WATCHING CNN in horror my colleagues and I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapse one after the other on Tuesday afternoon after hijacked passenger jets slammed into them in giant fireballs.

Gathered around the television set in our newsroom, we kept oohing and aahing every time something would happen. On the TV screen, the first plane didn’t look that big. Then around 20 minutes later another plane slammed into the second tower. Now we knew something was very wrong: These were not isolated accidents, these were acts of deliberate and calculated terrorism.

Rumors flew fast, with CNN happily flashing them on our screens: A car bomb blowing up outside the State Department in Washington, DC, (later denied), a radical Palestinian group claiming responsibility for the hijacking of the jets that slammed into the WTC (denied within minutes), and a plane crashing into the Pentagon (this one turning out to be true). Later, we heard of the fourth plane that had crashed in western Pennsylvania. What was its target? The White House in Washington? Perhaps.

In the middle of all this a friend of mine, Noel, called me on my cellphone from Manila. I told him what had happened as he hadn’t known what was unfolding. It was after 9 pm in the Philippines and he wasn’t watching television. A few hours later he kept texting me, asking me if I was OK and whether I was safe in Jeddah, wondering if I would be in harm’s way if the US retaliated against the perpetrators of these dastardly acts.

I explained that if the US retaliated, it would probably be Afghanistan, Iraq and perhaps Sudan that would bear the brunt of American anger, especially if suspicion kept pointing in the direction of Muslim extremist Osama Binladin, as being the mastermind behind these attacks.

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They had it coming

IN THE midst of watching all of this carnage on TV, some of my Arab colleagues seemed positively joyful at what was happening in America. One even said “good!” each time a plane crashed into something. I was obviously annoyed and distressed that anyone could take pleasure in watching thousands of people die in front of their eyes on TV screens, no matter what nationality they were. These same people enjoy various American exports. How ironic.

The flip side of this immature reaction to the bombing of the WTC towers is that Arab public opinion of the United States has been a long and slippery slope downwards in the past couple of months because of what is seen as its blind and murderous support of Israel and its military. The rising conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the daily flow of pictures of Palestinians being blown up by Israeli forces using American weapons, has only fueled anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Destroying the World Trade Center towers was the ultimate Arab fantasy of wreaking revenge on America, and it happened.

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Setting back the cause

THE FIRST thing that worried me was the possibility that Arabs and Muslims had perpetrated these horrific criminal acts. I was worried about the backlash that Arab-Americans and Muslims in America would bear after these attacks. And I was right.

Just a day after the WTC towers collapsed, and the Pentagon partially destroyed, a mosque in Dallas had its windows shot at, and Muslims across America received death threats and hate email. All those years of hard work trying to build up the Islamic community in America, fighting for the rights of American Muslims to be respected, were rapidly being flushed down the drain in one day. What a pity.

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Massive intelligence failure

JUST HOURS before the World Trade Center was attacked, the US government had issued a warning that US installations in Saudi Arabia and two other countries were in imminent danger of terrorist attack. How wrong they were!

Several analysts have been bemoaning this massive failure of US intelligence, but I think it just shows that extremely determined and well-financed terrorists will always be able to sometimes foil even the best financed and most sophisticated intelligence services in the world.

Obviously, the terrorists who died on Tuesday while attacking their US targets, had been in place for several months in America and probably did not communicate with their handlers abroad. Some of them allegedly had German passports, and this certainly would not have aroused the suspicion of US intelligence. Other reports said that they had actually undergone pilot training in the US.

The group of people who planned and executed these attacks, even if they are from the Binladen organization, are most probably of various nationalities united in one thing: Their hatred of America and of the Western way of life. This whole thing might boil down to a battle of civilizations: The West versus radical Islam. If it does, the Bush administration will have an extremely hard time pinpointing physical targets that the US military can strike back at. Who does the US bomb? Afghanistan, which provides Binladen with a safe-haven? Or the various Arab countries that some of the attackers allegedly come from?

Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, indicated in an NBC TV interview on Wednesday night what the US government’s position may be in the future when he said that he thought it was high time that US allies around the world showed whose side they were on. He said countries could no longer sit on the fence and only pay lip service to being against terrorism. He said this time clear sides would have to be taken. It’s either “you’re with us or against us”.

Unfortunately, this crude reductionism, while playing well to the American public, especially one seething with a desire to extract revenge for Tuesday’s tragedies, does not take into account the complexity of the multi-faceted relations, and the mixed feelings of love and hate, that govern relations of many nations with America.

It seems that the Pax Americana of the late-20th century and early 21st century is turning into a Pax Horribilis.

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‘We cried for six hours’

WORRIED ON TUESDAY night, I tried calling my friend Alfred who lives in Manhattan to make sure he was okay. All the circuits were busy so I couldn’t through, with my cellphone operator telling me in rather sinister recorded message that: “All circuits are busy due to an exceptional event in North America.”

Alfred is an old friend from college. Originally from Argentina, he and his family moved to America when he was a young boy. Skittish but extremely brainy, Alfred teaches French at a local college in New York while working on his doctorate in French literature from Yale University.

My thoughts also turned to another college friend, Abby Miller, who also lives in New York and works in the financial district where the World Trade Center towers were once located. Hopefully she’s okay and unharmed.

On Wednesday I got an email from yet another friend, Michael, who until early this year had also lived in Manhattan. Now in Washington, DC, he told me that he was safe. He and his friend had watched TV in shock and disbelief for 12 hours straight on Tuesday.

“It was so upsetting to see streets that I used to walk down in New York, now filled with rubble and destruction. We cried for six hours while watching the events unfold on television,” wrote Michael.

The ultimate tragedy of all of this is that it will only make the average American hate Arabs and Muslims more. The terrorists who committed these heinous acts on Tuesday may think that they have achieved victory, but it is a dark day for all civilized people in the world, be they Muslim or not.