September/October 2007 Feature
A 9/11 Rumination Six Years After
Leo Haber
The terrorist atrocity on September 11, 2001 took place soon after my assumption of the editorship of this publication in June of that year. The subsequent July/August issue was assembled only in part by me, but the September/October issue was wholly my obligation. And inevitably, we were late in sending the September issue to press. When the horror of 9/11 overwhelmed all of us, I immediately wrote an emergency editorial for quick insertion into our September/October issue in order to express our deep feelings of shock and sympathy for the victims and their distraught families. In it, I tried to defend America, not only against the venom of Islamist terrorists, but also against its pitiless critics at home and in Western Europe who piously deplored the deaths of innocents on that infamous day but sought to blame U.S. policy for provoking the “understandable” hatred of suicide bombers.
There were more than a few among progressive writers and intellectuals who ordinarily deplored the reactionary gambit of blaming the victim but were not ashamed to do so when it came to the United States as victim. Nineteen Islamist terrorists manned the three hijacked planes. Most of these men were subsequently described as well-educated and far from impoverished. But all were quite willing to kill themselves in the service of their warped concept of their religion so long as they destroyed famous edifices and murdered thousands of innocent civilians in their workplace in New York. To my mind, nothing justified the barbaric practice of suicide bombing, and I centered on this point in my editorial of that awful September. I was especially revolted by the Islamist practice of teaching their children and young adults to immolate themselves by means of explosive belts among countless other children, women, and men by promising them special glories in their religious paradise. It reminded me of the ancient and primitive practices of the votaries of the god Moloch who sacrificed their children to the voracious god. That some cultured icons in the West whom we ordinarily admired—I shall not repeat their names here though I named a few in that editorial—could “understand” such a vile response to American policy or Western culture was beyond my understanding or my sympathy. I could only summon up the apt Biblical word: Suicide bombing was an abomination.
The scourge of suicide bombing that the world tolerated when Israeli women and children were the target week after week in buses, discos, pizza restaurants, public markets, etc., especially in the terror war initiated by the Palestinians in the year 2000 after Yasir Arafat repudiated a generous peace plan offered by Israel and America’s President Clinton, is still haunting the world today. The U.N. never officially condemned suicide bombing as a crime against humanity or those who train and despatch the bombers as criminals worthy of international indictment. What about the Muslim world? Occasionally, some Western Muslims would appear on our TV and radio stations assuring us that Islam is a peaceful religion that abhors such acts. We long to believe these statements. But as far as I can recall, no imam of stature in the Muslim world itself has risen up in righteous wrath among his vast flock against the “anti-Muslim” practice of suicide bombing. What we do hear with frequency are reports of inflammatory rants in sermons by imams at Friday prayers in many parts of the Muslim world urging followers to acts of violence.
And so the nefarious practice of suicide bombing has spread far and wide in the Muslim world. Islamist suicide bombers commit murder of self and others in Irag almost daily, not only against American soldiers, but also against their own people. Thousands of Muslim civilians have been targeted and killed there by other Muslims. Where is the expression of outrage in the Muslim world? Why isn’t Saudi Arabia’s ruling class and imams speaking up? Where are the enlightened leaders of Morocco? Or Indonesia that includes the largest population of any country in the Muslim world? Silence from all of them.
Suicide bombers have wreaked havoc in England, in Scotland, and elsewhere in recent months, almost six years after the Islamist suicide murders of 9/11 in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania . This plague has traveled in recent years from Spain to Bali and beyond. The world is suffering from not having stood up to this barbaric sacrilege against any concept of humane religion or secular humanism when Jews were predominantly the target of terror. A recent article in Midstream discussed the time-honored concept of the canary in the mineshaft announcing danger to the miners. The writer maintained that the Jews have traditionally functioned as that canary. When they would be under sudden duress from persecutors, it was a canary’s announcement to the world that if action were not taken quickly, then others would find themselves in similar mortal danger. Adolph Hitler’s Nazi government instituted disabling laws and rulings against the Jews of Germany within the first few months of Nazi rise to power in 1933. The Nuremberg racial laws against Jews were proclaimed in 1935. But the civilized world, while expressing some sympathy for the plight of the Jews under Nazi rule, went about its business as usual. The democratic powers participated in the Berlin Olympics in 1936 with Hitler in the seat of honor in the stands. We all know what followed that sort of appeasement. The same pattern, alas, overtook the world in the matter of suicide bombing in past years. There seems to be no way of stopping it now.
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On this sixth anniversary of 9/11, we mourn the countless dead of that awful day and try to remember the lessons it should have taught all men and women of good will. That challenge remains the ongoing obligation of this century to our freedoms in America, in the democratic West in general, and to that oasis of democracy in the Middle East called Israel. American Jews, in particular, with few exceptions, look on this country as an unprecedented haven in which we have prospered and contributed to culture and human advancement as in no other Jewish Diaspora in history, from the Babyloninan exile that produced the Talmud to the Golden Age in Spain that nurtured Jewish diplomats, poets, scholars, and philosophers.
America is perhaps the only country of our sojourn that has no substantial history of official antisemitism sponsored by the national government. The only example that historians sometimes cite is General Grant’s order against the presence in military areas of Jewish peddlers or merchants during the Civil War, singling Jews out from all other merchants in an unprecedented way. His order was almost immediately countermanded by an irate President Lincoln when he got wind of it. Grant, by the way, as president years later, turned out to be a sincere friend of the Jews. I do not mean to claim that there were never any antisemitic incidents at local or individual levels in the U.S. There were, and still are, but no public policy ever at the national level. George Washington’s famous letter to the congregation of the Touro synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, thanking the Jewish people for their good wishes upon his elevation to the presidency and assuring them that the new nation would give “to bigotry no sanction” has held firmly for Jews to this very day.
Sadly enough, most African-Americans could not be so sanguine about America before the non-violent revolution achieved by Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Jews, by and large, understood their plight as few other white ethnic groups could. Perhaps that is why many Jews were so involved in the fight for black equality-–-from the early formation of the NAACP to the heroic battles in the 60s against Jim Crow segregation down South. Jews like Rabbi Abraham Johua Heschel marched alongside Dr. King while young people worked to increase black voter registration in the segregated south. Some of these Jews died for that cause.
In sum, we Jews cherish this country, with all its warts, all the more because it can make amends, albeit with difficulty, and correct its own injustices. Would that the Muslim world could do the same. Our gratitude for and allegiance to America is unimpeachable, and for us, and we hope for all others, 9/11 demands our eternal vigilance and support, in defense of America, the democratic West, and Israel, against the scourge of international terrorism. Jews may disagree with each other about the wisdom, or even justice, of the war in Iraq, but we know where we stand on the subject of suicide bombing and the fight against terrorism. On this anniversary of 9/11, we reaffirm this stand.
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Ever since the September/October 2001 issue of Midstream that reflected the ordeal of America on 9/11, we have generally devoted a portion of that issue annually to Jewish life, culture, and history in America. It is our way as Jews and as Zionists of showing our permanent bond to this marvelous country of refuge. As noted above, we don’t always agree with government policy. Our current issue of Midstream contains points of praise and criticism of America. In the classic words of all Americans who are criticized for disagreeing, this is a free country. We have the right to speak our piece and to try to persuade our government one way or another, just as all citizens do. Our sometimes passionate disagreements are in the best tradition of the American ideal of freedom—-and of the Jewish tradition of talking sense to power as the prophet Nathan did to King David himself.
We Jews protested in past years against certain policy initiatives of the U.S. that most of us thought were detrimental to Israel. We disagreed and fought the good fight. We didn’t win them all, in spite of the the claims made by Dean Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago in their paper written against the Israeli lobby. They were by no means the only two Americans of stature making extravagant and accusatory claims against Jews. Former president Carter recently published a book wherein he too alluded to overpowering Jewish influence on American policy that was redolent, I’m sorry to say, of the antisemitic conspiracy theories of the forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion that were concocted in Czarist Russia, exposed as a fraud by countless scholars, and is still being circulated in Arab countries on television and in the streets.
We, like all other individuals and groups in this beloved country, have the inalienable right to agree, to disagree, to protest, to lobby, to win some, to lose some, and not to be vilified for doing so. Our September/October issue in honor of America, in memory of the victims of 9/11, and, with pride in the story of Jewish life in America, will continue in this vein, b’ezrat ha-Shem.
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To return to our opening theme, the memorialization of September 11, 2001: The editorial I wrote at that time was done in haste. I stand by every word I penned then. But inevitably, some errors of my own making crept into that piece. I mentioned six thousand dead in the Twin Towers. Thankfully, that first report that I heard in the media was inaccurate. The actual number of fatalities reached three thousand, a terrible toll in itself, but half the early horrifying reports. I also badly misspelled the name of the British foreign minister at that time whom I berated severely for telling the Iranian press that American support for Israel provoked Muslim rage and terrorism, a message the Iranians surely wanted to hear from a spineless Western leader. The ironies abound. Just a few years after 9/11, the underground subway system in London was the target of Muslim terror with bombs that killed many and wounded many more. And some two months ago, the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, became a similar target, but thankfully, with very few casualties after car bombs were miraculously intercepted on0 the streets of London before they could kill and maim innocents. I repudiate schadenfreude, pleasure in someone else’s sorrow. But I wish that European leaders and intellectuals who are cozying it up to Iran and other Muslim countries on the issue of Israel would learn that doing so does not achieve security or salvation for their countries..
Israelis, who watch Iran strive for a nuclear capability while its president publicly announces more than once his fervent hope that Israel would some day be wiped off the map, learned this lesson a long time ago. I don’t really regret messing up the British foreign minister’s name, the chap who assured the Iranians that 9/11 was the result of America’s strong support of Israel. His legacy will surely be forgotten in due time anyway. But 9/11 will be remembered for a long time to come, and the common ideals of the United States and Israel will be rehearsed annually in this American Jewish Zionist journal every September. •
About the author
Leo Haber is editor of Midstream. His novel, The Red Heifer (Syracuse University Press), in its second printing in hardcover, was reissued in paperback in 2005.