The anger and suspicion that proliferated after the twin towers fell was just the latest instalment in North America's often racist and xenophobic past.
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. The memorial in New York was unveiled, the names of the dead intoned, heroes remembered, and the strength and courage of the American people affirmed. It was a day of mourning, of reflection, and of renewing a commitment to freedom and against terror – a day of reminders of how much the world has changed since that fateful September day. That has been one of the most powerful organizing narratives of the post-9/11 world. Indeed, the idea that there is a “post-9/11 world” has been axiomatic since the towers fell.
In his State of the Union address nine days after the attack, then president George W. Bush said that on Sept. 11, “night fell on a different world.” There’s just one problem with that story: It isn’t true. 9/11 didn’t fundamentally change anything. It exposed, and gave expression to, not only what is best, but also what is worst in human beings. However, those elements were already there, and had been for a long time. And the fiction – no, the lie – that we’ve told ourselves ever since has helped us to ignore history and rationalize moral bankruptcy. Not just in the United States, either. Canada, too, has been in thrall to the idea of a post-9/11 world, and we are paying a price.
Our news editor, Mike Barber, weighs in on the legacy of growing up in 9/11's shadow here.
Bush said that the 9/11 terrorists “hate our freedoms,” many of which are also Canada’s freedoms. But the United States has hated its own freedoms for a long time. It hated its freedoms when slavery was legal. It hated its freedoms when schools were segregated. It hated its freedoms at the Kent State massacre. It hated its freedoms during the McCarthy era. All this prefaced the U.S.’s hatred of freedom after 9/11, when it turned Guantanamo Bay into a lawless torture camp, engaged in the rendition of terror suspects to be tortured, and turned the U.S. into a national security state – a state that continues to exist today.
Canada, too, has a history of hating its freedoms: We hated our freedoms when residential schools were destroying aboriginal communities, the effects of which are still felt today. We hated our freedoms during the Red Scare. We hated our freedoms when abortion was illegal. All of this was a preface to 9/11. After that, we hated our freedoms when we let Maher Arar languish in a Syrian prison, where he was interrogated and tortured as part of the United States’ extraordinary rendition policy. We hated our freedoms when our government turned detainees over to Afghanistan, where they almost certainly knew they would be tortured . It is a shocking denial of history to claim that 9/11 represented a fundamental break with a moral compass that had been otherwise intact.
What 9/11 did do, however, is bring these ugly, disavowed currents of history into stark relief. It provided a context in which, if we chose to, we could make sense of the ongoing ugliness of life in ostensibly tolerant and freedom-loving societies. The sickening wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that has swept, and continues to sweep, parts of the United States represents nothing new, but is a bubbling-over of racism that has always marred the American body politic.
Then there was the hysteria over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque – which, incidentally, was to be neither a mosque nor all that near Ground Zero. It was to be a community centre called Cordoba House that simply had a prayer space. In that case, saner heads prevailed and the funding went through, but the fevered debate was further evidence of xenophobic hysteria.
National Post editor Jonathan Kay analyzes the state of 9/11 conspiracy theories 10 years later.
Finally, there was the case of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who – in a manner that evoked the Nazis and a scene from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – organized a Koran-burning on the lawn of his church.
More than just anti-Muslim sentiment, 9/11 opened the floodgates for a broader wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The amazingly punitive laws recently passed in Arizona concerning police rights to demand immigration papers from just about anybody is evidence enough. None of this is new to American public life.
Canada, too, has had its post-9/11 reckonings with its racist history spilling into the present. There was the famous kirpan case, when Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Grade 7 student in Montreal and a practising Sikh, dropped his ceremonial dagger in the schoolyard. Who knows what would have happened three months earlier, but this was November 2001. 9/11 might as well have happened the day before, and for too long nobody could, or would, distinguish between a ceremonial object and a lethal weapon. It made no difference that Multani was Sikh, and not Muslim. He was “other,” he wore a turban, and many smart and probably well-intentioned people stopped thinking.
Former Transport Minister David Collenette examines 9/11's impact on trade and industry.
Something similar recently happened in Ontario, with a controversy over Muslim prayer spaces in public schools. Opponents argued that public schools could not endorse particular religions. But since non-Muslims were not obligated to attend, and since the reason for implementing the prayer service was to make it so that Muslim students wouldn’t have to leave school for prayer services, much of the backlash was little more than thinly veiled anti-Muslim anxiety – a small piece of the history of discrimination and racial and religious anxieties that have stained this country’s history.
That ugly xenophobia persists in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere is terrible and shameful. But it is not new. Night did not fall upon a different world on Sept. 12, 2001. As long as we insist that it did, we will feel no need to address – and thus won’t address – our respective and entrenched histories of injustice, violence, and suffering. We will not, in other words, have learned the lessons of 9/11, and the thousands who died on that day, and who have died since, for freedoms that we do not practise and tolerance that we cannot abide, will have died in vain.
Origin
Source: the Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment