US SOLDIER TO IRAQI CHILD: "IF YOU DIDN'T HAVE THIS I'D PROBABLY KI** YOU" This video from the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq says it all. A soldier tells an Iraqi child serving him tea, “I’d k*ll you if you didn’t have this.” The soldier then proceeds to humiliate what appears to be the child’s father, cursing at him profusely and telling him, “Don’t interrupt me.” For the occupying American soldier, this may have been a joke. But for the more than a million Iraqis k*lled, and more than 9 million displaced and whose lives were devastated by George W. Bush’s war, it was not. With its wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the U.S. military ultimately transformed what had been a relatively stable nation in West Asia into a landscape marked by sectarian conflict and takfiri extremism and created the conditions that ultimately gave rise to the extremist militant group ISIS. This is what occupation and colonial violence leaves behind, even when the headlines describe it as "liberation."

The first episode was set in medieval Iran, and watching it brought back memories of when I embraced Islam seventeen years ago. I saw the same thing in Cairo. Students quietly dedicating themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. Seeing them, I knew that I wanted to become a part of that tradition too. And I am still a Muslim today, still pursuing knowledge.