I was sitting in the family room watching a broadcast of commemorations going on all over the U.S. and, the announcers emphasized - all over the world - of the most heinous act of terrorism successfully conducted on U.S. soil. It happened, as we all know, on September 11, 2001.
I immediately was transformed back to that fateful morning - approximately 8:45 a.m. - when I was hurriedly trying to down my coffee while reading the New York Times (or was it the Newark Star-Ledger?) and watching the TV in the kitchen all at the same time. I was multi-tasking.
Suddenly the TV showed the image of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center with thick billowing smoke coming out of one of the mid-level floors. Shortly after, I saw a plane seemingly going into the other tower and not coming out.
It was the end of the world as I knew it, but I did not know it then.
Now, nine years later, I struggle to find meaning in the event itself and in all the subsequent events that followed as unintended consequences and which have had a profound effect on both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
To many Muslims, it was as though an asteroid had struck their earth, a dark cloud hangs in the atmosphere, their homes have been shattered and their landscapes have been ruined and perhaps will never be the same.
It is remarkably unfortunate for Iraqis in general because they had nothing to do with 9/11. Darth Vader (Dick Cheney) and his student, George Bush, had decided that it was the Iraqis who must bear the brunt of America's wrath. An enraged Zeus with his thunderbolt must teach man his lessons, and Zeus could pick any man or men to be on the receiving end.
Close to a million Iraqi civilians are dead (the official number is 100,000), more than two million were displaced from their homes, many of them ending up in Syria and Jordan, destabilizing the populations in those countries and straining the infrastructures there to the point of breaking.
Iraqi infrastructure is a mess. There is not enough electricity, there is not enough water, the roads are still dangerous, occasionally patrolled by bombers and snipers.
The Iraqis have been punished hard. And for what? For having been cowered into submission by the tyrant, Saddam Hussein and his two sons. The era of the Husseins ended, and the era of the American bombers began.
Curiously, the Afghans who had cradled the blood-thirsty criminals who were the architects of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have gotten lighter sentences. Sure, they've been toppled from power, but now the Taliban are in a resurgence and will probably be in charge of Afghanistan once again. At some point in the future, after the Americans leave.
The American invasion of Afghanistan destabilized western Pakistan. The Taliban escaped through the Afghan Alps and into northwestern Pakistan and turned the already-lawless region into a political powderkeg. The Pakistani government no longer controls that huge region and is helpless in the face of the Taliban and their sympathizers' challenge.
Muslim communities in America, in Europe and elsewhere have had the spotlight trained on them and their cultural practices and traditions. Muslims everywhere are being commanded by the host populations to either assimilate into the mainstream cultures or else. The "or else" is deeply disturbing and foreboding, since this usually means harassment, intimidation, hostility and Empire-striking-back terror.
The silver lining in all this is the acceleration of the Muslim march into the 21st century. The de-Muslimization of peoples who either originated from Islamic countries or descendants thereof is continuing and even accelerating, though greatly unnoticed.
To what extent this de-Muslimization will succeed is anybody's guess, of course, because the call of the Muslim prayer is strong, and it is obvious that Muslims are transported back in time through ages to their roots in Iraq and Saudi Arabia every time that call is heard.
It is equally obvious that though many Muslims are trying to assimilate, there is no way of telling which ones are and which ones aren't and which ones still have murder and mayhem in their hearts. The Muslim dress is no longer the tip-off. The 9/11 attackers all wore western clothes. They all mixed in with the general population, drank (which of course is forbidden by their religion) and whored the night before they boarded the ill-fated planes.
And this is the quandary for the side of the American people, the Europeans, Australians, Canadians and people all over the world who are suddenly confronted with the threat of terrorism emanating from the Muslim ghettoes, communities and mosques that are fast sprouting in their cities and countrysides.
With no way of telling which Muslims are becoming like us and which Muslims are rejecting us and are planning our itineraries that must include our reunion with our Maker, we have lumped all Muslims as dangerous, feared and treasonous. Not all of us, for there are many in America who have idealized the freedom of religion and pursuit of happiness clauses embedded in our constitution as their guiding principles and are full-throated defenders of the Muslims in our midst.
And this is the miracle of America and western society in general. Because of our love for our freedoms and our constitutional guarantees of adherence to justice and fairness, we know that there will always be Muslim defenders in our midst and nothing that approximates the Holocaust will ever be visited upon them in America.
Unfortunately, there is countervailing evidence that radical Islam has been bolstered by a bumper-crop of new recruits who live for the jihad that imams everywhere have declared upon the west. At one point, there was a fatwa (a call to assassinate) placed on the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, Sr. That fatwa may or may not be in effect to this day.
It is this strain of radical Islam that the west has found itself at war with. The struggle may last as long as a hundred years, or it may build up and eventually explode into a conflagration before the end of this century, settling once and for all the question of which civilization shall be pre-eminent in our ever-shrinking world: the Crescent of Saladdin or the Cross of the Templars. Too dramatic? Perhaps. Yet, if you really think about it, the clash of Islam and western civilization was never really settled. Truce was declared, a truce that lasted over centuries. But the hatred, the hostility remains, and, like the coal in the bowels of the mountains of Pennsylvania, continues to burn underground.
Islam, after all, teaches that infidels who are occasions of sin may be killed. And we are, with our modern culture that exploits our women sexually, are occasions of sin. That is why the torturers in Abu Ghraib prison used naked women to insult the Muslim prisoners. Displaying the naked flesh and private parts of women before the prisoners was a form of torture since the Muslims deeply believe it is against their religion to find pleasure in the sight of naked women who are not their wives.
If the Muslims in Abu Ghraib held the guns and not the buards, the Americans there would have died.
This is the world we live in now, nine years after that fateful morning just as American children were starting a new school year. We adults did not know it then, but some radical Muslims were going to take us to school. And our world would never be the same.
