September/October 2001 Feature

Lessons from the New Day of Infamy
Leo Haber

The terrorist destruction of the giant twin towers in New York on September 11 that has resulted in the murder of up to six thousand innocent human beings staggers the imagination of men and women of good will. The bombing of the Pentagon in Washington and the suspicion that other centers of American power and prestige were intended targets are equally frightening. The president of the United States referred to these horrendous acts as acts of war. On the morning after the attack, William Safire’s Op-Ed article in The Times appeared with the headline, “New Day of Infamy.” The title was eminently appropriate, for it recalled President Roosevelt’s characterization of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that forced the United States into the Second World War.
No newspaper, no magazine can publish an issue, however ready for the printer, without addressing this sudden tragedy of unimaginable dimension. Even at the risk of delaying dissemination of our current issue, we must pause just a few days before the Rosh Ha-Shanah/Yom Kippur period of introspection to confront the figure of evil in our unredeemed world and ask ourselves pertinent questions.
First, immediate questions: How do we mitigate the agony of our neighbors whose families have suffered the ultimate sacrifice—the sudden snuffing out of the lives of mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons, of working men and women, firefighters, police officers, Port Authority officers, EMS personnel, and countless others representing a racial and religious cross section of the gorgeous world that is New York? Next, how do we contribute to the rebuilding of New York, the greatest city in the world, the center of business, fashion, art, literature, music, even sports—in sum, every facet of culture, freedom, and multiethnic living?
Then the other questions that cannot be set aside or disregarded: How do we respond to this barbaric act perpetrated by those who put little or no value on human life, their own included? How do we deter future fanatics from repeating such terrorist acts? How do we restore American prestige and power? In the final analysis, what do we learn from this unprecedented assault in peacetime upon millions of innocent human beings and upon the honor and soul of America? Millions, sadly enough, not thousands, because every such murder—and victims of terrorism are victims of murder—affects family and friends forever, and, in the final analysis, a whole grieving nation.
The terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, began with the hijacking of four jet airplanes and culminated in the suicide destruction of the jets with all their passengers and crew aboard as two of them were piloted mercilessly into the twin towers that graced New York so majestically and one into the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania, short of its probable target in Washington, apparently because of heroic action undertaken by passengers.
We at Midstream cannot help noting the following. Hijacking of airplanes, suicide bombings—don’t these two terrorist methodologies ring a bell? Airplane hijacking was one of the earliest atrocities carried out by terrorists against Israel and against Jews; vide Entebbe of 1976. Suicide bombings have been the latest barbaric enterprise visited upon Jewish men, women, and children in discos and pizza restaurants in Israel—at least two dozen such barbarisms in the last year alone. Hijacking of airplanes, suicide bombings—the alpha and omega of evil terrorist techniques, and let us not be coy in naming them Arab terrorist techniques. Let us also add immediately that making such an identification does not in the least justify antipathy against all Arabs or Muslims. We ought to be beyond ascribing the sins of some to all members of a group. And anyone who resorts to physical violence, God forbid, against Arab or Muslim residents of our country is himself a criminal worthy of prosecution to the full extent of the law.
The Western world may have occasionally expressed pious dismay at terrorist acts against Israel and Jews. But, in truth, the nations of the world did absolutely nothing politically or otherwise about it in the last thirty-or-more years beyond passing U.N. resolutions against the Israelis for excessive military response to these unconscionable acts. While the West was justifiably appalled at the Taliban in Afghanistan for defacing historic statues of the Buddha and proceeded to raise its voice publicly in international protest, it showed no equivalent rage at the ugly spectacle of terrorist groups training their young to make human bombs of themselves and to kill themselves by detonating themselves in the midst of other youngsters. Did one ever hear of a U.N. resolution against suicide bombing carried out against Israeli civilians? Never. Was the sacrifice in ancient times of children to the god Moloch any worse than this modern-day distortion of religion?
Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare, in his unparalleled genius and goodness of soul, put these wise words into the mouth of a queen mother whose son was to be sacrificed in the name of religion: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (Titus Andronicus, Act I, Scene 1, line 130)
