This Sunday used to be called Patriot Day as well as Grandparents Day. Now it needs no more than calendar shorthand: 9/11.
As if we needed reminding, this week has been a retrospective of that horrific day when nearly 3,000 people were killed. A decade later the ramifications range from personal tragedies to security subplots to foreign policy resolve and regret.
During the countdown to the 9/11 anniversary, we’ve all experienced visceral reactions. Those images of the trapped and terrified buying seconds of time by leaping to their deaths from the World Trade Center Towers. They will forever haunt. As will those agonizing phone calls of the doomed. The emotional spectrum includes grief, rage, incredulity — and unacceptable acceptance. This wasn’t just an attack on the homeland or a de facto declaration of war. It was an
affirmation of evil.
We are now — 10 years removed — in what’s termed a “new normal.” How our lives and attitudes have changed. In various forums, we’ve been encouraged to share our “new normals.” This is one such — perhaps candid to a fault — example.
At first, and I know I’m not alone on this one, I found myself scrutinizing young “Muslim-looking” males on airplanes. I didn’t so much care about coach or aisle anymore, but I did care about arriving intact. So, I was on the alert for those who reminded me of Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader. Political incorrectness and sensitivity to stereotyping were non-factors.
Less so now — but hardly not so. There remains a place for common sense, collective-security profiling without being confrontational or insulting. I miss not having a need for a TSA as soon as I remove my shoes and belt.
I’m also more mindful of Muslim women. Not that a hijab is a red flag, far from it, but I notice. For a while, I actually thought it would be a good idea — and surely the Prophet would understand — if a lot of traditional religious garb were back on the rack for a spell. Just out of sensitivity to the majority Western culture that was still grieving or might have, say, intimations of a civilizational confrontation. Just in deference to the common good and situational sense. And to help undermine stereotyping, always hovering at moments like this.
Now it doesn’t really matter, but, of course, I note what no longer matters. But I get the French looking legally askance at burqas in the public square.
Post 9/11 has also prompted me to ponder words that I had been either unaware of or only peripherally familiar with. Would that I were still as unfamiliar with “jihad,” “sharia,” “al-Qaeda” and “fatwa.” I recalled that the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a “fatwa” on “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie.
That was — and remains — unfathomable. Imagine, sanctioned murder over blasphemy? I also noted with unsettling concern the uproar and outrage over those Danish Prophet cartoons. Same response: This is to die for?
The word “crusade” now took on politically incorrect baggage, and the word “martyr” had devolved into disturbing context. The concept of afterlife reward could obviously be perverted. And infidel, to some, could mean me.
And yet none of this was fair to mainstream Islam. It too was a victim. Good people who were victimized by “jihadist” elements — a euphemism for inhumanly cruel, cowardly terrorists cherry picking a holy book for motivation and justification. I continue to feel sorry for all those Muslims of good faith, which is the vast majority, who suffer from the odious association. Another subset of “life isn’t fair” that knows no cultural limit.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I found my reading habits changing. Before making a case for a civilizational clash, as some had suggested might be in the offing, I needed to know more about the other side, if you will. Not just the Prophet Muhammad and what caused the Sunni-Shiite split. And not just how the hard-line Wahhabi sect spread and gained influence. But how Islam is embedded into contemporary geopolitics. As in, what is America’s role in this
increasingly globalized, sometimes culturally-colliding world?
We know, for example what Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 motivations were — and they had more to do with post-Gulf War U.S. troops quartered in Saudi Arabia than a zero-sum, Islam-infidel endgame. We also know al-Jazeera will be streaming live next year’s Democratic and Republican national conventions. There are no secessions from the global village.
My bookshelf now ranges from Peter Mansfield’s “A History of the Middle East,” Stephen Kinzer’s “All The Shah’s Men” and Kenneth Pollack’s “The Persian Puzzle” to Loretta Napoleoni’s “Modern Jihad,” Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept” and Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower.”
I’m better off with the broadened frame of reference, however sobering some of the implications.
I’ve also been inspired to go back and re-read some John F. Kennedy speeches, given that his presidency coincided with the most dreaded of Cold War scenarios. When the need for co-existence was never so literal. When adversaries had to acknowledge what they had in common — not just in conflict. At American University in June of 1963, JFK said:
“… In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
If there must, ultimately, be war, may it be against those for whom the above has no application.