A Muslim immigrant remembers September 11 and the world it made

A personal remembrance of the lives taken on 9/11, the suspicion endured by innocent Muslims afterward, and the enduring lesson that security must never be pursued at the expense of human dignity.

I did not first experience September 11 as history. I saw it as a few silent images on a television screen in a restaurant in downtown Toronto.

I was having lunch with two friends. Above us, a giant television was muted. Hockey images had been playing, the familiar background noise of Canadian public life even without sound. Then my eyes caught the Twin Towers, dark smoke pouring from them, fire where there should have been glass and sky.

I knew those buildings. During my four years at university in the United States, I had visited New York several times and had been around the World Trade Center. The skyline was not abstract to me. It belonged to places I had walked and memories I had carried back to Canada.

For a few seconds, I drifted away from the conversation. I stared at the screen and thought: this cannot be real. Perhaps it was a trailer for an upcoming Hollywood film. Perhaps it was an advertisement for a video game. The pictures were too terrible and too cinematic for the mind to accept immediately as ordinary news.

Nobody around me seemed to understand what we were seeing. The television remained silent. Lunch continued. I looked away and returned to my friends.

Only hours later, after work and after I reached home, did I learn that those glimpses were real. Hijacked passenger aircraft had been turned into weapons. Nearly three thousand people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in United States history. The people trapped in the towers, the passengers and crews in the aircraft, the workers at the Pentagon, and the police officers, firefighters and emergency personnel who ran toward danger became part of a grief much larger than any one country.

The first duty is remembrance

Before 9/11 became a doctrine, a war, an intelligence reorganization or an argument about civil liberties, it was a morning of individual human beings losing their lives. They had names, families, unfinished conversations and ordinary plans for the evening. Many people below the impact zones escaped, often with the help of first responders; many at and above them could not. The official 9/11 Commission later described emergency workers improvising amid failed communications and almost unimaginable conditions.

That human scale matters. It is too easy, after twenty-five years, to remember only the falling buildings and forget the lives inside them. It is also too easy to convert the dead into permanent justification for whatever governments later chose to do. Honour requires something harder: grief for the victims, gratitude for courage, justice for the perpetrators, and an honest accounting of the decisions made in the victims’ names.

I write this with another anniversary approaching in our collective memory: the victims murdered in Israel on October 7, 2023, the people taken hostage, and families whose lives were permanently divided into a before and an after. I do not equate every conflict or every government response. I connect the victims through a simple moral principle. Terrorism deliberately attacks human beings in order to terrorize a wider society. Our compassion must begin with those attacked, and it must not end at the border of our own religion, ethnicity or political camp.

America had the right to defend itself

America was enraged, and understandably so. An armed attack had occurred on its homeland. A government that could not protect its people, identify those responsible and prevent another attack would have failed its most basic duty. Al-Qaeda had planned the operation from abroad, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan sheltered its leadership. Self-defence was not an invented grievance.

But a terrorist organization presents a different test from a state army crossing a recognized border. Where does a country strike? Who is responsible: the planners, the financiers, the hosts, the sympathizers, or everyone who shares a nationality or faith? What quality of evidence is enough to kill, detain or invade?........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)