The Arab suicide bombers in Israel and the nineteen who commandeered the jet planes that attacked America were brainwashed into seeking “martyrdom” via self-immolation for a political cause with promises of heavenly rewards. They and their mentors, trainers, and religious teachers are nothing less than common criminals and killers—killers of their own and killers of other innocents. The civilized world should have been relentless years ago in its unanimous condemnation of this reversion to ancient barbarism. But where were the imams of the Muslim world who promulgate a humane interpretation of the Qur’an when they were needed in past years to raise their voices in unison against this retrogressive, nay primitive, distortion of the ideals of Islam? Where were they when suicide bombing, ostensibly against the highest traditions of Muslim law, was being directed weekly and purposefully against Israeli civilians, including children, by so-called devout Muslims?
Suicide bombing and terrorism of any kind that consciously targets civilians cannot be justified in any way by a political cause. But sadly enough, those imams of the world who have preached the glories of “martyrdom” in the battle against Israel and the West have their inadvertent allies in our midst. We frequently read self-righteous articles and letters to the editors of our most prestigious publications written by very sensitive and even celebrated progressive thinkers saying that while one naturally condemns terrorism, one can understand why oppressed people resort to the practice of terror through suicide bombing. I, for one, understand nothing of the sort.
Susan Sontag in The New Yorker of September 24 writes, “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” (P.32) Bill Maher, TV comedian, made comments similar to those in Sontag’s last sentence about cowardly American pilots and the “not cowardly” suicide bombers, comments for which he was roundly condemned, eliciting a subsequent apology from him. (By Sontag’s and Maher’s contemptible logic, we should be calling police officers who wear bulletproof vests “cowards” and murderers without such vests “heroic.”)
Dario Fo, the 1997 Nobel laureate in literature, wrote the following in an e-mail: “The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty—so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger, and inhumane exploitation.” (The New York Times, September 22, 2001, p. B12) Lord Snow, the British foreign minister, told the Iranian press what it wanted to hear, that American support of Israel provokes Muslim rage and terrorism. All, all simplistic, half-baked, self-righteous, and ultimately insensitive, inhuman, and vicious statements that somehow provide justification for the “cruel, irreligious piety” of religiously fanatic terrorism that ought to be the enemy of all progressive thought. For shame! Suicide bombing deserves only one special word of opprobrium very well known in the Bible and somewhat out of favor these days—abomination.
Frank Rich of The New York Times (October 13, 2000, p. A23) considers criticism of Sontag et al. part of a “disproportionate avalanche of invective” that is an attempt “to stifle dissent.” What nonsense! Rich mentions Sontag, Maher, and Noam Chomsky. Nobody has deprived them of the right to speak out (even if the flight of advertisers led to Maher’s apology). Is it Rich’s contention that no one else in a democracy must dare to dissent from their views by responding vigorously to these false gods of regressive thought?
America was the victim on September 11, a wholly innocent victim, not the victimizer. And not for the first time either. American marines, embassies, and a naval vessel have suffered immeasurably from the perpetrators of terror. Israel, alas, is first and foremost in this heartless history of victimhood. Both America and Israel have consistently stood up in world forums against acts of terrorism. The same commitment and intensity of emotion against this unremitting evil cannot, in truth, be fully credited to other countries or to many political ideologues on the left or the right.
The lives of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in New York City, Washington D.C., and on four jet planes cannot be retrieved. But their deaths, dealt them so cruelly, must not merely be mourned and forgotten. All the countries of the democratic world and freedom fighters everywhere must be willing to learn a hard lesson from the calamitous events of September 11. It is simply this. If we do not repudiate the pernicious notion that one’s sense of “oppression” somehow or other justifies or makes understandable the atrocity of suicide bombing, and if we do not condemn such terrorists without any reservation whatsoever and make them pay for it dearly, we do so at imminent peril to ourselves and to all other nations.
May the God of Abraham to Whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims give obeisance enlighten every one of us to understand what ought to be unacceptable in all religions. May we have the wisdom to repudiate any thought of capitulating politically to terrorist demands or even evincing the slightest sympathy for such demands, an unfortunate reaction that only perpetuates terrorism by awarding it the easy success it covets. And may we have the courage to support all necessary, reasonable, and moral actions short of indiscriminate war, however long-drawn out, however arduous, that will make suicide bombing, airplane hijacking, and conscious targeting of civilians unthinkable in every corner of the world.•

About the author

Leo haber is editor of Midstream. His novel, The Red Heifer, was recently published by Syracuse University Press.