12gauge.com 2002 - World Trade Center Tragedy

A Child of Allah

I wake up with the nightmare in my head. Cinematic, cleanly spectacular, in action replay again and again as two planes hit two skyscrapers, right in the belly, all red sparks and dark clouds, raining glass and concrete and soon, horribly enough, human beings. Melting steel and disintegrating the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and something else inside us all that is hard to define.

These images have colonized my subconscious, put me into a state of shock. For days now I have floated through a universe I no longer feel fully a part of.

No doubt the terrorists involved were fully aware of this shock value. They optimized their ‘hit’, the pacing of the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, to ensure maximum television coverage.

By the time I had been watching CNN and surfing the net for twenty four hours, the British novelist Ian Mc Ewan had publicly expressed in The Guardian what some of us were also imagining: terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and his followers observing the carnage via satellite dish, delighting in their prime time coverage. McEwan felt ‘a ghastly chill’; I felt cruel mockery instead, a perverse pleasure in imagining religious primitives working overtime on the joys of a remote control. Even Allah’s basest thugs need a Western video game from time to time. Such sweet, bitter irony - for them, and for us too.

The hate in me has been hard to release. I want the people who helped planned this dead, tortured first, physically shamed and desecrated, on their hands and knees groveling and denying their ‘god’. I want them broken, yes. Their faith tested and found wanting before us all. Their beards shaved.

What kind of animal have I become in this cold new world? Penetrated by and perpetrating vengeance? A child of Allah’s rage - is that me? The answer is a rather unholy yes.

Right now the entire world is wounded. Because New York is much more than a major American city. More than London, Paris, Tokyo, more than the fresh excitement for Sydney, Shanghai, Toronto, New York is the capital of the world. It represents the high point of Western civilization, its very heartbeat, and I would go even further to say the heartbeat of all international civilization. Some might debate this latter emphasis, but the multicultural, global nature of the city is undeniable, a fact curiously underlined by so many people who say visiting New York is not like visiting the rest of America. This great metropolis is a country unto itself. It belongs to us all.

The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, what we knew as the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, all stand as icons to this grand place. Not just representatives of American capitalism and imperial power as the terrorists simplify, but of an immigrant flow that has remained, however tarnished over the years, heroic, optimistic, plural and open. Some might call this thinking a mere sentimentalizing of the American Dream, but it’s become the stuff of all our dreams and this dreaming - so explicitly upwards - is important. I can see many reasons to criticize the brutal inequities and hypocrisies of global capitalism and its American character, but in the architectural outlines of this bold city I see less oppression and much more hope being gifted to the world. Knocking it down in an act of foul petulance and killing thousands of innocent people into the bargain doesn’t impress me as an act of evolution.

That said New York is of course an American city. And the terrorists have deeply rooted issues with an America that has failed for some time to repair a sickly, spasmodic and often short-sighted foreign policy. There are half a million children dead in Iraq as a result of uranium leakage from bombs left behind after the Gulf War and the ineffective sanctions that cripple medical and living standards there. It’s one good way to cultivate hate, unreason. Saddam Hussein wears that crown of ‘thorns’ (to use his words) rather happily to propagate the nationalist blindness he needs to maintain power as a dictator. There has to be a better way to be rid of him. It’s time to think again.

So it is that I find myself bucking hard against the American rabbi being interviewed on the Larry King Live program who said, “Now we are all Israelis”. As much as I felt the impulse to smite those Palestinian fools shooting off their weapons in celebration in a refugee camp (can we call a man with an AK47 a refugee?), the idea of an Israel with an open contract to do as it pleases is a recipe for more disaster. The aggressive policies of Israel’s Ariel Sharon – laughably shaped ‘to make Israel safe from terrorism’ – have spiraled the conflict the Middle East into entirely new dimensions and sucked the world down into the quagmire with it. How we climb back up the slippery slope is much harder to say. But Israel is not leading the way.

In a television address, a traumatized and deeply sincere Yasser Arafat sent his condolences to the American people. “God bless, God bless, God bless,” he said, his lips trembling as he stared straight into the camera. Arafat knows what this might mean: an Israel off the leash permanently is a dog bent on genocidal ends; in the short term is has a license to kill. When the towers of New York crumbled Arafat must have glimpsed his own people in the rubble and dust of other explosions, feared for them all. There is no good in this for the Palestinians. No good at all.

That’s why I characterize the terrorist attacks as petulant. Bin Laden maims his own cause, maims his own Islamic faith. Puts the Palestinians in grave danger, almost certainly ensures the destruction of Afghanistan and the recalcitrant Taliban regime. He is a man after Saddam Hussein’s heart, goose-stepping in the name of Allah, pleasuring in an ego that ultimately regards his own people as expendable. It is hard to fight this kind of man, and the way he hides behind civilians in whatever country he dwells in, many of whom hardly even know what happened in the USA. So much wealth, so much energy, so little time put into lifting his own supporters and peasant faithful out of the dirt of their poverty.

