Is it possible that anything good could ever come from someone who is an Arab? In the seventies the Arab Oil Cartel Embargo forced the world to the brink of economic collapse. Since then there have been a litany of dubious actions that you would not expect to come from so called “friends of America”, such as the death of the “American” journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the questionable friendship with the Saudi Crown Prince, who ordered his murder, to name just a few. It is hard to believe that childhood cancer, and compassion and a commitment to the welfare of our fellow man can be part of this discussion…but it is.
Consider Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz. Born January 6, 1912. He grew up in America, born in Deerfield Michigan, the son of a Lebanese family that migrated to America.
Early on he loved the entertainment business but it was frowned on by his family so he moved to Chicago and changed his name so no one would know who he was. And he struggled, and struggled, until one day Amos Muzyad, a devoted Catholic, prayed to his favorite saint (a saint, by the way, born in Israel), that if he could be shown the way to become successful that he would build a memorial to him.
And so in time, Amos Muzyad’s career did flourish, unbelievably; his patron saint had kept his word, and true to Amos Muyard’s word he began the work of building the memorial that he promised. He brought other prominent American Arabs together to fund something that had never been built before, a specialized children’s hospital, based on Amos Muzyad’s idea that, “No child should ever die in the dawn of life”.
He built the his hospital as promised and in 1962 when it opened, children dying of cancer had less than a 4% chance of surviving. Today, because of that hospital, children with cancer have a better than 94% chance of survival–and there is, and never has been, a charge to the parents.
Since then thousands of children of all religions and ethnicities from here and around the world have survived one of the deadliest diseases in human history and it is all due to a single Arab (yes an Arab) that kept his promise. The hospital he built was and is St. Jude, and by the way, the name that Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz changed his name to, so no one would know who he was, is “Danny Thomas”.
Danny Thomas has been gone for over 29 years, and even in his absence, his legacy reminds us that life, and kindness, and generosity of spirit, is not limited to people who just look and sound like us.
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