Millions upon millions of people will spend a few moments today to reflect on what happened three years ago when twisted fanatics seized four planes in the US, smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killed thousands and changed so much in the world. Those millions will reflect on what has happened since.
The world, as events in Jakarta and North Ossetia most recently demonstrate so sickeningly, has not become a safer place. It does not matter where we find ourselves; we try to live our normal lives, but they are now touched by insecurity and fear: Will our plane be hijacked, our train bombed? Will someone we know be kidnapped and murdered? When we fly to the US or Europe, will we be arrested and accused of being a terrorist simply because we are Muslim? Worse, there is a sense that our very identities and loyalties are being violated. In the Muslim world, bigots try to hijack Islam and set Muslim against Muslim. In the West, there is rampant Islamophobia, its fires stoked by certain members of the media eager to demonize Islam and apply collective guilt to all Muslims for the acts of a handful of fanatics. Elsewhere, we see oppression and slaughter in the name of democracy, injustice in the name of justice, at the very least a loss of ordinary freedoms in the name of security. And in the background, we hear voices from both ends of the divide, insisting that if we are not with them we are against them. There are people out there, it seems, as much in the White House as in mountain caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan, hell-bent on turning Huntington’s terrifying Clash of Civilizations theory into an apocalyptic reality.
For many of those millions, there will be anger and bitterness, not least because there is now no international unity in the face of terrorism — shattered as it was by Washington’s attempted hijacking of it to fight the wholly unconnected war in Iraq, by the desire of other governments to use the situation for their own political purposes, and by the cowardice of some when themselves directly targeted by terrorists.
But the death of consensus does not portend a war lost. There have been battles won — at great cost, as we have seen in this country. There will be more. The war will continue for some time to come, fed as it is by resentment, alienation and a contempt for lives of others that is wholly evil. Retaliation by itself is no answer. It only breeds further demands for revenge, further violence. Political and social changes must take place to draw the poison, although we must not allow ourselves to weaken our guard against the terrorist.
So on this third anniversary, even while Washington wallows in impotence in Iraq, the world needs to rebuild a united front. The first step needs perhaps to be taken with ourselves.
The word jihad — struggle — is often, but wrongly, talked about in relation to the terrorists. A real jihad is necessary — a struggle to change our own hearts and minds so as to eradicate any possible malevolence, a struggle to rid Islam of its deviants, a struggle to restore the honor of Islam which has suffered immeasurably through their doing. The terrible reality is that millions of people across the world who knew nothing about Islam before Sept. 11 now wholly associate it with killing and hate, and fear and hate it in return. We need to change that. Most of all, we need to make sure that the Clash of Civilization theory does not become a self-fulfilling prophesy. This is the real jihad, the real struggle ahead.
And the first important step on that road is to get out of the blame game — all it does is perpetuate our own poisoned sense of victimhood, while alienating and confirming others in their own negative views.
