THE LIBERATOR - 9/11 Special Report

THE LIBERATOR SPECIAL REPORT

LIBERAL ARTS WEEK | SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2011

A Decade Later RACHEL MARINO

TH

REMEMBERING

SEPTEMBER

The year 2001 began on a Monday.

It was the year Wikipedia launched. It was the year Dale Earnhardt died in the last turn of the Daytona 500. George W. Bush became president, surgeons implanted the world’s first self-contained artificial heart and Enron filed for bankruptcy. But stop anyone on the street, ask anyone in America, and they won’t tell you 2001 was about money or the internet. Tuesday September 11, 2001 was a day of sorrow. Ten years ago now, those 2,996 deaths still feel like they happened yesterday.

“[I remember] watching the attack on TV in the middle of class and thinking it was happening in a different country for the first five minutes,” sophomore Sarah Sweet said.

Though many of us were young at the time, it’s something we’ll never forget, even if we didn’t understand it then. On that fateful day, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes with plans to crash them all. Two planes hit the Twin Towers in New York, which collapsed within 2 hours, killing thousands.

The third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia and a final plane crashed in a field after passengers tried to take control.

“I remember feeling a sense of vulnerability I had never felt before,” professor Jeremi Suri, originally from New York, said. “It seemed to me [then] that things were going to blow up right where we were.”

While firefighters and rescue groups worked tirelessly, just a short time later another scare hit - Anthrax. Killing five people and infecting 17 others, Anthrax was sent in the mail the news medias offices and two US senators.

“It was scary to open your mail,” professor Suri said. “You start to look at where you mail came from, was it something you should open or not? To this day mail doesn’t go to congress people’s office anymore. It get eradiated, goes through a special facility, they zap the mail to try and kill anything that’s in it.”

But from September 11th came a sense of community, a reemergence of love for neighbors and for the United States. Hung in thousands of yards, US flags could be seen

everywhere. People across the country came together to support each other and show support for those who had lost friends and family. A willingness to help strangers on the street and people across the globe prevailed.

As in any normal lifespan however, this extra patriotism eventually declined.

While many, if not most, Americans originally supported going to war with Afghanistan, and then Iraq, results were limited and slow, and the streets today tell a different story.

“I didn’t [support the wars] even as a kid,” Sweet said. “I just never felt like the invasions were justified.”

Calls to pull out of both countries can be heard across the country. Our goal consisted of dismantling Al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban from power. We thought other countries would want to be democratic, like us.

“I think we had a chance, early on, to be more successful in Afghanistan in eliminating the Taliban, in creating some sort of functioning society, but we diverted our resources to Iraq,” professor Suri said. “I think people expected when we went into Iraq that there would be a welcoming of Americans, that Americans would be seen as liberators. [Then] we were shocked because we thought we were doing the right thing, why would anyone hate us?”

So after 10 years, we are left in two countries where it’s unknown how wanted we are and unclear how long until we leave. We’re left with what many feel is a threat to privacy – the US Patriot Act. Designed to increase government’s ability to search telephone, medical, financial, other records, and more, the act angered many citizens.

“I personally think it’s an invasion of privacy,” senior Caitlin Carson said. “And even if the Patriot Act had been signed before the events of 9/11, I don’t see how it would have prevented the attacks from happening.”

Here in the United States we are also having trouble with our own free market economy. The debate remains what is going on and what’s yet to come – Was it a depression?

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Continued from front page Is it a recession? What happened?

When will it get better?

“[The war is] really not the source of our economic difficulties,” professor Suri said. “The way which over speculation in the real estate market created, I think, a set of crises as those investments went bad - that process contributed to a sort of shortening of people putting money into the economy in various ways, and that in turn, then created a major debt problem as we started to spend a lot of government money to try to make up for shortfalls in private spending. And that’s where we are today.”

