Muslim leader's tells teens everyone, at some point, is asked to stand up
Just days after Eboo Patel became the first Muslim to address the Greater Chicago Leadership Breakfast, the Chicago activist faced a decidedly different audience on Monday: high school student leaders.
This time, the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to building the global interfaith movement, was in his element.
"As I go through history, over and over again people find something in them that requires them to stand up for what is right," Patel told them. "I wonder what it's going to be for you, that requires you to stand up for someone who's different?"
More than 100 teens gathered at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie. They represented more than a dozen high schools, including Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Maine West High School in Des Plaines and Willowbrook High School in Villa Park.
They had been invited to attend the inaugural Student Leadership Day, part of the museum's mission to teach new generations to fight hatred, indifference and genocide in today's world.
For students, it was a full day of testimonials, beginning with those of the victims memorialized in the museum, before hearing firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors.
Conant senior Anthony Landando of Elk Grove Village said he drew inspiration from hearing the story of Fritzie Fritzshall, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
His counselor, Dan Detzner, said the daylong workshop helped students to think on a broader scale.
"Right now, there's not a lot they can do to effect change," Detzner said, "but this presents a lot of possibilities."
Maine West sophomore Angela Remus of Des Plaines said her classmates could make a difference by starting out with small acts of kindness, that would add up to larger change.
"I learned that whatever we decide to do, we have to be passionate about it," Remus said.
Patel, a member of President Obama's Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, invited the teens to join his Interfaith Youth Core.
When he described his own high school experiences at Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn, he admitted his own failure, in not standing up for a Jewish friend who endured discrimination.
It wasn't until he spent a summer with his grandmother in Mumbai, India and watched her take in women of all faiths who had been marginalized, that he internalized the direction of his Muslim faith, and of standing up for the oppressed.
While studying for his doctorate at Cambridge, Patel formed the idea of starting the Interfaith Youth Core, and of educating a new generation of leaders to work with others to effect change.
When the teens asked what they should do now, he encouraged them to develop a personal ethic and practice it, so that when history calls, they will be ready.
"Start where you are - and do the right thing," Patel said.