Remembering 9/11 Means Remembering Why |
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, America is once again remembering the nearly 3,000 people murdered that morning.
We remember the airplanes. The burning towers. The people jumping from impossible heights. The firefighters climbing stairways from which many would never return. The collapse of the World Trade Center. The Pentagon in flames. And the passengers of Flight 93, who learned what was happening and fought back.
We should also remember what happened afterward.
Muslim Americans were subjected to suspicion, hostility and sometimes violence. Sikh Americans, tragically mistaken by some for Muslims, became targets as well. Those stories deserve to be told. Innocent Americans should never be held responsible for crimes committed by people who happen to share, or are mistakenly believed to share, their religion or ethnicity.
But there is another part of the history that increasingly seems difficult to discuss.
The nineteen hijackers were not simply angry young men. They were not generic “extremists.” And they did not randomly select the United States as their enemy.
They were members of al-Qaeda, an organization whose leaders embraced a radical Islamist ideology that fused political grievances with religious extremism and provided a theological justification for murdering civilians.
That is not my characterization. It is essentially the conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, established by Congress to investigate the attacks.
Its report carefully, and importantly, distinguished between Islam and the ideology of the terrorists:
“Islam is not the enemy. It is not synonymous with terror. Nor does Islam teach terror.”
That sentence deserves to be remembered.
But so do the sentences surrounding it.
The Commission warned that the........