Ten years later and we’re still fighting, not just other countries, but within our own. Park 51, a proposed Muslim community center, would be built two blocks from the World Trade Center site if given the go ahead. Popularly termed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” the building is a hot topic among many Americans.

“I think having a Mosque there is an absolutely great idea,” said professor Suri. “It shows the best of our society: we’re religiously tolerant and inclusive… I think a Mosque would symbolize that perfectly, and I think it would also

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stimulate reflection about those events, so I strongly support it.”

Yet it remains controversial. For some in New York and others who personally lost someone, the Muslim center may seem like a slap in the face. According to 2010 polls, the majority of New Yorkers and Americans actually oppose the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

“Obviously it’s not okay to stereotype all Islamic followers as terrorists,” Carson said. “But 9/11 was a horrible event in American history… I think that it’s just a little insensitive to build a mosque near ground zero.”

It’s been ten years. Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn’t doing that great, millions of people use Wikipedia, and we have an African American president named Barack Obama.

These years seems to have flown by, yet September 11th still feels so recent. While we will never forget, can never forget, 9/11 does not define Americans. Fire and smoke, war and depressions, America has been though it before and can get though it again. 2011 began on a Saturday, it’s time to start writing our own history.

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EXTREMIST STEREOTYPES MUSLIMS IN POST - 9/11 AMERICA

Ten years ago, 19 hijackers, motivated by a twisted Messianic ideology, embarked on what German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder rightfully called “a declaration of war on the civilized world.”

Though the 9/11 attacks didn’t invent Islamic fundamentalism, they sparked an important debate on the status of Muslim relations with the Western world. On one side, politicians such as Herman Cain in the United States and Geert Wilders in The Netherlands actively preach hatred toward Muslims. On the other, Centrist and left-leaning media often label the Muslim diaspora as helpless victims who need special protection. Truthfully, both perceptions oversimplify a very complicated topic.

Collectively referring to adherents of Islam as Muslim in the first place implies a degree of similarity that does not exist. The Islamic world contains a vast amount of religious sects as well as ethnicities, all of which not only have wildly different interpretations of Islam, but also different economic and political backgrounds. For example, most Iranian Americans emigrated as a result of the fall of the Shah and actively oppose the modern fundamentalist regime. Kurds living in the US and Europe survived an attempted genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein, and many stood behind the American-led invasion of Iraq. Other Muslims from countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, lived as either victims or beneficiaries of American-supported dictatorships, and their experience affects their political views.

Westerners must not tolerate bigotry towards Islam; however, some Muslims in the past showed

blatant disregard for Western values of liberty, especially in relation to criticism of Islam.

The murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and violent reactions towards the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad all highlight the crucial problem of modernism vs. tradition in Islam. The kneejerk reaction of Muslim organizations consists of dismissing these actions as products of an extremist fringe. True as that may be, it doesn’t change the fact that these tragedies stem from widely accepted interpretations of Islamic law stating that blasphemy and apostasy are capital crimes. Ignoring the problems of religious fundamentalism instead of confronting it head on contradicts Western values of liberty and undermines the work of liberal theologians working tirelessly to bring Islamic society into the modern world.

The question of whether Islam advocates violence remains an important debate, but claims that Muslims inherently support violence more than Christians or Jews shows ignorance of Islamic society and history. According to Zogby International, 59% of American Muslims hold undergraduate degrees, which is over twice

the national average. The nations with the two largest Muslim populations, India and Indonesia, underwent enormous economic and political progress in the past decade that led to moderation and wider support for democracy. Images of Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians protesting side by side against the brutal dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak filled the world with hope for a region plagued by intolerance and corruption.

The 9/11 attacks served as a wake-up call to the world about the dangers of religious fanaticism.

Unfortunately, an all encompassing solution to that problem does not exist. Muslims are neither brutal murderers subject to violence or helpless victims of Western policy, and labeling them as such creates disastrous results.

USMAN MASOOD

Cartoon by Khalil Bendib