Major Acid's E-Rag
After Nine Eleven
On the
Banks of the River
28 September 2001
There are more than 40 of us in the class, from more than 30 countries.
There are two Canadians (including me) one American, Palestinians and
Japanese, citizens of Ethiopia, Rwanda, Georgia, Denmark, Armenia, Egypt
and more, including one from our host country, Austria. We are in a
classroom in the European Peace University in Stadtschlaining, a tiny
village about two hours from Vienna. We are enrolled in a program called
Peace and Conflict Studies, an irony not lost on most of us when
hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center.
Following
the attacks, this mini-United Nations proved quickly to be less united
than nationalistic. The North Americans grew closer together. After
expressing sympathy, the Palestinian and other Middle Eastern students
became more withdrawn, in some cases actively avoiding contract with the
American. This was not easy to accomplish in our small
dormitory/classroom building with its single, cramped kitchen. The
African contingent seemed carefully neutral. The Eastern Europeans were
quick to return to their routine squabbling.
The
splintering was predictable; it was already slowly underway before the
attacks, and in some ways was no more than groups settling into the
comfort of commonality of interests and backgrounds. What troubled me
more was the response from some of the more actively religious in our
midst.
One student,
a Christian minister I believe, solicited signatures on a letter of
condolence to be given to the American, a letter littered with pious
expressions of god’s will and unknowable plans. Some Muslims, on the
other hand, were quick and vocal in their standard line about Islam
being a peaceful religion and Islamic terrorists not really, therefore,
Islamic.
I despise
both responses. If there is a god with a plan that requires the
exploding, incinerating and crushing to death 5000 or 6000 unsuspecting
people, he can keep his plan to himself. If Islam wishes really to show
that it is not responsible for its militant members, it is no longer
enough to hide behind self-serving, pious denials. Talk is cheap.
Without action, such talk is complicity.
I refused to
sign the minister’s letter. This produced a look of stunned
incomprehension on his face, but he had enough presence of mind not to
ask me why. Since then he has avoided contact with me. Most of the
Muslims tend to shy away from me too after my stating in class that the
WTC attacks would have my former Saudi Arabian high school students
literally dancing with joy.
I spent the
last two years teaching in Jeddah. I saw the school’s religious leaders
deny the holocaust, saw them vilify Israel and the US, saw the school
play host to Palestinian fund-raisers and lobbyists, watched my students
being herded to local hospitals to visit the wounded martyrs of the
Intifada, listened to my students praising Osama bin Laden as an Islamic
hero. Some of my former charges would, indeed, be dancing with joy.
No doubt,
too, that some of my former students, along with some of the Muslims
here, were appalled by the events of September 11. No doubt, too, that
many Christians took genuine comfort in their religion in the face of
September 11. Yet all that is cold comfort to me.
It didn’t
take long after September 11 for the Christian right to weigh in, when
Falwell and Roberston declaimed that god was indeed behind the attacks,
that he was acting out like the Old Testament vengeful god punishing
America for its descent into a sort of modern day Sodom and Gomorrah,
courtesy of gays and feminists and civil libertarians and pro-choice
supporters. It didn’t take them long to deny what they said, either,
apparently thinking people would believe them when they protested that
what they said, on their own broadcast program from their own studios,
was somehow taken out of context.
In
Stadtschlaining, school was back in. Our class was broken into groups
representing regions of the world and we all prepared presentations of
the conflicts from our regions. The Palestinians presented their
conflict with Israel and made a point of saying that the US media is
owned and run by Jews and that broadcast pictures of Arabs dancing in
the streets after the WTC attacks were faked by CNN. They asked: why do
Americans hate the Palestinian people, who, after all, never harmed
anyone in the west?
They were
oblivious to their own incredible irony. Our gateway into Austria was
the airport in Vienna, and no doubt every one of us who landed there
walked past the very place that, on 27 December 1985, witnessed a
pro-Palestinian terrorist attack that killed 3 and wounded 45. On that
same day, in Rome, 13 more were killed and 74 wounded.
I wasn’t in
Vienna in 1985, but I would bet that Christians there comforted
themselves and each other with the mercy and mystery of god; that
Islamic apologists protested loudly that the killers weren’t, not
really, Muslims, because Islam is, after all, peaceful.
The tension
in our mini-UN is easing now, and interaction between blocs and
individuals increasing, even so soon after September 11. Yet no one’s
beliefs have changed, I think. Today is the one-year anniversary of the
al-Aqsa Intifada, and our class was treated to an emotional appeal to
remember the martyrs – the Palestinian martyrs. No similar thought was
asked for the Jewish men, women and children who have been shot dead or
blown to shreds by some of those same Palestinian martyrs.
Life must be
somehow easier for those who hear the siren’s call to blind faith or
uncritical belief. I wonder sometimes that I cannot hear the same siren
song or see the same bright illusion of heaven, but I know why. I cannot
because I am standing on the banks of a river whose noxious waters put
the lie to every claim of mystery and every cry of denial. I cannot
because I can’t take my eyes off nor shut my ears to the swirling,
roaring, ever growing river of blood.
