Asmi Fathelbab was at work when news of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s death began to spread. She heard about it much later, from her mother.
“My first reaction was ‘Ummm…How?’ ” she says. Later in the afternoon, she says, two ESL students walked into her office at the Egyptian American Community Foundation in Bay Ridge, where she is co-director.
“‘Qaddafi is dead!’, they said. I smiled and asked them ‘Can we say this in English now?’”
Both Fathelbab’s parents used to live in Libya. “Actually, that’s where they met,” she says. “They had to leave in ’78 because Qaddafi wasn’t too fond of Egyptians. Literally, Egyptians would disappear. I remember my mom telling me horror stories and remember thinking ‘How can someone like this exist?’”
She speaks about the ties between Egypt and Libya. “A lot of Libyans have an Egyptian relative somewhere,” she says. “They’re closely connected, almost like family.” She talks about Laila A., a half-Italian, half-Libyan friend of hers from her college days in Cairo. Fathelbab says that Laila’s father fled Libya in the 1970s. Laila’s family would fly to Egypt to meet him. “They were waiting patiently for some change in that country,” she says,
On the question of Libya’s future, Fathelbab is cautious. “It depends on what happens to Qaddafi’s family members. If they come into power…Qaddafi ran the country like a monarchy.”
The foundation is having a community meeting tomorrow, and Fathelbab expects a lot of talk about the death of the dictator. “We have two members of our board lined up to answer questions from the community,” she says.
-Hiten Samtani
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Qaddafi’s Death : The Twitterverse Speaks
A hot topic in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s death was President Obama’s foreign policy, in particular his “leading from behind” doctrine. The Brooklyn Ink’s Hiten Samtani and Ravi Kumar dove into the twittersphere to learn more. CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO VIEW THE STORIFY
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