Driving for Dahlia
By Jim
Smith
Can one person stop the war in
Iraq? If so, my money is on a 100-pound dynamo named Dahlia
Wasfi.
She is one of a small group of
speakers that includes Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan and former arms inspector
Scott Ridder who travel about the country trying to rouse opposition to the war
and occupation of Iraq.
Hurricane Dahlia rolled into Venice for a
teach-in, April 22, and for other speaking events around L.A. I volunteered to
drive her to and fro. We meet Sunday morning at the Pasadena All Saints
Episcopal Church where she is surrounded by about 20 gray-headed church ladies
who had just heard her talk in the auditorium. She nods my way, and returns to
the conversation. In a scenario that will be repeated over and over, I nearly
have to drag her to the car with her new admirers in hot pursuit. They are still
talking to her as we drive away.
Dr.
Dahlia S. Wasfi is an M.D. whose father is Iraqi and her mother is Jewish. Her
parents met in Washington, DC in the 60s when her father was studying there on a
student scholarship. The combination, as Dahlia says, makes her 100 percent
Semitic. Her mother’s family fled the holocaust once Hitler took over
their native Austria.
Her Iraqi
family, who live near the southern city of Basra, are suffering through a
different kind of holocaust that has already killed millions during two wars and
a 12-year-long embargo. Millions more have fled the
country.
Dr. Wasfi, whose medical
training is in anesthesiology, is probably the most charismatic speaker to
emerge in opposition to the war and occupation in Iraq. Her passion and
intensity spring from concern for her family in Basra, Iraq. But her candor and
outspokenness stem from a thorough political analysis of what led us to this
seemingly endless debacle in the Middle
East.
Dahlia works her magic on
audiences, not with high-flown oratory, but with a constantly changing
Powerpoint slide presentation and a matter-of-fact, but humorous, delivery
style. She tailors her presentation to each audience, removing some slides and
adding others. Her attention to detail keeps her riveted to her laptop sometimes
even as she is being introduced.
On
Tuesday, she is invited to an all-Latino middle school in Huntington Park where
teachers want her to talk about the war with students who are 10 to 12 years
old. As the first group of 5th graders files in, they seem to be interested in
anything but the war. A buzz fills the room even after teachers try to get their
attention. Their wound up energy keeps many of the kids involuntarily fidgeting
in their seats.
Dahlia begins,
“I’m going to show you some graphic pictures today.” The room
is suddenly silent. “They are no more graphic that what you see on TV or
video games, but they are real.” You could hear a pin
drop.
She talks about the racism of the
war. Many small heads nod. They already know about the day-to-day reality of
this sickness. She asks how many of them have a relative who has been to Iraq.
Many hands shoot up. These kids also know about violence. One little boy tells
Dahlia that a gun was pointed at him by a gang member. Another has a brother who
was shot on the streets of L.A. When a bell rings ending the class, they line up
to take Dahlia’s business card. She tells them they can email her any
time. It is clear that Dahlia and the slide show made a big impression on these
kids who will soon be prime targets of military recruiters, even though they got
the PG version of the carnage.
A couple
of days before, at the teach-in at the Venice Methodist Church, we got the
no-holds-barred view of war and occupation. Dahlia begins with slides of her
family in Basra, photos that she took when she spent three months there last
year. “This is my cousin,” says Dahlia, her arm around a young Iraqi
woman. “She is alive and well, and we love her very much.” Then a
new slide appears. This is someone else’s cousin. Another young Iraqi
woman is shown, but she is dead. “I’m sure her family also loved her
very much.”
“This is my
uncle,” says Dahlia. The photo shows a distinguished looking older man.
“And this is someone else’s uncle,” Dahlia repeats. But this
time there is someone else in the picture with the dead man. It is an American
woman soldier, smiling and making a thumbs-up gesture. The photo is from Abu
Ghraib prison. Dahlia is generous. She says the soldier was probably a nice
young woman back home, but she was put in a position that would make monsters of
any of us.
Then comes the bombshell.
The next slide shows the wife of the dead man and his son. They are holding the
photo of their father/husband with the soldier and her ridiculous thumb. So many
emotions well up in the audience. Embarrassment, sorrow, anger, horror. I saw
this photo many times that week and it always brought tears to my eyes. The war
is suddenly personalized in this one Iraqi family. Will the boy try to avenge
his father’s death when he grows up? I would if I was
him.
