aishabintjamil (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aishabintjamil) wrote2011-09-11 10:45 am
aishabintjamil) wrote2011-09-11 10:45 am
Remembering Sept. 11
This started out as a reply to some comments on Facebook, but I wanted to put it somewhere a little more permanent.
I hope that I won't hear a lot of wholesale Muslim bashing today. We need to remember that the vast majority of Muslims in this country, and indeed, in the world, are not terrorists. Many of them talk frequently about how activities like the World Trade Center attacks and other acts of terror are not acceptable actions within their faith.
It's reasonable to be angry about the attack, even more so if you lost someone. But if we blame all Muslims, we're doing the same thing, at
least in spirit.
The perpetrators of the atrocity came here, full of hate and anger. Maybe they had good reason to hate people who'd injured them or theirs. Maybe some of those people were Americans. I don't know, and probably none of us will ever know. What we do know is that they didn't strike at those guilty people. They struck at a thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with that, just happened to be the same nationality/ethnic/religio
That's the cycle we have to be strong enough to break. We did the right thing as a nation - we went after the specific individuals and organization who planned the attack. I'm not going to try to debate whether we did that in wise or effective manner. I'm not sure what the answer there is. But the important thing is that we did try to hold onto that high ground. We didn't blame the religion wholesale, although there are plenty of examples of individuals or agencies doing so.
On the whole we tried, however imperfectly, to do the right thing, and we need to keep trying, and to keep fighting the tempation to take out our anger on Muslims as a whole, and to stand up and say something if we see someone being wronged based on religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other broad grouping. That's the heart of being an American, at least for me.
I hope that I won't hear a lot of wholesale Muslim bashing today. We need to remember that the vast majority of Muslims in this country, and indeed, in the world, are not terrorists. Many of them talk frequently about how activities like the World Trade Center attacks and other acts of terror are not acceptable actions within their faith.
It's reasonable to be angry about the attack, even more so if you lost someone. But if we blame all Muslims, we're doing the same thing, at
least in spirit.
The perpetrators of the atrocity came here, full of hate and anger. Maybe they had good reason to hate people who'd injured them or theirs. Maybe some of those people were Americans. I don't know, and probably none of us will ever know. What we do know is that they didn't strike at those guilty people. They struck at a thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with that, just happened to be the same nationality/ethnic/religio
That's the cycle we have to be strong enough to break. We did the right thing as a nation - we went after the specific individuals and organization who planned the attack. I'm not going to try to debate whether we did that in wise or effective manner. I'm not sure what the answer there is. But the important thing is that we did try to hold onto that high ground. We didn't blame the religion wholesale, although there are plenty of examples of individuals or agencies doing so.
On the whole we tried, however imperfectly, to do the right thing, and we need to keep trying, and to keep fighting the tempation to take out our anger on Muslims as a whole, and to stand up and say something if we see someone being wronged based on religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other broad grouping. That's the heart of being an American, at least for me.