This weekend I intend to be out. Perhaps I’ll take a boat out to sea or go for a long hike in the hills. One thing is for sure: I will not be anywhere where I may be tempted to look at a television set or glance at a newspaper.
Monday marks the 5th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Consequently this weekend will see the 9/11 anniversary industry go into full swing.
Anniversaries are primarily an opportunity to remember, but they should also provide a time to reflect, understand and most importantly rekindle hope. The first anniversary of 9/11 was indeed a memorial. The focus was on the victims and their loved ones. The tone was hushed. The image that summed it up was that of the huge crater at ground zero as they called it. That still image conveyed the sense of loss and devastation better than thousands of words or impassioned speeches.
But now it is five years. Each year that passed has removed with it one more layer of sensitivity. The kid gloves are off. Now we can have full-blown reconstructions, vivid and sensationalist portrayals of what happened on the planes and in the towers, dramatic testimonials from the great and the famous, and the good ordinary citizens too, of how that “one momentous day” changed their lives, the day when “the rules of the game changed” as I saw somewhere in big letters. The books are out, the films have made it to our screens and now we can have the full tornado-like frenzy of the anniversary coverage.
Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say. Maybe, but maybe not. In focusing on the events of that one day we remember only part of the story. It is as if we separate the event from its context. The official count is that 2,973 people died in the attacks. This count rather tellingly excludes the 19 hijackers who also died that day. Though I understand why we do not wish to mourn the murderers in the same manner as the victims, it stands as testament to the unwillingness to examine frankly what pushed the hijackers to commit the attacks. Instead what we have is good guy, bad guy stereotypes. And rather obligingly OBL — the big bad wolf — has delivered a new tape to Al-Jazeerah for the occasion.
The attacks of 9/11 were indeed an atrocity but it is what has happened since which makes the world more dangerous today than it was five years ago. The last five years have been catastrophic. While we have a roll-call of those who died on 9/11, the thousands who died in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon remain nameless and uncounted, their lives less worthy of our sympathy because their story is not photogenic. This is just one example of the double standard that is screamed about on the streets of Baghdad, Beirut or Bethlehem.
What I feel most strongly since 9/11 is incomprehension. I look back on the last five years and I struggle to understand how we got here.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks I remember looking again and again at the photos of the 19 hijackers and feeling utterly baffled and terrified. How could men who looked just like my cousin or my best friend commit something like this? Why did they do it? I tried desperately to understand their mindset, to have a way into the anger or rage that they surely must have felt in order to push them to commit mass murder. I did not want to justify their actions, I wanted to understand them: Because the unknown is more frightening than the known and because the known is easier to fight.
But the weeks that followed the attacks were marked by significant aftershocks. I found to my dismay that people I knew and loved cheered at the killings on American soil. “Let them understand what we feel,” a young girl said to me in my own kitchen, “they’ve been massacring us for years and we did nothing. At least now we got them back.” I looked at her in astonishment; clearly I did not know her as well as I thought, but who was the “them” I asked. “Why, the Americans and the Israelis of course!” she answered.
Voices like hers were in the minority in my social circle, but year on year they grew louder. When London was attacked on July 7, 2005, I was just as shocked and upset as in 2001, but I did not feel the same incredulity. I understood the rhetoric, it had become familiar.
Similarly I look at the pictures from Iraq and struggle to understand why Bush and Blair went to war. Weapons of mass destruction? Nobody sane believed that even for an instant. Removing Saddam? A convenient excuse; nobody was sorry to see him go until they saw what Iraq has become since his toppling. Oil? Maybe, but could that be reason enough? None of it makes sense to me, neither the way we were marched into war nor the daily bloodshed which we now witness. Why did it happen? I have yet to hear a complete and convincing answer.
Then I see the destruction that Israel delivered onto Lebanon in the space of just over a month with not even a slap on the wrist from the international community. They demolish and the rest of the world pays for the reconstruction. Except of course that lives cannot be reconstructed, only buildings, roads and bridges. And I see the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza who have been laid under siege, starved and cut off from the rest of civilization, with little concern or attention from the rest of the planet. Could all this really be down to the abductions of a handful of Israeli soldiers? Are Israeli lives really so precious that they justify so much human suffering?
And suddenly I find myself treading dangerously close to the arguments used by those who justify terror. It is a fine line and that is where their power lies. They exploit the anger all Muslims feel as they witness the daily taking of Muslim life and turn into a cause. And every day the likes of Bush, Olmert and Blair give them more ammunition. It is frightening, very frightening, more frightening than any reconstruction of the attacks of 9/11.
That is why this weekend I will escape far away from the media circus. I will find myself a quiet place, and I will pray.
