding thank you cards and school work should have been the greatest of your problems, being subjected to discrimination this far after 9/11 must have dumbstruck you. A place that you had called home for many years of your life, your sanctuary, a place of justice, was no longer the same rose-colored world you once lived in. After hearing the news via Facebook posts on the walls of my Muslim friends, I ached and experienced paroxysms of disappointment that escalated to outrage. On February 10, 2015 you were robbed. Your parents were robbed. Your friends were robbed. The whole country was robbed. You three were students, my age, with beautiful, philanthropic lives ahead. When I look at your photos, I see my siblings, my cousins, and my friends back home. What a tragic target for murder execution style.
Despite the controversy about whether or not this was over a “parking dispute”, your identities as religious individuals — identities that you are supposedly free to express in this country — were identities that your alleged killer is said to have publicly opposed. Even if parking is as hard to find as it is where I am from, I REFUSE to think of this heinous act as anything other than a hate crime. Your deaths received minimal media coverage, and when networks did cover it, the idea of it being a hate crime was avoided. Of course, had the roles been reversed, had you, as Muslims, been on the other side of the gun, no one would hesitate to call it an act of terrorism. You did not deserve this. No one deserves this, but especially not those who contribute positively to society the way you all did.
The Harry Potter movie billboards last declared: It all ends here. A thread from the past to the present came to a close with such a symbolic tagline. But there is not much truth to that statement in this case. It does not ALL end here. You were silenced by a bullet of hatred. Assassinated by the crime of ignorance. Yet, I promise, your legacy will go on.
Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23
Yusor Mohammad, 21
Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19