2001-09-13 - 1:01 p.m.

OK, it's been 2 days now. This was not Pearl Harbor. This was not Oklahoma City. This was not JFK, or MLK, or Malcom X. This is something entirely new, and infinitely worse. The death toll is in the thousands, most of those civilians, innocent people who could not possibly have deserved this, because nothing, no perceived crime, could ever justify this. The World Trade Center is gone. It's easy to forget that, it's too big to understand. Everything is different now. And it's only going to get worse. Already there have been death threats sent to mosques in South Florida, bullets fired at Islamic Centers, Palestinian and Iraqi-American owned buildings burned to the ground in Maryland, and a mosque fire-bombed in Texas. All this, and we don't even know for sure who did it.

The papers are screaming for blood: the Philadelphia Enquirer ran an editorial advising its readers to keep revenge in their hearts, people write in to newspapers demanding why we haven't begun bombing the perpetrators already, demanding military action to drown our sorrow in blood, and bitter letters from Jewish South Floridians explaining that now America knows what Israel has been going through. No, we don't, because this is much worse than anything Israel has ever gone through. One woman sarcastically hoped that the US would be leniant with the bombers, cause we have demanded the same of Israel. Rabbi Gellman, of the God Squad, explained that we must not be like the bombers and hate Islam, as they hate Jews for being Jewish.

Bush gave an empty, EMPTY speech, promising vengeance, and repeating over and over again that our 'resolve;' would not be shaken. Cause terrorism 'will not stand'. Resolve to what? He didn't say. Our leaders are helpless: they know nothing about who did this, or how, or even why. And in the interim until these questions are answered, they are reverting to speeches and ideas from previous calamities, desperately trying to instill us with calm and righteous anger, so that we don't examine this horror too closely. Cause there's a lot to study here, and America is not going to want to see it.

This is not Pearl Harbor: there is no country whose leadership, elected or not, attacked us. Bombing random countries will only kill more innocents, probably more than were killed on Teusday. And that's exactly what the terrorists want: to prove to the world that we are barbaric, bloodthirsty, and unscroupulous. Which is exactly what we will be if we attack Kabul. No pain, no anguish can justify the slaughter of innocents, and in 5 years when we look back and see the destuction we may yet cause, they blood we may yet spill, and the anguish we may yet tear from the hearts of civilians who are already victims of the very regime we hope to punish blindly, we will see that too.

We saw pictures of Arabs celebrating this event, and our hearts burned to think of anyone sick enough to think this was a good thing. A noted historian last night explained that this hatred is taught by parents to children in this radical sect of Islam. No, it isn't. The more we pawn this off as unexplainable, incomprehensible evil, not human, the more we lay ourselves open to danger and death. Palestinians didn't celebrate because they hate us for no reason: they celebrated because we are, and have openly declared ourselves to be, their enemy. By supporting Israel in its actions in the West Bank and Gaza, we have made a significant portion of the globe our enemy. Israel is our friend, a country I love second only the the US, and has every right to exist: but even the Holocaust can not justify some of Israel's actions. I'm not talking about the targeted assasinations of terrorists, or even the military attempt to garner peace, as misguided as I believe it to be. I'm referring to the root cause of the violence there, and possibly here: Israel is an occupying force, engaged in ethnic cleansing. The settlers, most of whom are americans, are being placed in strategically important areas of the West Bank, connected by the only good roads in the region. Even if the Palestinians were given autonomy today, Israel, with these sttlements, could isolate and control any part of the territory they chose. And the settlements are increasing in number: there are twice as many now as there were when Oslo was signed, despite the Israeli government's solemn vow at Oslo to halt these very settlements. Land is being taken from Palestinians for these purposes, and it's making them very angry. The Palestinians are not Muslim: they are a nationality of Muslims and Christians. The struggle here is not against Judaism, it's against Israel. And its high time we started seperating those two concepts. Israel has been fanning the violence by operating in exceptional bad faith: Palestinians are treated as third-class citizens in their homeland. There are more restrictions on movement and land ownership, and other basic human rights, there than under apartheid. Yes, Islamic militants are guilty of a host of atrocities, including the premeditated murder of innocents, and these atrocities simply can not be forgiven: but Israel is no angel, and our one-sided support of her has created a situation where people are angry enough to die, just for the chance of killing us.

There are other reasons why we are hated, though. 1.2 million people have died in Iraq, civilians all, through our embargo there. 500,000 of these were children under 5. Madeline Albright was asked if this monumental crime was 'worth it'. Her answer was 'yes'. 1.2 million is a LOT more than the amount of people killed Teusday, and should make us rethink our platitudes about who we are. 'We don't kill civilians' our papers claim. Yes, yes we do. We hold people accountable for the actions of their leaders: if they didn't agree with their governments, the thinking goes, they would have rebelled by now. The terrorists Teusday did exactly that: they judged us all guilty for being citizens of a nation which has done incredible wrong to them. We all see the lunacy of that judgement when it is applied to us.

Most importantly, though, we have to think about who did this. It's probably Osama bin Ladin. If it is, we have a lot to think about. Because we created him. we trained him, we armed him, we supported him in the 80's. You may remember Rambo III: Rambo was helping out an Afghani rebel group who were fighting the evil Soviets. The group he was supporting was certainly not the Afghani communists (who were the bulk of the rebels). He was supporting the group that later became known as the Taliban. And when the Taliban rebelled against the Afghani communists in the early 90's, and began a reign of terror that revoked the rights of women, and made violence and starvation governmental instruments, we were right there to give them weapons, including stinger missles which remain in bin Ladin's hands. We supported the worst criminals since the Third Reich in our fight against communism, we bred a mad dog, and now that the dog has eaten our enemy, it wants to devour us, too. It has bitten us, and bitten hard. And if we are not VERY careful, we will become mad ourselves.

And the worst tragedy of all this is that the thousands of our people who have died, innocents with no murder or hatred in their hearts, innocents with no control over US policy, innocent people who never hurt anyone were made the target of these madmen. Nothing can bring them back, and that hurts so much. And our illusion of security has been forever destroyed, and that hurts too. And for all our talk of national unity, and of rising from the ashes, and for all the laurels of poets and politicians layed at the feet of America's strength, we are vulnerable as long as there are people angry and hate-filled enough to want to die for the sake of killing us. "We are at war" they, and we, shout. But no war can stop, no bullet can kill this monster: because we are at war with war itself, a monster that feeds on blood, grows stronger with every attack, instills more hatred with every dead child, and watches over the dust of New York and the ashes of Jerusalem and the panicky bravado of politicians who have to do something, no matter what, just to do something, with unimaginable glee.

We are not safe.

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