“When I saw him, he was walking kind of fast, his head was kind of down, and he was kind of red in the face a little bit,” Williams says in the film. Williams was one of the first to spot McKinney striding toward the mosque, looking agitated and angry. He carried a hostility toward White people until he converted to Islam. His great-great-grandfather was lynched and castrated by a White mob. One was Jomo Williams, an African American member at the Islamic center who knew something about anger. There were plenty of people who helped diffuse McKinney’s anger and guilt. Then he met the ‘Mother Teresa’ of Muncie’s Muslim community “He can’t completely forgive himself for what he did,” says Dana, one of his ex-wives, in the film. He wasn’t just at war with Muslims he was at war with himself. Layered in his grief was also guilt over the lives he had taken during combat. It was a ‘You don’t belong here’ kind of thing.” He resented the presence of Muslims in Muncie because it seemed to make a mockery of the sacrifice he and his comrades made in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeing Muslims only caused his pain to resurface. Once he returned home, he drifted into drinking and womanizing to numb his wartime experiences. He also says he struggled to find a new community after he left what he calls the “band of brothers” he fought alongside during his service. McKinney says he was trained to see the Iraqi and Taliban soldiers he fought not as human beings but as paper targets on a shooting range. McKinney’s struggles after he returned to Muncie in 2006 are a prime example of the adage, “In war there are no unwounded soldiers.” One was the story of how McKinney was changed by combat. But there are some scenes and characters that beg to be described. To reveal too many details about how McKinney converted would rob the film of its impact. McKinney was looking for a way to forgive himself for what he did in war They gave us a blueprint for how we could all do this.” “If that could happen, anything is possible. “They were able to build an impossible bridge to one another,” Seftel says of McKinney and members of the Muncie Islamic center. He says McKinney’s story gave him hope that even some of the deepest divisions in the US can be transcended. Seftel made his film as part of “The Secret Life of Muslims,” an online video series. Classmates lobbed antisemitic slurs while throwing pennies at him. Joshua Seftel, the film’s director, says he was drawn to McKinney’s story in part because of his own experiences facing antisemitism growing up in Schenectady, New York, in the late 1970s and early ’80s. “To this day, it still doesn’t make sense to me,” McKinney says about the gesture. Bahrami, a native of Afghanistan and co-founder of the center, ended up hugging McKinney and erupting in tears. The film cites one staggering act of kindness: Mohammad S. Instead, several mosque members stepped forward and disarmed McKinney with some shrewd choices that may have saved their lives. “By the end of the night, I figured they would have me in the basement with a sword to my throat,” he says. McKinney says he thought his Friday afternoon visit might end with his death. Wearing a blue “Say No Hate to Hate,” T-shirt over his muscular frame and a long white beard that made him look like a buffed Santa Claus, McKinney told his story in a blunt, no-frills manner that underscored his 25 years in the military. McKinney recently spoke to CNN via video about his unlikely conversion. He was on a scouting mission to pick a location to hide his bomb and to gather intelligence that would validate his assumption that Islam was a murderous ideology. He was going to plant a bomb at the mosque in hopes of killing or wounding hundreds of Muslims. Unable to contain his anger, he went to the Islamic center that day in 2009 on what he saw as his final mission. His fury deepened when he returned home to Muncie to see how Muslims had settled into what he called his city, and even sent their children to sit next to his daughter at her elementary school. He was a former US Marine who had developed a hatred toward Islam during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. His name was Richard “Mac” McKinney, and he was there not to worship but to destroy. As an outsider with a USMC tattoo on his right forearm and a skull tattoo on his left hand, he stood out. It was Friday at Muncie Islamic Center in Muncie, Indiana, and the mosque was filling with people who had come for afternoon prayers. He was a big guy with broad shoulders, marching toward their mosque with his head down and his face flushed red from what looked like anger.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |