The Column I Wrote on September 12, 2001
September 10th, 2007 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families"The past is a strange place."--Morrissey
I think it was P. J. O'Rourke who wrote that one problem with being a writer is that whatever idiotic thing you wrote is always there for people to look back upon and mock. I occasionally am compelled to look back at a newspaper column I wrote many years ago, and I always prepare to cringe when I do it.
I wrote the newspaper column below on September 12, 2001. It will inevitably be viewed through the lens of post-September 11 politics, the Iraq war, etc., though these things have little to do with the column itself.
All Americans Need to Stand Up for U.S. Arabs, Muslims
By Glenn Sacks
With the possibility of more terrorist attacks, U.S. military action, and even war, Arab and Muslim Americans are in danger of becoming pariahs in our society. It is the duty of all Americans to make sure this doesn't happen.
Since Tuesday's terrorist attacks, Arab and Muslim Americans have been the victims of dozens of despicable hate-crimes. Arab gas station attendants have been punched, shot at, and attacked with machetes. Mosques, temples, and Islamic centers have been shot at, vandalized, firebombed, and attacked with Molotov cocktails. Arab businesses have been burned down and fire-bombed. Muslim girls have been beaten, a Pakistani woman was almost run over by a car, and a Sudanese man was attacked with a knife. Arab businesses have closed and Arab parents have held their children out of school because they fear harassment and violence.
At the same time, talk radio air waves have been filled with racist bile and lust for blood and revenge. One Southern California caller suggested earlier this week that the U.S. bomb and annihilate all the Arab nations. Whereas a week ago the man would have been seen as a nut and cut off immediately, in our new, darker climate the host merely quizzically asked "and kill women and children?" The caller replied "Yes, get the children, because in 20 years they'll be the new terrorists attacking us." Subsequent callers, instead of denouncing him, continued in the same vein.
Some U.S. leaders haven't been helping. Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat from Georgia, spoke of the terrorists and told the Senate:
"I say bomb the hell out of them....If there's collateral damage, so be it....They didn't care about our citizens, so we don't care about theirs....They certainly found our civilians to be expendable."
Arab-American leaders have denounced Tuesday's terrorist attacks in the strongest possible terms. In a statement issued Wednesday, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said that the "entire Arab-American community" felt "deep shock, outrage and anger" over the "heinous and reprehensible attack against our society," adding that "Arab-Americans will be no less moved, no less angry and no less outraged than our fellow Americans."
Our support for Arab/Muslim Americans needs to be demonstrated in ways big and small. If a Middle Easterner in a convenience store or gas station is being harassed, taunted, or threatened, we must not turn a blind eye. If we hear children on a school yard taunting an Arab/Muslim child, we must make it clear that this is not acceptable.
If Muslim homes or places of worship are threatened with attack and the police are unable to provide protection, we should organize civilian defense guards, as were used during the Civil Rights Movement, to defend them. During that movement, when black leaders were threatened with attacks, blacks and anti-racist whites organized squads to stand guard outside their homes.
Arab and Muslim Americans may well be facing the greatest challenges any American minority group has faced during the past 30 years. Over the past three days we have glimpsed the dark possibilities of this nightmarish future of violence and hate. Americans of all ethnicities and religions must act together to make sure that it never comes to pass.
This column first appeared in the Pasadena Star-News & Affiliated Papers (9/16/01).
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September 10th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Glenn,
You are spot-on with your points.
There are apparently between 1.4 and 1.9 Billion Muslims in the world.
The number of "terrorists" who might place themselves in the 9/11 club, and who are involved in, or interested in, action against the U.S., is comparatively miniscule, and must not number more than the thousands or 10s of thousands at most, with the latter/larger figure necessarily putting terrorist-stripes on recent and peripheral wannabe recruits. (And no, I really have difficulty considering those now resisting U.S. occupation in the Middle East to have been terrorists or even enemies of ours until after we invaded. But having said that, I do understand why we invaded, I think, and the practical deterrent justification for this otherwise non-evidence-based military action. History will show whether it was "morally" justified, given that it seems not to have been legal-evidence justified.)
People throughout human history who undertook politically motivated violence have very often cloaked themselves in whatever religion was available to help them draw in more support. This is no more than skilled manipulation of whatever people are proximally available to be manipulated/recruited into the group with the agenda.
We have the Christian "crusades", which were clearly motivated as much by political and economic reasons as by religious, and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of that. Curious that the property of the people found guilty in that Inquisition was confiscated. (Sounds like being found guilty of being a father in America?)
For these reasons and others, people always have and always will attempt to blame-shift their motives and actions onto the "noble motive" of service God if they can. Completely typical.
Knowing nothing about the Muslim's religion, short what I've read since 9/11, it is hard to see its principles as being terribly different from those of Christianity or Judaism if one seeks to distill out the core values. It seems a pacifist religion. It does have lots of specific social practices, but so do various early and/or more extreme sub-flavors of the Western world's other prevlent religions. So what?
Catholic Nuns wear or wore until recently something as covering-up as the usual female Muslim's head-wear. Elder Catholic women can certainly still be seen to wear veils and head-covering dress even today. Hasidic Jews seem to dress very conservatively, both men and women.
So let us not give the tiny, nasty, crowd of actual terrorists a big win by assigning to their camp, the overwhelming majority of the 1-billion plus Muslim people of this world.
They don't deserve to have such an army. They didn't earn it. And that "army" of peaceful people would never follow them. And it never has.
This truth should be clear to any American who sets aside or shock, our hurt and our anger, and looks at the facts and the numbers.
September 10th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
I certainly agree.
The bit I really hated about some of the comments Glenn quoted were the 'them and us' references.
Apparently, if somebody of a certain religion or ethnic group attacks somebody from another religion or ethnic group, this is seen as an attack on one group by another.
Who can possibly say if your average Muslim shop owner supported the acts of 9-11? An attack on a Muslim cannot be construed as an attack on a terrorist if that Muslim is not a terrorist. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, but people group the innocent citizens that died there in with the 9-11 bombers, simply because they both come from that wide stretch of earth we know as 'the middle east'
Crazy
September 10th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Yes Callum, and importantly, to the extent that people in the West are naive in understanding the manipulation of the very tiny terror groups, then the net result is that WE in the West end up facilitating the terrorists by driving the bulk of Muslims AWAY from a position of sympathy and allegiance to the Western victims, and TOWARDS the only other folks who will (of course) sympathize with them as a group wrongly accused by us. And that group of "folks" are the terrorists.
This is a chess game of small and large group sentiment manipulation and if we don't think about where the moves are coming from, and the goal of the oppostion, we could lose most of the pieces we have on the board.
Already, we have created many, many new and deeply committed individual enemies, simply by invading peoples who had real issues with us. But we gave the masses there some real reasons to hate us -- and particularly after it is carefully "explained" to the masses why they should hate us, which explanation is offered up conveniently by the manipulator/terrorists who do have an agenda against us.
So we should embrace and empathize with the 99%+ of Muslims who are certainly not terrorists, and who are peaceful people whose religion's primary rules of conduct look to my untrained eyes, pretty darned similar in terms of core values, to every other major religion existing in the world today.
September 10th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
type corrections to my post above:
#1 the first word of 3rd line should be "manipulations" not "manipulation"
#2. 6th line from the bottom should read "peoples who had NO real issues with us" -- the word "no" was accidentally ommitted by me
September 11th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Should generalizations about a group accrue benefits or blame to members (or those who are perceived to be members) of the group?
Because Einstein was a man, should men alone be considered eligible to teach mathematics and physics?
Because a small minority of men are violent, should fathers not be eligible for a rebuttable presumption for shared parenting?
September 11th, 2007 at 11:15 am
The opinions posted here are by men I respect and, in some cases, have expressed admiration for, but several of you, and Glenn, exhibit a naivete about war and terrorist (guerilla) theory that is dangerous.
Let's start with the percentages of radical Moslems. It is not 1%, but widely reported to be about 11%. What Hitler would have given for a radical army of that magnitude! This means that there are millions of Moslems willing to blow themselves up to kill us.
Second, no revolution was ever started by a majority, but by a small, dedicated, radical group, to include especially the American Revolutin. This revolution is being waged by quite a large group, with asupporters numbering in the log of millions, if not billions! When Glenn quotes that the "entire Arab-American community" felt "deep shock, outrage and anger," I recall the cheering crowds of Moslems in the Middle East at the news of the Ameriocan deaths on 9/11.
As to the innocent Moslem civilians,few Germans were Nazis, or even Nazi sympathizers, but they did not take up arms to stop the Nazis. As such, they rendered themselveds and their children irrelevant when they became casualties of the allied attacks, including the bombing of Dresden. They and their allies started WWII, and we finished it, and they have no validity when it comes to criticizing our methods, including the atomic bombing, for ending it. I take the same view of the Moslem community. The American Moslem community should be viewed with great suspicion because they do NOT take action against those who are terrorists among them in this county and because some of their organizations have sent funds to Hamas and other terrorist groups!
The bottom line is that we are at war and we need to recognize that fact and all the consequences that go with it, including the death of "innocents" on both sides.
http://ken454.statesmanblogs.com
September 12th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Ken,
Your post made me think about how what I believe to be a miniscule percentage of women who are feminists in this country, have in the eyes of some politicians, positioned themselves -- or been positioned by certain profiting puppetmasters -- as the official spokeswomen for all American women.
This is quite a trick that they have pulled off, I am sure you will agree. Meanwhile, I find it hard to find a woman who doesn't cringe when asked how they feel about feminists.
Similarly, a very tiny group of terrorists in the Middle East successfully got the U.S. media to "credit" them with representing hundreds of millions of Muslims -- if not the full 1.6 to 1.9 billion Muslims -- just due to commonality of religion and geography*, plus a copy of the Qu'ran thoughtfully left in an abandoned car at the airport!
(*Noting that the largest country-population of Muslims is in Indonesia, far, far away from Iraq.)
This to my eyes is the same old game as a tiny core group of feminists deceiving many legislators into the false belief that these "femnazis", as some apparently call them, should be accorded the status some duly elected representatives of all women as a gender.
These two case examples show how a few individuals can set two large and unsuspecting groups at each others throats. Whether the groups are Muslims vs. Christians, or Women vs. Men. In both cases, the puppetmasters behind the scenes are engaging in a massive and fraudulent manipulation of very large groups of innocents who end up suffering terribly, while the puppetmasters profit mightily in the currency which they hold dear.
And in the case of the feminists, I would argue that they are being used as "straw women", in that the real and most dangerous puppeteers behind our wretched family court policies are the private sector attorneys and others feeding at that trough. These hidden robbers must absolutely love the shield offered them by the "feminists" and their loud arrogance. And legislators who are really pandering to attorneys can act as if they are just being sensitive to the rights of women, as articulated to them by an organization which has hijacked the noun "women" into its name.
Meanwhile Bin Laden, and his tiny little coterie have, to use his own recent words, "turn[ed] the direction of [America's]compass", and in fact, that of the whole world.
One wonders what would have happened if we had treated him and his nasty team of cult members as merely a scaled-up version of Timothy McVeigh -- an extremist using criminal and murderous means against innocent civilians. Basically, a nutcase who pulled off a large act of terror.
But instead, we gave him and his weird little team full billing, and accorded to him a level of importance fitting to one who was running an entire continent, fully under his command. And by attacking that continent, we drove many of th otherwise completely disinterested iraqis into his waiting embrace, and thereby under his effective leadership, did we not?
It is not clear to me that it was so wise to have attributed to him such importance, despite the shock he delivered into New York and the Pentagon, and almost to the White House. By our reaction, we have only elevated him and his impact, it would seem. Might it not have worked as well to have treated him as an exceptional, precocious but mentally diseased mosquito, who got his blood-fill, but wasted his whole little army in doing so? And then we work behind the scenes to wipeout his training camps and infrastructure so as to eliminate his pipeline of terrorists-in-training?
(I can also see some arguments in favor of the pre-emptive invasion, which basically amount to acting by threat to force enlistment and motivation of neighboring dictators and their power structures and influence networks into strongly suppressing any and all further acts of terror from occuring on U.S. soil -- "or those who harbor them" was the messaging phrase which our invading Afghanistan and Iraq punctuated and amplified to the ears of all neighboring dictators, and I would note that further incidents have not occurred on U.S. soil. So that is the best argument I can offer, parenthetically, for our government's strategy of invading, not evidence of culpability or the risk of imminent harm posed to us by Iraq. And I would add, that America is extremely lucky that no further incidents did occur on its soil -- or with its passenger jets, as beyond more horrible deaths, economic chaos could well have resulted from continued serious terror incidents.)