A Son of Appalachia and Syria – 25 Years Later

I came to America because my family believed in its promise. Twenty-five years after 9/11, I have learned that belonging isn’t something we simply inherit—it is something we choose, defend, and build every day.

I was a teenager when I first raised my right hand and swore an oath. That oath was not to a country I was born in, but to one that had promised my family something we could no longer count on where we came from. Lady Liberty’s light led us here, and to the hills of West Virginia, where an immigrant kid from Syria learned what it meant to belong to a place that, at its best, asks only that you believe in its ideals enough to help build it. As Gibran wrote: “I am here to build with you, and with a will.”

Twenty-five years ago, that will was tested in a way I could never have imagined.

It was a clear, crisp Tuesday morning in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. The sky over the capital was the kind of crystal blue you remember for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. I slid open the glass door of my apartment to catch the early fall breeze, the Washington Monument visible in the distance, and got ready for the short walk to my job as the younger of two young attorneys at an Arab-American civil rights organization.

Ten minutes later, a firestorm of hate from my native east changed everything. Before I ever saw the column of smoke rising across the Potomac, before the F-16s thundered overhead streaking toward the eastern horizon, I already knew. I knew, somehow, in the particular way that people who share an identity with the accused always seem to know first, that this day was not only going to be a national tragedy. It was going to become my identity and the struggle against hate and targeted violence would intertwine my life’s work.

The rest is history, and it has been my daily reality ever since.

For 25 years I’ve carried a strange and painful duality. The fires of what I can only call evil had all but consumed the worlds I knew. As the reality of the tragedy sunk in, I flashed back to the Syria that I loved, where my grandmother marched for women’s suffrage in the 1920s, where my father celebrated independence from colonialism in 1946, only for that nation to later become a killing field focused on maintaining dictatorship, terrorism, and hate. For almost 15 years in the interim, I saw my childhood memories burn in the fires of injustice, authoritarianism, terrorism, stigmatization, and division, until Syrian liberation came in 2024.

These tragedies, and that duality, ultimately served as motivation for me to spend my adult life fighting a different set of fires here at home: the fires of hate and “otherization” that fuels targeted violence and, ultimately, terrorism. I knew that, if left unchecked, these fires threatened to consume the very ideals that brought my family to this country in the first place.

25 years later, the struggle to protect our communities from hate, targeted violence and terrorism here at home, and to promote civil rights, remains. That first step into civil rights work became a twenty-five-year career trajectory culminating with a focus on violence prevention. Fourteen of those years I spent as a federal civil servant, twelve of them at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and later helping to launch and eventually lead a non-political public health-informed effort focused on stopping targeted violence and terrorism, the same violence that targeted communities with which I personally identify and whose civil rights I spent well-over two decades defending.

Five times I took the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I served under multiple administrations, alongside some of the most dedicated, selfless public servants I have ever known, all of us trying to fulfill the promise of an imperfect union. Along the way I learned some hard lessons, lessons this 25^th anniversary of 9/11 has only sharpened for me.

I learned that conflating immigration enforcement with violence prevention doesn’t make us safer and that we can never arrest our way out of targeted violence and terrorism; doing so will just add new scars to communities already bearing old ones and enhance divisions instead of unifying our nation.

I learned that ideological litmus tests, judging people by their mosque or temple, their national origin, their politics, divide a nation in the name of uniting it and enhance the threat instead of mitigating it.

I learned that civil rights protections can’t just be an oversight afterthought bolted onto policy; rather, it has to be foundational to it, present in the room when the policy is written, not just the room where it’s later investigated.

And I learned, watching administrations chase programs built for other democracies with different histories and different constitutions, to defeat terrorism of all types; that our system, our laws, and our history have to be the guide for building something uniquely American, not an import.

I’ve been personally targeted more than once by voices of hate, some espousing violence, because of my work and because of who I am: an Arab, a Muslim, an immigrant from Syria who happened to grow up in rural Appalachia; a proud Mountaineer who carries as much love for his hometown in the hills as his city of birth in the cradle of civilizations. That combination confuses people. I’ve come to think that confusion is exactly the point of a nation built on the idea that identity; race, faith or the absence of it, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, any of it, should never determine whether you belong.

This past December, watching the very programs I helped build be haphazardly dismantled, watching civil rights oversight and violence prevention work effectively abandoned, I made a decision my younger self might not have expected: I voluntarily left federal service, not to step back, but to step further in. I have been privileged to join the team at the Civil Rights advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice and, to help further the mission of building bonds of strategic partnerships between my nation of birth and my nation of choice with the Syrian American Council.

Twenty-five years have taught me that I cannot be a spectator in the fight for democracy. I owe it to my parents, who risked everything on the promise of this nation. And I owe it to my children, whose future depends on whether enough of us are willing to keep building rather than let the fires, from either horizon, win.

“E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.” Twenty-five years later, I still believe it. I have simply learned how much work protecting that “one” actually requires.

On this 25^th anniversary of 9/11 let’s remember all those we lost and refuse to lose any more lives to hate.

Kareem Shora retired following 26 years focusing on national security and civil rights, including service as former Acting Director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, and supervisory roles in DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). He also served with FEMA and the State Department’s Counter Terrorism Bureau. He is a recognized expert in violence prevention, having led federal initiatives on targeted violence and terrorism prevention while building bridges between government, policymakers, and civil society. Now COO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), he has testified before Congress and worked extensively at the intersection of policy, human rights, and violence prevention. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.