The Blog I Started to Avoid “Unsubscribe” Responses to My Mass E-mails

And then I checked Drudge Report for a quick news hit.

For those who don’t know, my parents have spent the past three weeks with me in Egypt and Jordan - a major highlight of which, for me, was the week we whiled away in little Dahab, a charming Red Sea beach town surrounded by the deserts and canyons of the Sinai Peninsula.

A charming town that just had the hell bombed out of it. 

A charming town with a fantastic little family restaurant called Al Capone’s, where we ate at least once a day.  A little family restaurant that was decimated in yesterday’s bombing.

And while I appreciate the President’s quotes of condemnation and the media’s scramble to determine responsibility and fit this latest tile into the Middle East’s developing political mosaic, it all seems kind of insignificant in contrast to what this means in practical terms.

Say for instance, how many of Dahab’s Egyptians and Bedouins died to score this point.  How many more Americans will tsk-tsk and stand vindicated in their belief that the Middle East is full of deranged terrorist.  How many more people around the world will think this act sums up the region more than the Muslims we met — almost all of whom told us two things:  1.) You are welcome here.  And 2.) We all worship the same God - what should it matter if we do it in different ways?

I am thinking about the guys who waited on us at Al Capone’s, who greeted my family every night like their own family and came to chat while we waited for our food. Who laughed proudly when the rest of the town’s restauranteurs teased us about always favoring Al Capone’s. Who shook my dad’s hand firmly and didn’t care that he was American or Christian. Who treated us with respect and warmth. 

And I wonder how many of them died in the bombing. Or probably more realistically, how many lived.

I’m thinking about the little local girls – impossibly beautiful little girls – who climbed barefoot through all the beachfront restaurants like trapeze artists, under tables and over walls, smartly bantering with the tourists and selling their little braided bracelets.  And I wonder if the mastermind behind this “warfare” thought about that collateral damage.

Three foreigners were killed and a town full of vacationing Israeli families was probably terrified. And that is undeniably tragic.  

But it seems like relatively small stakes in comparison to the toll the village itself will pay.

I have no meaningful political commentary on the characters in this battle or the merit in their respective arguments.  And I don’t care to offer any trite summaries on how lucky we were to miss this tragedy by a week. 

I am just incredibly sad and angry as for the first time, I guess, this kind of thing means more to me personally than politically.

For whatever it’s worth, I hope the people of Dahab know some foreigners’ hearts are aching with them today. 

And we will make sure people know this kind of madness does not sum them up.