9/11: Clash of Civilizations or Global Tragedy?
By Rabbi Hillel Levine
US
To my dear Muslim friends:
Which 9/11 will you mourn? There are, indeed, many.
In my faith-civilization of Judaism, as I imagine, in yours, there is a concept: should evil befall a person, no matter how innocent that person might be of personal culpability, “yifashfesh bemaasav.” A person should feel the need to carefully scrutinize his or her deeds, and not necessarily out of any recognizable wrongdoing.
In a tragedy as vast and as complex as 9/11, it is difficult to identify pure victims and pure victimizers. The facts are clear to any honest person. A group of Muslims, financed and inspired by other Muslims and their interpretation of the verities of their faith, prepared with such demonic concern to kill vast numbers of Americans. Others took pride and celebrated this murder. Under any circumstances, such pre-meditated revenge is pernicious. But to whatever extent it might matter, in fact, only a very few victims, on that beautiful morning, were in any real way actually doing anything that had to do with Muslims, good, bad or otherwise but were unlucky enough to be in spaces with some symbolic meanings. The complexities begin with some blaming all Americans, all modern people, and all western people for suffering justifying such murderousness. Others focused on Jews in particular, even to the point of raising old conspiracy theories such as the claim that it was Jews who themselves, not Muslims, who perpetrated the kidnappings and actual plane crashes of such murderousness.
Confined to rational discourse in choosing with whom I stand in mourning, I extend my hand to all people who share the pains of memory. But I also ask to join, ten years later, with all people in examining our deeds, however they might be related to 9/11.
What we together experience is fear and anger, shame and self-reproach, blame and vindictiveness. We seek hope and reform. We crave protection when we put up with the indignities of airport inspections but what we really acknowledge is gone are the days when we could sit on a plane without imagining neighbors preparing to blow us out of the sky. High-tech gadgets and well-trained security personnel, however, protect us from the last assault and might comfort those who believe that “history repeats itself.” But those with greater imaginations for human venality will recognize that what we need is the prevention that is accompanied by the renewal of public trust.
Of all memories of 9/11, images of savagery seared deeply into many of our souls, one extended more than a glimmer of hope. The President of the United States and the leader of the Western world entered a mosque but hours after thousands of our neighbors and fellow citizens, including many Muslim Americans, had been murdered, the openness and trust of a liberal democracy exposed as pathological naïveté, the very power of Western modernity in its organization of commerce, defense, and individualism exposed for all of its vulnerabilities. George W. Bush bowed head and bare footed, entered the sacred space of the religion in the name of which, all of this had been perpetrated. He uttered with impressive conviction, “Islam is a religion of Peace.”
Never mind that this was a simplistic assessment. All religions espouse peace and all religions contribute to and legitimate the greatest violence. This we must concede to each other so readily. But this gesture likely prevented horrible rioting and vengefulness and put us on the right track, ever so momentarily.
So what went wrong in this conciliatory act? How did we descend to the perversities of Guantanamo that contradicts everything for which we stand as Americans? Why are we Americans and you Muslims fighting multiple wars against each other on different continents? Why, after celebrating the achievements and loyalty of Muslim Americans and noting with such certainty that “it can’t happen here” do other Americans simply assume that there are more Muslims, by birth or by choice, importing more jihad rather than exporting liberalism, democracy and pluralism? And why can’t we Muslims and Jews stand as one in giving our co-religionists the encouragement to take the risks and make the compromises needed to make peace in the Holylands of Israel and Palestine that we share in venerating?
What other opportunities do we have to work together to prevent other 9/11s? How do we improve the quality of public trust and communal responsibility in responding to more recent catastrophes, such as the financial melt down of 2008? What have our governments, corporate, education, and religious leaders learned from horrible 9/11 failures that could have prevented sequels and that we now can work together to remedy? In many of our counties, but particularly in America, the intelligence agencies with their huge resources that indulged in bureaucratic rivalries, the regulatory agencies that did not regulate, the security workers who were neither adequately trained nor equipped but in their devotion resorted to self-sacrificial risks rather than well thought out strategies, a corporate and banking elite that competes for market share, short term profits, and extravagant bonuses rather than innovation, reputation and service to the public. They are supported in their inadequacies by the politicians for whom public office rather than public service becomes an end in itself and who are ready to be swayed by whoever can pay for their votes, and not the least the educators, well trained technocrats and well behaved bureaucrats who want to expand their empires through global branches and save money on quality instructors through “distant learning” and online degrees but who themselves no longer model and certainly cannot inspire and educate public minded citizens capable of independent thinking, moral decision making, and tolerance. Where do we go from here?
The 9/11 and subsequent catastrophes for which I will mourn, and invite you to join me, involve the failure of political and moral leadership. You are neither the enemies of the country in which I born and which I love, the USA, nor of the enemies of the Jewish people to whom I belong. Among the hundreds of millions of Muslims that we all too easily have learned to see as enemies are so many heroes of the “Arab Spring” who now publicly protest the inadequacies of their leaders. You share with us the need for that global prevention.
How do we, Americans on the left or the right, delude ourselves into believing that globalism or localism will promote peace and prosperity for Americans or anyone else? Will promoting predatory rather than well-regulated entrepreneurial capitalism restore our public trust at home and our reputation abroad?
This post-9/11 decade has unleashed neo-colonialism disguised as globalism, often led by corporate rather than government officials, unregulated in outsourcing our neighbors’ jobs rather than making capital investments abroad that contribute to the growth of potentially larger markets. We have been slack in allowing deceptive bankers to confiscate those neighbors’ homes preventing them now, as consumers, from spurring your productive capacities. Both travesties are backed by subsidies drawn from the tax dollars of those citizens who lose the most. Again, those who argue for more government or less government miss the point; what we need is better government, better global thinking, and the education that supports this.
9/11, with its unprecedented assault on American civilization and aspiring people of all religions who, all over are deprived of human dignity, is nothing short of a global tragedy and a serious set-back for the more salutary processes of modernization. It is a day of mourning for all. Can the commemoration of any 9/11 catalyze forces of renewal or will it cast us all into a hopeless whirlpool of despair and irreversible decline? Can we join in shared penitence to improve the world that we share?
If now, at this very moment, we together are unable to prevent forms of dehumanization and barbarism from interfering with the expansion of public trust and communal responsibility as we, together have done at other moments, we well may know the answer considerably before that 20 th anniversary.
