Word: sanae
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...elite, look upon the U.S. as a second home, a place where relatives routinely find success. These are kids who should love America but don't. After the towers fell, their loyalties were firmly with Osama bin Laden. "There were girls in my class who loved him," says Sana. "We all thought Osama was a champion of downtrodden Muslims...
...girls passed around magazines with bin Laden photographs. Some swooned over his "soulful" eyes. They saw him as a man who had walked away from an air-conditioned palace to live in a cave in Afghanistan and avenge the wrongs committed against Muslims. "He was our Robin Hood," says Sana. "Some of my friends defended bin Laden because they thought he carried out the bombings, while others defended him because they thought the U.S. was accusing him unjustly." Sana belonged to the latter camp...
...October, as the U.S. began its Afghan-bombing campaign, public opinion in Pakistan turned against America. Sana did too. At stoplights near the Lahore bazaar, she saw vendors hawking bin Laden shirts and posters. She watched protesters spill into the streets, and though she didn't buy the bin Laden paraphernalia or attend the bin Laden demonstrations, she found herself agreeing with him. "This was hypocrisy. Why is an Afghan's life worth any less than an American's?" she asks. She felt revulsion at the U.S. air strikes, which left hundreds of Afghans dead and thousands more wounded...
...November, Sana was invited back to New York by Seeds of Peace, and, reluctantly, she decided to go. "On CNN and Fox News I kept hearing how Islam was a violent religion, but it's not, and I felt I had to explain that," she says. She felt apprehensive landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. At Customs, which she had always sailed through before, she was herded into a line with people who, she says, were "a little darker. They made the men stand with their hands in the air, and they checked every little thing in the bags...
...Sana's group visited the attack site in lower Manhattan. "The remains looked like withered old flowers," she remembers. "It was scary. I kept looking at these giant cranes lifting away the rubble and thinking that there were bodies inside, all mangled up. I couldn't take it any longer. I ran away, crying." Sana wept again, and couldn't stop her tears, at a religious service where she met Connie Taylor, whose son, an equity trader, had died in the attack. Later, in a long, soulful e-mail, Sana tried to describe her experiences to other Seeds of Peace...