Given the over-the-top media coverage of the past few days and grand ceremonies around the world to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, you would think it’s the end of the world.
For weeks newspapers and television networks have been going on and on about the events that we have heard and read about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Every pundit worth his/her share of audience had to come up with his/her own take to mark the occasion. What strikes me about this whole business is the fact that the world looks at the 9/11 tragedy and the larger issues associated with it from a US prism, totally ignoring the infinite suffering wrought on the victims of US wars.
Indeed, there’s a complete industry out there catering to this market, continually churning tomes claiming to offer “new light” on the attacks. What distinguishes these ostensible attempts to understand “Islamic terrorism” though is their pathological hatred of the Other and an incredible ignorance or wilful misrepresentation of Islam, Arabs, and Muslims.
The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis, Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left are only some of the most ‘respectable’ names that exploit the unprecedented curiosity about Islam in the West.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many horrified Americans had understandably asked: Why do they hate us? So even as most of us were as outraged by the horror of 9/11 as most westerners had been, we nurtured a faint, innocent hope that perhaps now the US would see reason and review its absurd policies and actions all these years. Many hoped that 9/11, totally reprehensible as it was, would make the US pause and ponder the cause of this corrosive anger and source of this conflict. Of course, we were wrong — and how!
Whoever carried out those attacks, they turned out to be the greatest enemies of the cause they claim to champion. They have managed to visit the greatest catastrophe on Muslim lands since the Mongol invasion eight centuries ago. The Mongols raped and pillaged Baghdad, the capital of Abbasid caliphate, and virtually every Muslim city. When the Mongols left, they had left behind two million dead, including the caliph and his sons who were bundled in a carpet and trampled to death by Mongol horses.
What Baghdad has witnessed under the Coalition of the Willing hasn’t been much different. And if anyone thought 9/11 would prompt America to mend its ways and policies in the Middle East, well, they need to think again. Clearly, America — the militant global superpower that we get to see and experience and not American people — doesn’t seem to care one way or another. It remains far from repentant.
According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, Americans today are more willing to believe that US policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington. Reflecting a remarkable shift in US public opinion over the past decade, today, 43 per cent of Americans feel the attacks may have been motivated by something “the US did wrong in its dealings with other countries.”
Clearly, all is not lost. There may be still hope for America. That is, people’s America, the nation of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain and Martin Luther King that once inspired and beckoned dreamers from around the world. The ultimate land of opportunities where it’s possible for a black man with a Muslim father to pursue his ‘audacity of hope’.
That America, however, seems to have lost its way in a wasteland where no morals, no justice, and no principles exist. Some of my fellow travellers have convinced themselves that the land of the free has been hijacked by a lunatic fringe. I wouldn’t know the truth. After the betrayal at the hands of our change-we-can messiah, I am not sure about anything anymore.
Coming back to the issue at hand, all of us share the pain of those who lost their loved ones that sunny morning in September 2001. Most of us remember where we were that day and how our hearts went out to those trapped inside the World Trade Center. Those who perished in that awful tragedy were innocent folks like you and me.
There were also many Muslims among the victims, just as there were people from all faiths and ethnicities, celebrating the rich diversity of America. It was no jihad, if it was indeed carried out by Al Qaida, a premise now increasingly challenged by independent researchers and experts like Dr Alan Sabrosky, a Vietnam and US Navy veteran. It was murder, pure and simple. And you know what the Quran says about murder? Taking one innocent life is equal to killing entire humanity. Whoever perpetrated that outrage deserves severest punishment in this life — and the next.
That said, one must ask: How long will America remain handcuffed to history and stuck in this time warp? Isn’t it about time it moved on? It has already turned the world upside down, without achieving anything visible or concrete. Indeed, its overwhelming response to the terror attack has given birth to more extremists and has served as a recruiting agent for groups like Al Qaida.
Even the Washington Post, the voice of US establishment, admits, “in the name of the war on terror, we have invaded and occupied a country that had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, we have emboldened our enemies, we have lost and taken many lives, we have spent trillions of dollars, we have sacrificed civil liberties, and we have jettisoned our commitment to human dignity.”
Instead of drawing the right lessons from the September 11 tragedy, the US has turned the whole world into a battlefield. More important, in its preoccupation with its own loss, America remains oblivious to the catastrophic suffering it has visited on others. Amid this anniversary brouhaha, does anyone remember the innocent victims of US wars? What about the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives America and its allies have expended — and continue to — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere since 9/11?
Comparisons are odious but unavoidable. To avenge the killing of 2,977 people, the US and its allies have ravaged Afghanistan and killed tens of thousands in Iraq alone. And this war is far from over, although the crusader in the White House has been replaced by someone who never tires of singing paeans to peace and has already been feted with a Peace Nobel. So, dear America spare a thought for all the victims of your wars. And if it’s not too much to ask for, ask yourself who and what started it all.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a commentator on the Middle East and South Asia affairs. Follow him on twitter/aijazzakasyed
