Abandoned By His Dad, An Arab Boy Came To Jersey City At Age 11. Then Sept. 11 Happened

JERSEY CITY, NJ — After George Farag's father abandoned his mother in Egypt in the 1980s, she thought it would be hard to raise her two sons there.

So Ms. Farag brought both boys to Jersey City on Halloween night of 1986.

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Young George saw people wearing blue and orange Mets jackets, since the Mets had just won the World Series. He desperately wanted to have one, in order to fit in.

It would be years before he could afford one, he told Patch in an interview this month.

Fifteen years later, after the Sept. 11 attacks and resulting suspicion of Arab immigrants, Farag worried that his efforts to fit in were for naught.

But Farag went on to become a U.S. diplomat. He wanted to tell his story around the anniversary of the attacks as an example of what immigrants can do.

"America gave my family a chance when we needed one," he said. "Public assistance helped us through difficult years. Public schools educated me. Teachers invested in me. Scholarships carried me to high learning. America invested in me long before I had much to offer America in return."

A Boy In Jersey City

Farag works in the Foreign Service, traveling around the world, facilitating relations between the U.S. and foreign countries in times of war and peace.

He said that back in 1986, his family saw America as a dream.

"My mother felt she could not build the future she wanted for two fatherless boys in Alexandria on her own," he said. "For people all over the world, America was, and still is, the land of opportunity. She brought us here in search of a future for me and my brother. We arrived with very little and settled in a small apartment off West Side Avenue."

He appreciated what he had, while he longed for items like a Mets jacket.

"To an eleven-year-old kid who had just arrived in the NY area, it represented belonging," he remembered.

Farag went to Public School 24, Chaplain Charles J. Watters School. The school is located on the city's West Side, far from the bustling waterfront.

"At school I got government lunches like chicken pot pie, tater tots, sloppy Joes, the strange American food we never ate at home," he said. "It was also there that my eighth grade teacher recommended Academic High School."

Farag applied and got in to McNair Academic, a magnet school in Jersey City that's considered one of the best high schools in the country.

Sept. 11

Farag was attending graduate school at Syracuse University in 2001 when a government official encouraged him to join the U.S. Foreign Service.

His response was, "No thanks."

Less than a month later, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Farag was horrified that his country was under attack.

But he was now an object of suspicion, he said.

"A group of terrorists led by Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian, attacked our country," he noted. "Families like mine became objects of suspicion. Rather than retreating, I decided to serve the country that had given us a future."

He added, "I found the recruitment pamphlet and took the Foreign Service exam three weeks later."

The Time Of Saddam

He was assigned to Bahrain as his first diplomatic post, but instead, he volunteered to serve in Najaf, Iraq. He was "one of the first American diplomats helping Iraqis adopt permanent democratic institutions while Saddam Hussein remained at large," he noted.

While there, he lost eight colleagues to ambushes by Iraqi insurgents. But he was able to pull another American diplomat, and future ambassador, out of a "mob of enraged Iraqis."

As a result, he was nominated for the U.S. Department of State Award for Heroism.

In 2006, after the start of a war between Hezbollah and Israel, he helped coordinate the evacuation of 15,000 Americans out of Beirut, Lebanon.

As the only diplomat there who could speak Arabic, he remained in Beirut to support Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, who negotiated the cease-fire that ended the 2006 Lebanon War.

"For the past 13 years, I've consulted the U.S. State Department on consular systems in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia," he said. "Most recently I've been supporting consular crisis operations across 15 U.S. diplomatic missions during the U.S.–Iran conflict."

Farag has a lot of thoughts about the Sept. 11 attacks — and about suspicions towards families like his.

He said after the attacks, he experienced occasional prejudice.

"In the Foreign Service, there were a few occasions that were more explicit," he said. "Several times I was reminded to remember 'which team I was playing for.' I cannot know exactly what the people who said that intended, and I don't want to assign motives to them. But it infuriated me. It suggested that my Arab background somehow made my commitment to American interests less certain, as though there were two competing loyalties inside me. There weren't."

But, he said, "The overwhelming majority of Americans I served and interacted with treated me as a colleague, trusted me, and valued what my background allowed me to bring."

Farag still travels the world for work, but considers Jersey City his home, and his mother lives there.

Thoughts On America

"I've lived and worked in countries where the circumstances of your birth determine much of the rest of your life," Farag said. "America is not perfect, and we do not always live up to our ideals. But I've experienced what can happen when our institutions work: when a public-school teacher sees potential in a child, when a family that is struggling gets enough help to stay on its feet, and when education opens a door that might otherwise have remained closed."

He added, "That's why, for me, 9/11 wasn't an attack on some abstract idea of America. It was an attack on the country and the institutions that had given my family a chance. I felt a responsibility to defend what had been given to me."

He noted Egyptian-Americans who have served in positions of power, and won the Nobel Prize.

He said it's important for people not to just others solely on their background.

He said that in the past, as a U.S. consular officer, he had decided who would get a visa, so he's been on both sides of the immigration process.

"The United States has every right to control its borders, enforce its immigration laws, and expect immigrants to contribute to the country that receives them," he said. "I have spent part of my career helping our government do exactly that."

He added, "But America should also judge immigrants by what they contribute and what they become, not by where they came from or by the worst people who happen to share their nationality."

After all, he said: "There's another 11-year-old kid in Jersey City today whose family is struggling and who has no idea yet what he or she is capable of becoming. Our responsibility is to make sure that kid gets one chance."