In one short series of slides,
Dahlia has shown us, on an emotional level that we will never forget, why they
hate us, and what war really means. “When I heard the term ‘shock
and awe,’ I thought about shock and awe against my family, and against
people like this,” Dahlia tells us in a voice that is far too calm for
what we have just seen.
Fortunately,
Dahlia is a doctor. She is not holding us responsible for the cancer within our
body politic that has done these horrible things. But she does want us to
address this illness and take steps to end it. Her prescription is militant, but
non-violent. She reminds us about the Orange Revolution where thousands of
Ukrainians camped out in front of the government buildings in Kiev until the
regime fell. “We need to do the same,” she tells us. “The
Orange Revolution was probably paid for by the CIA, and they won’t be
funding us, but it can still work. A peace march on a Saturday afternoon makes
us feel good, but it doesn’t change anything,” she
says.
Once, while we’re driving
to another presentation, Dahlia gets a call from a cousin in Iraq. Her only link
with her family now is by cell phone and text messages. It’s become too
dangerous for even her to attempt to get to Basra. She tells me that two years
ago, she traveled by bus from Jordan. Last year, that was too dangerous so she
flew to Kuwait and took a taxi to the Iraq border. In that part of the world,
it’s unusual for a woman to be traveling alone without a male with her to
speak to officials. The border guards were ready to take advantage of her. They
hinted that the price of admission to Iraq would be her video camera. Just in
the nick of time, her male cousin arrived and saved her and her camera. Now,
with a male to follow she was just another Iraqi woman. With the level of
violence still rising, making the same trip today is out of the question. Dahlia
and her family are isolated and cut off from each
other.
At a Venice house meeting on
Palms Blvd., Dahlia tells us that many Iraqi women have been wearing black
mourning clothes since the war began because there have been so many deaths in
each family that when one period of mourning ends, another begins. She describes
how our military is literally poisoning the land with depleted uranium shells
that will remain radioactive for years to come. She adds that the malignant
influence of the military is not limited to Iraq and shows slides of U.S.
armaments being used by the Israeli army against Palestinians and in Lebanon.
Dahlia reminds people that she has a Jewish mother. She says it’s not
anti-semitic to be critical of Israel when it is being as vicious as our
government. She shows more slides depicting how our media doesn’t mention,
or show, Palestinian or Iraqi casualties. She asks why when the majority of
Iraqis are women and children are we only shown young Iraqi males on
TV.
We have lunch at the Figtree Cafe
on Ocean Front Walk, and the next day at Alejo’s on Lincoln. In both
cases, she orders the cheapest meal on the menu, and then takes more than half
of it home for dinner. She’s adopted a frugal lifestyle that would even
make many low-income Venetians wince. Dahlia’s income from speaking fees,
I estimate, is not one-tenth what she would pull down as a working
anesthesiologist. She doesn’t care. It probably doesn’t cross her
mind, unless it interferes with her ability to talk to people about this war.
But there are parallels with her life as an MD. She is still making her rounds,
except we are her patients, and the disease is geopolitical. Her slide show is
like a much needed visit to the emergency room. There is blood, death and dying.
At a talk at UCLA, a student faints. She later says that she had given blood
earlier in the day, so it might not be entirely due to Dahlia’s tough
love.
Even though they are separated by
generations, she reminds me of the Argentine doctor, Che Guevara, who abandoned
his practice for similar reasons. Dahlia, and Che (as described by those who
knew him) retained their love for people, both as individuals, and in the
aggregate. After a meeting in Thousand Oaks, Dahlia tells me how “very
special” it was to be complimented on her talk by a 98-year-old man who
had attended.
She had already convinced me
on the first day that she wasn’t a pampered anti-war “star,”
when she insisted on sitting through the entire teach-in, and listening intently
to each speaker, before she got up to speak at the end of the
program.
On Thursday, she’s up at
the crack of dawn to catch a 6:30 am flight to San Francisco for a lunchtime
talk at Stanford University and one in the evening in the City. It’s just
another day in the life of Dr. Dahlia Wasfi.
You know, maybe one person can change the
world!
Posted: Tue - May 1, 2007 at 08:28 AM