11 September 2010

Today* is the ninth anniversary of when al Qaeda sent two aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan and another plane into a field in Pennsylvania, short of the Pentagon in Washington DC. It’s a date that rightly should commemorate those who died then, and later of injuries sustained on that day; those who remain injured – either in body, mind, or both; those who have family members and friends who were directly affected.

Yet, only nine years on, it’s been hijacked for crude and crass politics.

Proposals to improve a building owned by an Islamic centre in Lower Manhattan have been lied about under headlines of a monstrous mosque in the ghostly shadow of where the World Trade Centre towers stood. Those lies have whipped up a storm of protests and anti-Islamic fervour from coast to coast USA. Violence has been perpetrated against Moslems, or people suspected of being Moslem, when Moslems should be able to celebrate Eid and the end of Ramadan without fear. The story of a strange bloke calling for “Christians” to burn copies of the Koran to celebrate “9/11” has taken on a horrifying life of its own and, unsurprisingly in the context of the other anti-Islamic violence, has inspired others to threaten to do the same. News of all that has generated violence against the USA and the west, and Christians, in countries including Afghanistan where there has been at least one death.

That’s the negative. Fortunately, there have been lots of calls to end this nonsense. American Christians have decried the anti-Islamic acts as “anti-American”, as anti-Christian, as a stain on the memories of those who ought to be commemorated. The threat these actions pose to the USA and the “Christian west” by suggesting that all of us hold Islam in contempt, or worse, has been acknowledged publicly by Barak Obama, Hilary Clinton and others. They’re saying it to not just to try to calm a volatile situation down, but because the opposite is true. Hatred is not okay and flies in the face of American values. Of the west's values.

Most people are generally okay about getting on with other folks. It’s not to say that lots of people aren’t susceptible to being whipped up into a frenzy when they are made to feel fear about someone else. My recent trip to Nürnberg in Germany reminded me of the strategies the Nazis used to generate the hatred needed for the awful war and genocide. For the Nazi plans to work, the Jews could not be seen as real people, as real human beings. They were caricatured, long-term stereotypes played up and exaggerated even more. German, and other so-called Aryan children were exposed to cartoon monsters from a very young age. Real Jewish people were moved from where they could mix with the populations the Nazis regarded as superior. They were put first into ghettoes, then to the camps. It’s easier to kill people when you don’t think of them as people. It takes away the ability most people have to empathise with other people.

It’s not unique to Germans, and it’s not unique to white-skinned people, and it’s not unique to any religion (or none) or politics. There’s an argument that Zionist Israelis have caricatured all Palestinians as terrorists and thus the murder of little Palestinian girls are excusable; and of course Hamas and the other actual terrorist groups employ similar techniques to justify their carte blanche attacks on Israeli citizens. In another long-term “war” called "cold" because the nukes didn't go off, 11 September 1973 was when an at times irrational fear of communism was victorious against a democratically elected Socialist government in Chile. The military dictatorship that took power then under General Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands, all in the name of being against the despotism of communism.

The pattern seems to be that an individual or small group has a megalomaniacal vision. They are charismatic enough to start to attract supporters. There is a level of rationality that keeps those people with them, and that is combined with the gratification of one or more things – it could be wealth when they had none, reassurance of them as people, as sexual beings, whatever. The individual’s influence grows. Fear becomes a tool to wield to ensure obedience of the followers. That’s often fear of punishment, fear the good things will disappear, and fear of others. It’s no accident that those weird religious cults all exaggerate the threats posed by family members, other people from a person’s past, other beliefs (who never interpret The Truth in the right way, unlike our leader).

Hatred seems easy, but once it starts leaking out into a wider world it can have consequences impossible to control.

Al Qaeda is such a thing. It purports to be Islamic, but is it? Is it more of a runaway movement of hate, generated by the vision of Osama bin Laden and a small group of “mullahs”? I raise these as questions because there has been so much written and said about al Qaeda in English that are lies or half truths. I do know that they spread hate and manipulate the disaffected in much the same way as so-called Christian “churches” that preach hatred and death to homosexuals and doctors who perform abortions. In much the same way as Hitler, Pol Pot, and others did and do within their political and social “truths”.

The needless tragedy of this anniversary of “9/11” is the giving of oxygen to a small town megalomaniac, and some others like him, to stir the same kind of hatred that caused the injuries and deaths nine years ago. I know I am not alone in being disturbed and worried by how politicians in the USA who should know better are trying to harness the hate-mongering of these certain individuals. While it seems that in most primaries in this election cycle, sense prevailed and the politics is about things that matter but aren’t going to destroy people’s lives just for short-term power-reassurance. But there are enough who have got through to contest the elections, and who might win if not enough people who care about US democracy get out and vote wisely. My American friends, please don't ignore these mid-term elections this November.Just as al Qaeda does not speak for all Islam, those who want to (and have) burn the Koran do not speak for all Christianity.


* I wrote this on 11 September 2010 in London, but due to technical reasons it was not posted until 12 September, British Summertime.