Now America plans its attack on Afghanistan and the bases of Osama bin Laden. On mountain fortresses it once helped finance and build when bin Laden was fighting the Soviet insurgency. It does so under the guidance of the most underwhelming president it has had this century, a man who it is questionable should even be in the driving seat. What a terrible time to have such a lack of leadership quality. One can only pray he rises to the occasion, that he gets good advice.

The USA Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfield has said this ‘war’ takes place in a new kind of ‘21st century battlefield’. Through terrorism and its partner, fear, it is clear that the idea of a civil society is already constricting. Public space is now diminished, poisoned. The targets are unexpected, civilian, often innocent. The perpertrators almost invisible. How does one bring the battle to their door when you can’t even find them, let alone be sure they are to blame?

As the buildup to attack and possibly invade Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his cronies reaches fever pitch, this new form of ‘total war’ should take into account gun runners and arms manufacturers in the USA, Britain and France who happily deal in death. It should take into account the duplicities of international trade and under-the-counter agreements that support ugly regimes and leaders seemingly favorable to American interests, among them Hussein and bin Laden in the past. It should ask why honour ends where profits begin, and look at the false economies that risk human safety and health and dignity both abroad and at home. Questions that affect not just America but the entire global order.

Will this broader consciousness, this deeper sense of strategy - and history - and humanity - prevail? Or will a show of the fist be an easy, and ultimately limited response? Do we really all want to be Israelis? Bellicose and living in fear?

Despite the hate still burning in me, I feel revulsion and rage when people attack an Islamic school bus, my god, school children!, in order to vent themselves. When they firebomb a mosque, smash another’s windows, daub swastikas on the walls. When they phone peacable and upright Islamic families across the West and threaten them. As the great fighter Muhammed Ali has tried to tell an inflamed America, they are not all the alike.

The idea of a new Western imperial order supported and manned by the likes of these angry, misguided people terrifies me. They are of the same kind who drove planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The types who thrive on hate and seek it out to empower their own rage. I don’t want to go there much as I have indulged in fantasies of vengeance. And yet I feel how easily it would be to take that ugly step. I want it, I don’t want it. How unbalanced I am right now.

I try to consider at the firefighters, men lugging 30 kilograms of weight up 80 floors of a burning building to fight the impossible. The police who also died as the towers fell, all moving towards what so many were trying to escape, just doing their job and saving lives. The men and women on Flight 93 who voted to fight to the death to prevent a fourth plane reaching another terrible target. The people phoning partners and families on their cell phones to say ‘I love you’. The couple forced to jump to their death, holding hands as they fell.

These were the true ‘martyrs’ on the day the World Trade Centre was hit. Brave, noble people doing what was right and laying down their lives for it, or simply reaching out with a last message from the heart. I saw, heard and read their stories and those of their families on television, the net, in newspapers: felt redeemed by their actions amid the horror, the disorientation.

Both Allah and God bless them and what they stand for, I’m sure of that. Not a handful of murderers slitting women’s throats in back of airplanes and smashing down buildings to kill thousands of innocent people while their leader hides in a mountain cave. And yet we must seek to understand what created that act, the most powerful single gesture of pure hatred the world has seen.

That’s what the destruction of the WTC towers says: we hate you.

Why? We must ask why?

We must also understand that bin Laden wants this hate to translate itself like a virus through our systems, to cause an assault on Afghanistan and a perhaps complicit Iraq or a duplicitous, politically fragmenting Pakistan that will then galvanize the entire Islamic world, spreading his ‘faith’ closer towards its apocalyptic goals, destabilizing moderate regimes and movements into the bargain as extremism triumphs across the Moslem universe. How do we hold back and think clearly about this, prevent it happening?

As the wreckage of the World Trade Centre smoulders we must ask what we can do next and we must do it with surpreme grace. The immediately intense military responses, the revenge desires, the longer terms strategies, they must be thought out carefully and with an ethical line that is from now on unimpeachable. But in New York, once the debris is cleared and life slowly returns to something like normal, we need something else. We might do well to rebuild the towers, or to make a monument of a similar size recalling all the brave souls and innocent lives lost there. To give the world a symbol that Osama bin Laden had hoped to destroy: a thing called hope. May the martyrs live in our hearts whenever we look towards it. May they drive us on to better and more honourable ways, in the future and most certainly in these dark, strange times upon us now.

Australian writer Mark Mordue is the author of ‘Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip’, appearing this November through Allen & Unwin Publishers in Australia and New Zealand. His full bio can be found here.

What We Can Do by Garrett Mok

Where I Was When... by Carol Mangis

God and Wall Street: Observations and reflections crossing America, late September, 2001 by Judd Kleinman