That Grin
By A.M. Siriano (09/12/04)
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working in a Columbus, Ohio, office, struggling with some minor issue, when I received a call from my daughter, who told me that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. I announced it to others, and all work stopped as everyone scrambled from website to website, trying to get breaking news. Someone pulled a small television from the supply room and everyone crowded around. One girl began to recite passages from Revelation as we all stared at the little screen in disbelief. And then we were told to go home. No work was getting done, no point in staying.
As I packed my laptop and discussed the events with others, two young men of Middle Eastern descent strolled by, paused, and stared us down defiantly. One grinned, just slightly, but enough to send a message of … something. Glee? Triumph? Approval? I recognized him, for I had encountered him more than once in the stairwell, where he often used the vacant space at the bottom for a place to pray …
The next day, my boss, a native of Vermont, made rounds to bolster the corporate troops and began to pontificate at length about America’s complicity in this attack, that “what we have been doing to those people” brought this upon us. I heard his words, but only saw red as I thought about people jumping to their deaths or being pulverized by crashing steel and concrete, while Muslims around the world danced in the streets. Some, like the young men from the previous day, felt too repressed in America to dance, but they couldn’t contain that grin. And here was a misguided liberal offering excuses and blaming America. Since the days of Reagan, I have been aware of the ideological schism in this country, but how shocked I was to discover that even an attack on our own soil was not enough to bridge the gap.
The worst event since that day occurred just recently, in Russia, where hundreds were brutalized and killed in the name of some cause for which I will never find sympathy. Yet, once again, sympathy for the devil abounds. The murderers of schoolchildren have been “freedom fighters” for far too long, and we aren’t yet ready to let that epithet drop. These sentiments stem from years of pacifism and, more notably, from the Clinton administration, which preferred the Chechens over the Russians in the same way it preferred the KLA over the Serbs. There is little doubt that all parties can be blamed to one degree or another for the violence, but it is still chic to prefer Muslims over Christians, even though Muslims have yet to prove themselves worthy of such high regard.
Recently Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of media giant Al-Arabiya said, “It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.” I applaud him for those words, and it is a start. The questions now remains, how many non-terrorist Muslims actually reject their terrorist brethren’s activities. Since Muslims have been largely silent and complacent about terrorism, we simply don’t know their true position. For the sake of our own well-being, we must assume the worst, until they convince us otherwise.
Muslims, like right-thinking Americans, must turn this into a black and white issue. In the case of terrorism—which is nothing more than the cowardly murder of innocents as a way of wounding an enemy—we all must condemn the sinners and worry about their souls long after they are dead. There is no excuse for the fact that Chechen terrorist Akhmed Zakayev, propped by elitists like Vanessa Redgrave, should be walking freely about London. There is no excuse for the New York Times to be pining about the poor, militant women whose horrible conditions in Chechnya caused them to turn into heartless child killers. There is no excuse for allowing a loathsome traitor like Michael Moore to compare Saddam-supporting insurgents to our own Minutemen and hope for their success over our own troops. Commiseration for evil is the same as evil.
For everything there is a season, including investigations that explain how something has come about. That is the job of historians. But when people are in danger, the time is emphatically then, not now. I have no high regard for Vladimir Putin, who turned his back on his allies (and his fellow man) for love of oil, but it was nice to see him wake up to the danger of international terrorism and talk tough. Ah, if only talk were followed by swift, harsh action! Our State Department, not wanting the Russians to start calling the shots on the War on Terror, encouraged Putin to meet with the “rebel leaders”—a suggestion Putin rightly ridiculed—and, at the least, to launch a “probe” over the whole incident. To the latter, Putin has conceded, so now, instead of taking advantage of the mood of the country to exact retribution for the crime, the Russians may only get hand-wringing instead of justice.
As I ponder the events of September 11, 2001, three years later, and contemplate the many lesser, but equally horrible, acts that have occurred since that day, I don’t care one iota about how it happened. I just want the killers dead and I want their supporters to either shut up or be shut down. I am supposed to be concerned about our Muslim friends, but have yet to see any real outcry from them against our supposed common enemy. I am supposed to believe Islam is a good force in the world, rather than a resident evil, but one cannot easily refute practical evidence to the contrary.
Most Americans, I believe, are like me, content to hold to a live-and-let-live philosophy. They couldn’t care less how many good Muslims there are, or whether or not their religion has been “hijacked.” When something is hijacked, the only valid response is to take it back at the first opportunity, Todd Beamer-style if necessary. Muslims, the world over, have refused to take back their so-called religion of peace, which means they are either cowards or it isn’t a religion of peace. The onus is on them, not on us, to prove that they are human beings, rather than savages that revel in the deaths of innocents.
So far, all I have seen is repressed glee, and it appears on the faces of too many Muslims somewhere on the planet whenever innocent blood is shed. In the end, the response will be what that smiling fool heard three years ago: “You wipe off that grin, or we’ll wipe it off for you.”
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