I still remember the day. I was thirteen, just starting eighth grade. As I prepared to leave for school that Tuesday, my parents had the news on, as usual, and they were staring at our massive eighties-era box television in disbelief. Every news channel was showing footage of the burning buildings. Soon, people who were vaguely connected to me in the public imagination through Islam were identified as responsible. I was caught between disbelief at the thought that America was not safe, and even then, a nascent sense of dread that I would be seen as culturally complicit in the eyes of our predominantly white community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the 25th Anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I cannot help but marvel at how much our world has changed, and how much has remained the same. The iPod had not been launched yet; today, I carry a smartphone in my pocket almost constantly. We had never had a Black president in 2001. Israel and Palestine, then treated by many Americans as a distant conflict, have become a central to contemporary debate. We had a new Republican president after eight years of the Clinton administration. Today, the country is experiencing another Republican administration amid profound political polarization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The uncomfortable truth is that, as horrific as the attacks on the World Trade Center were, Islamist terrorism has been replaced as the leading source of extremism in our global political context. In the United States, we have white supremacists and other forms of domestic extremism have demanded attention. Abroad, the murders and devastation in Gaza and continuing U.S. military support has forced Americans to confront whose narrative to believe. The truth we have all been forced to confront in these unprecedented times is this: the real monsters look and speak just like the people who have been playing the good guys for the past century, and who colonized the rest of the world with vicious abandon not long before that. This was a rebirth, not an inception. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States has intervened in the affairs of other countries out of sordid self-interest for decades, if not centuries. Iran is the clearest example: in 1953 the United States and Britain backed the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh<\/a> after his government nationalized Iran\u2019s oil industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Africa and South America have been reduced, in the wake of colonialism\u2019s formal and perhaps merely nominal end, to a playground for European corporate greed and political machination. Asia presents threats that range from communist China\u2019s competing hegemony to the Middle East\u2019s postcolonial Islamist violence. The common thread throughout these inextricably joined destinies is European dominance, more often than not through barbaric violence and corrupt politics. As the genocide in Gaza has shown us, attacks against the status quo, however violent of unjustified, often occur in response to previous attacks on the offending party that our media fails to register because they do not affect us. Just as October 7 was a response to Israeli violence, September 11 was a response to US interference in the region at large, and Palestine in particular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That complexity matters when we talk about 9\/11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing can justify the deliberate killing of civilians. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on September 11, 2001. e also lost our collective innocence in the years that followed. I refer, of course, to the War on Terror, which foreshadowed the rise of white extremism and ushered forth a new era of fascism and police state violence, not just in America, but throughout the developed world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From Guantanamo Bay, to Abu Ghraib, to the death tolls of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and now Gaza and Iran, the War on Terror has proven itself, as I prophetically feared as a teenager that Tuesday morning, a war on Islam. When I was still in eighth grade, a Jewish student, upon learning that I was Muslim, asked me point blank if I believed that all Jews should be killed. It was phrased as a question, but her tone made it clear that she was making an unequivocal statement. The year after 9\/11, during my first year of high school, a group of boys jumped me outside my classroom because I was the nerdy Muslim girl who wouldn\u2019t suffer their harassment. In my junior year of high school, an Israeli friend confidently explained, as I sat right next to her, that the difference between Israelis and Palestinians was that Israelis have morals. In college, my liberal mock trial teammate would joke after every flight during our team trips about my being pulled over by TSA. He would have never joked with an African teammate about Jim Crow, such were his politics, but the shy, surprisingly talented brown girl who didn\u2019t date or drink was fair game. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those experiences taught me\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n The War on Terror tapped into a strain of antisemitism that traces back to the Catholic Crusades against Muslims for custody of Jerusalem. We have always been the ultimate other, the conclusion of Abraham\u2019s trinity that threatens European control of the Christian narrative they misappropriated from the Middle East during the reign of the Emperor Constantine<\/a>, who first identified the efficacy of religion as the opiate of the masses. While European Christianity colonized the free world and exploited it until the very system they created proved untenable, Muslims endured under its iron fist until Europe finally returned its colonies, leaving the Israel-Palestine conflict as a final, divide-and-conquer parting shot to their former victims. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the quarter century since 9\/11, I have watched the eurocolonial world order collapse into a smoldering ruin on the ashes of history. On this day of mourning, I encourage our readers and supporters to honor the lives that were taken from us by raising their voices against fascism in all its forms, be they Zionist, Islamist, Evangelical, or Hindutva. Our most powerful tool is our democracy, which allows us to vote our conscience and hold our leaders accountable to the people they tax and represent. Let us come together on the anniversary of America\u2019s greatest tragedy in recent history and build a world that does not recognize such fear because every child is safe, educated, and fed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I still remember the day. I was thirteen, just starting eighth grade. As I prepared to leave for school that Tuesday, my parents had the news on, as usual, and they were staring at our massive eighties-era box television in disbelief. Every news channel was showing footage of the burning buildings. 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