Do We Know Our Children?

(You can also read the article here.)

Five days after the bodies of Golam Rabbi, 59, and Shamima Rabbi, 57, were discovered at their home in San Jose, California, about three hundred friends and relatives gathered at the Five Pillars cemetery in Livermore on a Friday to bury the couple. With the sun on our back and a brisk breeze blowing, we prayed for their forgiveness and salvation as the bodies were lowered into the grave next to one another while the Imam recited verses from the Quran.

Shamima Rabbi and Golam Rabbi

Police have charged the couple’s two sons, Hasib Golamrabbi, 22, and Omar Golamrabbi, 17, with homicide. “I want everyone to know what happened,” said Hasib in a jailhouse interview. Both brothers pleaded not guilty to the murders at their arraignment.

I knew the Rabbis for over two decades as Bangladeshi immigrants who worshiped at the same mosques. We were members of the Evergreen Islamic Center where Golam, an engineer, and Shamima, an accountant, volunteered their services. Soft-spoken, humble and generous, they radiated peace. Friends sought Golam’s advice on how to grow the perfect apple or the peach, drawing on his extensive knowledge of gardening. He often brought his two sons to the mosque to pray next to him. Although I found them rather reserved, nothing seemed amiss or foreboding.

Ever since 9/11, Muslim-Americans have been stereotyped as jihadists and extremists and found themselves in the cross-hairs of politicians and presidential candidates like Donald Trump who would stand to gain from such labeling. We had been under siege for home-grown terrorists like those responsible for the 2009 Ford Hood shooting, the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and the San Bernardino attacks in 2015.

But this macabre murder is a darker development in which young people have allegedly turned on their own family. Every parent’s nightmare is that their children will kill themselves due to depression, anxiety, stress, or emotional rage, or get killed in gang fights, or wind up in jail, or most frighteningly, run away to join ISIS, as did a teenager from Virginia last year.

Added to these fears now is the fear of violence being turned on the family itself, causing despair among us bordering on fatalism.

A week after the killings, a few Bangladeshi-American families in the Evergreen area met to try to make some sense of what had happened. After a lot of anguished back and forth, we concluded that we only had a superficial relationship with our children, other than constantly worrying about them. We led our lives and they led theirs, with the occasional intersection that didn’t mean much. We didn’t know what animated them, whether they felt alienated from us, or what they wanted to do with their lives. In the end, we resolved to be more involved in the lives of our children, not as parents but as friends. And not just with our kids, but with the kids of our community. What we realized is that it takes a community to raise a youth in these tough times.

It is impossible to fathom what Hasib and Omar had been thinking prior to their alleged roles in the killings. A recent Instagram posting by Omar offers a clue: “I always hated myself. Not sure what I am doing here.” No clue could, of course, be clearer or more chilling than what the brothers had scrawled on the wall and the floor of their home (police have matched the writings to the brothers): “Sorry my first kill was clumsy,” and “I can’t be like you telling a lie … I can’t love someone without telling them.”

While the Quran does not directly address the issue of patricide and matricide, it talks extensively about mercy and forgiveness. “My mercy encompasses all,” says a verse, complemented by a saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “My (that is, God’s) mercy takes precedence over My anger.” Another verse states: “If one is patient in adversity and forgives, this indeed is something to set one’s heart on.”

There is a most stirring example of the power and grace of forgiveness in recent times. In June of 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof, embraced with open arms at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire during a prayer meeting, killing nine people. Within a few days, however, relatives of the nine victims declared that they had forgiven Roof. “We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive,” said the sister of one. “I pray God on your soul.”

But while mercy and forgiveness are pertinent for the wider public, it should be remorse and repentance for the alleged perpetrators. The Quran says: “Those who committed evil deeds and then repented afterwards, surely your Lord is forgiving and merciful.”

Are the sons feeling any remorse? Are they repenting? Do thoughts of atonement even cross their minds?

We have no way of knowing, unless they themselves disclose what is in their hearts.

No matter how noble the instincts of mercy, forgiveness and repentance may be, however, they will not override the imperatives of justice. San Jose’s deputy district attorney Matt Braker has said that “there are some unanswered questions to this case. Police are working tirelessly to answer those questions and to ensure that both of these victims receive justice."

So what can we do as we await the trial that is likely to be as sensational and gripping as any in recent memory? Perhaps it is contained in one of the verses that the Imam recited after we had buried the Rabbis: “Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear.”

A Marine's Take on Gun Control

In the aftermath of the horrific shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the issue of gun control has enraged, and engaged, Americans from all walks of life. Emotions are running high. It is clear that America’s gun culture has to change, and change soon, for the killings to stop.

As a former active duty Marine (and Marine for life), David Mauk, 23, has seen both sides of the issue. He was deployed in Afghanistan from late 2010 to early 2011. By maintaining a high moral ground, he and his unit were able to earn the trust of the local Afghans. “We did it by removing the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from the path of villagers, even though we risked our lives to do it.”

David had witnessed an Afghan child who had struck an IED that shattered his legs. He had seen firsthand the work of cruel men and knew that, whatever the politics and issues, his job was to try to make the village safe for the teeming children. He and his unit did it with honor, integrity and respect for the local culture and customs.

The experience in Afghanistan taught him that saving the lives of children was among the noblest of callings. That’s why he was so traumatized by the killing of twenty children in Newtown. At the same time, “guns are an important part of my life and culture. They have many good uses, such as hunting, as in my home state of Missouri. Hunting keeps the deer population from overbreeding and destroying valuable farmland.”

Unfortunately, not everyone has the character, training, and responsibility to use a gun in its proper context. David has seen far too many instances where criminals and mentally-disturbed individuals use them for evil purposes.

His proposal to fix the violent gun culture in America consists of the following:

-          Completely ban military style or rapid fire weapons and magazines. No one outside law enforcement or military needs such power. Assault weapons are NOT effective hunting weapons. They are meant only to kill people. We don't need them.

-          Require stricter screening before allowing the purchase of firearms.

-          Require regular training and evaluation administered by qualified law enforcement personnel.

-          Require a more accurate system of licensing gun ownership, much the same way that a concealed carry license works.

-          Require ammunition to be regulated at least as closely as, say, alcohol. Ammunition is the real key. Different types of ammunition and quantities of it would indicate what it would be used for.

-          Finally, require gun owners affiliate with the militia, as the Second amendment intended, and then rein in the militias to fulfill the intended purpose of arming and educating citizens for the good of society. As it stands now, militias are breeding grounds for conspiracy theorists, anti-government extremists, and other threats to the free and secure society we seek to create in America.

David has just begun his college career. He is a student at San Jose City College. In his first semester, he is taking courses in English, Chemistry and Math. He wants to be a park ranger for the U.S. Forest Service or the National Parks Service because “I love the outdoors and want to educate people about the world they live in. People invested their time in me to develop a love for the outdoors. I want to pass it on.”

David never went hunting in Missouri because he couldn’t afford all the equipment. He did, however, work with a conservation department at an animal rehabilitation center, where he learned that much of a conservationist’s job was to keep the animal population in check. “It is a fact of nature that animals hunt and kill each other. Sadly, because we hunted the predators to near extinction, the job now falls upon us. I have never been comfortable with this cruel fact, but at least I understand it. What I cannot accept is how easily high-powered guns can be bought in America. In particular, close-range assault rifles - preferred by criminals and mentally-ill people because they are so obscenely easy to use - are meant only to kill people. Why we allow people to buy them is beyond me.”

“I fought for this country so that we could have peace and freedom, not so I could come home to see people killing each other. In Afghanistan, my mission was to protect the civilians and neutralize violent radicals so that the Afghans might have a safe place to bring up their children. My mission is turned into a mockery when I come home to find disturbed individuals murdering children with military weapons.”