~YOUTH VIEWS~ 9/11 five years later: what’s our legacy? by Kareem Elbayar

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~YOUTH VIEWS~ 9/11 five years later: what’s our legacy?

by Kareem Elbayar

12 September 2006

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Washington, D.C. - “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing,” Winston Churchill once said, “—after they’ve tried everything else first.” Five years after the attacks of 9/11, it is painfully clear that we are still trying other options.

9/11 was a singular event in American history, and it is time we Americans ask ourselves what the legacy of that national trauma will be. This is not the first time that a blow to the American psyche has been inflicted—but the nation always recovered and went on to prosper. Five years after Pearl Harbor, the United States had not only defeated the Axis powers in a two-front war but had also embarked upon the largest reconstruction and recovery project in the history of the world; five years after the assassination of President Kennedy, American society was permanently transformed by the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.

What have we accomplished in the five years since 9/11? The entire world was horrified by those attacks, and although it is hard to remember now, the outpouring of grief and sympathy that Americans received was unprecedented. In Jordan, so many people came to pay their respects that the American embassy in Amman was forced to turn them away. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing the world’s 56 Muslim nations, condemned the attacks as “contradict[ing] the teaching of all religions and human and moral values.” France’s Le Monde newspaper ran the banner headline “Nous sommes tous Américains”—“We are all Americans.”

9/11 presented an opportunity for the American people once more to work together with foreign nations and to do something about the great problems of our time. Instead, our government chose to go to war in Afghanistan alone, oddly ignoring the offers of assistance from sympathetic nations the world over—and before that campaign was even complete, the government would again demonstrate its disdain for the world’s sympathy by starting an internationally condemned war in Iraq. Now we fight two very difficult wars in which tens of thousands of lives have been lost. And worst of all, these campaigns have no end in sight.

The Middle East remains terribly instable, seemingly on the verge of explosion at any moment. We have been lucky enough to avoid any new terrorist attacks in our country, but terrorist groups have struck or attempted to strike in Canada, Britain, Jordan, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, and beyond. Anti-Americanism in nations all over the world has surged, and the suspicion and hostility of average Americans toward Islam and Muslims is likewise higher than ever. Meanwhile, our leaders talk of the “global war on terror” and confronting “Islamo-fascism,” but no one seems to know what these words actually mean, let alone how we will know when we have achieved our goals or what our goals actually are.

Five years after 9/11, it is time to stop and re-evaluate where we have gone. President Bush is right: 9/11 was indeed the first battle in what will be an ongoing war for the future of civilised people. But the term “war on terrorism” is facile and misleading. Terrorism, after all, is a tactic. It is not an ideology or a nation or a people.

The American people are sophisticated enough to understand the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, or Iran and Palestine. It is time our leaders stop treating us like children; it is time to stop calling different fights in different countries against different enemies by the same name in the hopes that this will be enough to secure our unquestioning support.

Our battle is not against Islam or Muslims. It is not a fight against Islamic fundamentalism, or “Islamo-fascism,” one of the most absurd terms that has ever become a part of our national discourse. The Nazis called themselves Christians and believed that they were acting in conformance with God’s will—but no one ever called them Christian fundamentalists, or “Christiano-nazis”. Our fight—and it is one that we can and must win—is a battle against poverty, against lack of education, and against depravation of civil and political rights. These are the demons that must be slain, for they are the root causes of the despair, suffering and anger that so often lead to violence. As it happens, these demons are nowhere more prevalent than in Muslim countries in the Middle East, but this does not mean that we are fighting a religion with over 1.2 billion followers worldwide.

It is time again for America to embrace the moral high ground. How many billions have been spent on war, death and destruction since 9/11? Imagine if that money had been spent feeding the world’s hungry, educating the unskilled, ending gender inequality and securing the civil rights of refugees and other marginalised people? What if we attempted to actually promote democracy in the world by isolating and punishing all dictators, not just those who aren’t our “friends” and happen to rule over oil-rich countries? What if we focused on fully engaging in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to finally make real the two-state solution that all parties already know must be put into place? It is this last point that would do the most not just to make ourselves and our Israeli friends safer, but also to finally prove to the Muslim world that the US can be a fair and even-handed partner for peace.

Americans can accomplish great things. We have risen to the occasion time and again to remake the world into a safer and more just place. On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, let us recall the spirit of cooperation and unity that we all felt in the weeks and months after 9/11. Let us harness our great national spirit and put it to good ends. Instead of being suspicious of and hostile to Muslims, let us empower the 8 million Muslims living in America so that they can serve as our global ambassadors to the Muslim world, and so that they can show the world that the US is not represented by Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Let us fight once more on the right side of history.

It is our actions as individuals that will decide what the world will look like on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

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* Kareem Elbayar is a law and international affairs graduate student at the George Washington University Law School. He wrote this article after attending the 9/11+5 Conference on American/Muslim Relations, hosted by Americans for Informed Democracy (www.aidemocracy.org). This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 September 2006, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for republication.


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