Me and Moe

Growing up in an urban area of northern New Jersey meant having a wide variety of friends from different cultural backgrounds. Every pack of kids in my neighborhood had a few Hispanic, black, white, Asian and Middle Eastern kids in it. In the particular crowd that I ran with, there was one who literally went on to become one of the most infamous characters in modern day history. He was the one who I would have considered my best friend and still is today. His name is Mahmoud but I called him Mo.

Up till the age of eleven Mo and me were inseparable. We did everything together. Mo loved to go to the library and read books. I was not really interested in anything he read, because most of it had to do with politics and world history. Mo loved to talk about history, and as we walked home from the library he would excitedly explain to me everything from the American Civil War to the history of his homeland, Iran. He used to always say to me that one-day he would go back there and start a revolution and become president. I never realized at the time just how serious he was.

We both shared the same birthday, October 28, and the day after our eleventh birthday, Mo told me he had to leave because his parents wanted him to go back to Iran to go to school. This was extremely upsetting to both of us, but we decided that we would always keep in touch no matter what. Ten years later after I graduated high school, we still kept in touch with the help of the Internet. I was almost done with college and Mo had received his degree in Iran for engineering and was starting to get involved with politics. We kept in contact through email and the website called MySpace. Mo's MySpace page was extremely popular but not for the right reasons.

I knew from his emails that he had developed some radical ideas since he went back to Iran, but I did not realize that he was broadcasting these ideas on a public forum. The one thing that really stood out was the denial of the holocaust. Mo had always told me in his emails that he was studying World War II and that he thinks the holocaust was made up but I never took him seriously. I thought these were just crazy ideas that he only shared with me, until I saw a long diatribe on his MySpace page and my jaw hit the floor. I pleaded with him to mark his page private if he was going to spew these things but he refused. Ninety percent of the comments were death threats and other things that cannot be repeated here. Word had gotten around about his page and all the anti-Semitism on it. At this point I knew that I had lost my best friend. We still kept in contact sporadically over email but it seemed that he did not have much time anymore, and the content of the emails became more and more brief.

Many years later Mo did go on to become president of Iran, and also one of the most hated people in the world. I still read about him in the papers all the time, and with the way they wrote about him you would have thought the next Hitler had arrived. He was working on a nuclear project now in Iran and making people very angry by these actions. Politicians loved to have a bad guy. It made them look good. I learned that Mo would be speaking at Columbia University in late September and figured I would go and hear him speak. We hadn't had any contact for a few months, except every year he would send me a birthday greeting on my MySpace page. He never forgot my birthday. Watching Mo on stage at Columbia was one of the most harrowing experiences I have ever been through. This was not the Mo that I knew. When the president of Columbia introduced him by ridiculing him, I wanted to go up on the stage and punch him out. Why invite a man to speak at your college and mock him? This was very American and very ugly. Mo did not help the situation any by saying some of the things he said. People laughed at him and I felt terrible, because Mo did not realize that he would be laughed at. I was relieved when it was over and quickly exited the building. On my way out a man pulled at my arm and handed me a piece of paper, then quickly shuffled off. When I got far from the college I opened the paper and it said,"Hi friend, I've missed our talks. I took your advice, go to my new private MySpace page and say hello. Love your friend, Mo." The irony in this was that Mo was now one of the most public figures in society but at least his MySpace page was private.