'Take a lesson from the dead': Fatal stabbing of 6-year-old serves warning to divided US

The violence in the Middle East has come to the American Midwest in the most gruesome fashion.

On Sunday, in a Chicago suburb, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old American Muslim child of Palestinian descent, was fatally stabbed 26 times by his 71-year old landlord in what police allege is a hate crime. Wadea’s mother, stabbed multiple times as well, is still in serious condition in the hospital.

I cannot get the picture that has been circulating of young Wadea wearing his "Happy Birthday" hat out of my mind. It reminds me so much of my two boys when they were his age.

I fear that this is not going to be the only incident of the Israel-Hamas war having violent reverberations in the United States.

The principal of my son’s high school, a large and diverse institution on the north side of Chicago, sent out a message to all families saying she was concerned about violence in the school as a result of the war that began Oct. 7. At Columbia University in New York, a 24-year-old Israeli student was beaten while hanging flyers condemning the Hamas attack.

Who is going to hold America together? Because it sure feels like we are coming apart.

Calling all coaches, nurses, teachers, employers – America needs you

For years now we have been dangerously divided over controversial issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Now the conflict in the Middle East is creating new tensions in the United States.

Calling all athletic coaches, hospital nurses, elementary school teachers, high school principals, volunteer managers, small business owners and theater directors. America is relying on you.

If you have a diverse school or team or staff, they very likely disagree on some fundamental things, such as the conflict in the Middle East. Without minimizing the importance of their varying loyalties, your role as a leader is to focus their attention on working together on the task at hand, whether that is preparing food at a restaurant or fighting fires together in your community or playing hockey together on a team. 

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If you need some inspiration on the path of holding America together: Watch "Remember The Titans" starring Denzel Washington.

The movie, released in 2000, takes place in 1971, after T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, was fully integrated. The prior year, a Black teenager was killed by a white store clerk over the alleged theft of razor blades, touching off days of race riots. Tensions were high, and racial injustice ran deep. 

Then Black and white high school football players boarded buses to preseason training camp, led by newly appointed Black head coach Herman Boone.

Boone enjoyed telling people that he was not Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ or the Easter Bunny – he was just a football coach. His job was not to affect the broader racial tensions in the society; it was simply to coach a winning football team. But to have a winning football team, he needed to make sure that the racial tensions in the society didn’t affect his players.

He paired Black and white athletes together as roommates and required them to learn some facts about one another. Mostly, he relied on the game of football to teach his players that they needed to work together. The white offensive linemen better block for the Black quarterback, or he’s not going to have time to throw a pass. The white receiver better catch the pass from that Black quarterback, or the team is not going to score touchdowns.

The movie is cheesy in parts, but it carries a powerful message: Our society’s strength is in the institutions that bring people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies together to cooperate on concrete activities with common aims.

And it is in the leaders who focus people on the areas of cooperation, even amid our wider conflicts.

'Take a lesson from the dead'

So who is going to hold America together? The answer is: you.

You don’t just have an inspiring Denzel Washington movie on your side; there is academic research supporting this approach. In the social psychology study called the "Robbers Cave Experiment," researchers found that the best way to dissipate conflict between rival groups was to give them concrete activities on which to cooperate.

They also found that the longer diverse people cooperated, the more their identities shifted: from adversaries to friends.

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And that new identities for some can have wider implications for all. In "Remember The Titans," as the integrated football team wins games, the broader Alexandria community finds its own racial tensions easing. Black and white families start sitting together in the stands, forming friendships, building a collective identity as Alexandria – not just Black Alexandria and white Alexandria.

It is a picture of America at its best.

We can appreciate this, because we know how ugly the alternative is. 

In the most powerful scene in the film, coach Boone takes his team on a grueling early morning run. They arrive at the destination just as the sun is coming up and are shocked to be looking at gravestones. It is Gettysburg, the battlefield turned cemetery where tens of thousands of Americans died in one of the most famous battles of the Civil War.

Coach Boone tells his team, “Take a lesson from the dead. If we don’t come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed.”  

Of course, it was on that same site that President Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, which ended with the famous lines: “This nation, under God, will have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” 

The American people hail from every race, religion and nation on this earth. To achieve the goal that President Lincoln placed before us, we need to follow the path of coach Boone and realize that we need to cooperate across our differences, not let them divide us.

Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, hosts the "Interfaith America" podcast and is the author of "We Need To Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy."