Have the Terrorists
Won?
By Adnan Gill
Los Angeles, CA
When
the CNN interrupted its regular programming to
break the news that an aircraft had crashed into
a Manhattan, NY, apartment building; disturbing
9/11 memories overwhelmed my mind as I found myself
feverishly praying, God please don’t let
the pilot of the unfortunate airplane be a Muslim.
I am ashamed to admit, that I was more concerned
about the religious affiliation and the skin-color
of the pilot of the crashed airplane than the
safety and wellbeing of the pilot and the possible
victims of the tragedy.
Almost immediately, the primitive instinct of
self-preservation kicked in. Fearing reprisals,
I was franticly calling and sending instant messages
to family and friends advising them to stay indoors
and avoid crowds as most of them happened to be
Muslims and/or dark skinned.
An even more disturbing fact is that instead of
feeling grief for the untimely death of the New
York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, I was relieved
to have learnt the pilot’s identity.
Initial reports of the crash had all the hallmarks
of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The crash rattled
America’s nerves so bad that within 10 minutes
of the crash, NORAD scrambled fighter jets over
several major American cities. US Coast Guard
positioned several patrol boats and a Coast Guard
cuter in the East River. While, literally, hundreds
of first responders harmoniously took to their
rehearsed duties. The drama and anxieties about
a possible terrorist strike were mounting by each
minute. As soon as the drama climaxed, to everyone’s
relief, it fizzled away with news about the identity
of the pilot.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one elated
to have learnt about the pilot’s identity;
even the whole American media seemed to have sighed
a breath of relief. In what appears to be a maddening
rush, joining the media chorus, even the New York
mayor Michael Bloomberg in a news conference declared
the plane crash to be an accident, as he appropriately
patted the first responders on the back for a
job well-done.
As if we wanted to be in denial, we desperately
glued to our TV sets in a hope that any moment
our leaders would declare the crash to be an accident.
And the leaders didn’t disappoint us. Our
hopes were so strong that we didn’t spare
even a moment to contemplate other possibilities,
like if the accident could have been an attempted
suicide or a possible murder? Barely six hours
later, a day that had started with revisiting
the traumatic 9/11 memory lanes, it concluded
with a comforting ease, that we survived another
day without experiencing another terrorist attack.
Is this the state-of-mind of a nation that is
winning the war on terror? Or have the terrorists
already won the war of nerves? We have become
a nation of paranoia, where dark skinned citizens
are forced to disembark airplanes for merely passing
a cell phone to each other, and the possibility
of terrorism is immediately and unanimously ruled
out upon learning the identity of the Caucasian
pilot of a crashed plane.
President Bush, close to 3,000 brave American
soldiers, and thousands upon thousands of Iraqi
civilians have been sacrificed to the Gods of
your so-called war on terror, but that hasn’t
even given us a rudimentary sense of security.
How about looking for political solutions to snuff
out the ambers of terrorism?
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