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          


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