Guarding the secrets

by Ellen Francis Harris

To her friends and teachers, sixteen-year-old Tina Isa was a bright, bubbly American girl, working at a fast-food restaurant to earn money for college and dating a shy, poetic senior. But at home there were secrets that scared the honor student. Her parents and older sisters were constantly on the attack - she had humiliated them by assimilating into American culture instead of conforming to the traditional Muslim values dutifully followed in their native West Bank village. Furious, Tina's father beat her so savagely that she told friends - and left notes in her schoolbooks - that if anything happened to her, her father was to blame. Tina had long known that Palestinian terrorism was behind his mysterious phone calls and many trips to the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Her father and the other Abu Nidal Organization operatives worried that Tina might expose their activities. . One midnight, as Tina returned home from her job and walked into the living room, her father made a c