The story after 9/11 and what it bred
by: sara
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Word Count: 2012
Imagine yourself sitting in school with a large gathering of your friends and the friends of your friends. The Math teacher has called in sick and people gather in the school ground relaxing on the hard benches. It is a lazy summer afternoon and nobody feels like doing anything.
You lethargically watch the yawning clouds drift across the white sky when quite out of the blue the atmosphere changes, no it’s not the change in the weather; it’s the atmosphere of the gathering. You come out of your stupor to realize that something does not feel right. It takes you a moment to grasp what has happened someone has mentioned the words: ‘Muslims’, ‘Islam’ and ‘terrorism’.
Sensing danger, you, sit upright on the bench, alert, and steer the conversation out of perilous waters and bring it back to shore before temperatures run high and people start pointing fingers at each other; their faces becoming distorted with rage as they start waging war with words, spit madly flying out of their mouths and landing everywhere.
People don’t like to talk about the tragedy of September the 11th. The topic has been discussed too many times, too many people still feel the pain of that day and too many times Muslims have been given the blame for the killing of three thousand Americans.
Even though the conversation may have drifted towards discussing another mundane topic, you cannot be too sure that the air is completely free of ‘danger’.
‘Children in Afghani and Pakistani Madrasas (Islamic Schools) are taught to hate America.’
‘Islam is a religion that teaches violence.’
‘Muslim Women are suppressed and caged in their houses.’
‘Muslims with beards and turbans wrapped round their heads are Taliban.’
‘Why do Muslims hate America?’
‘All Muslims are terrorists.’
‘Muslim extremists use Jihad to kill innocent people.’
‘Nip the Muslims’ hatred of the West in the bud before it is too late.’
‘Muslim Extremists’
‘Muslim Radicals.’
‘The invasion of Afghanistan is justified. ‘
‘America will take ANY measures necessary to fight against terrorism even if it means invading a country and killing its people.’
Everywhere you go be it a school, a college, a park or even in a beauty salon, somewhere in a newspaper, on the radio or the television, whenever America or Muslims are mentioned, joined together in a clump or expressed separately you get to hear or read these words.
There is no escaping the fact that ‘Muslims Extremist’ hit the mighty United States on September the 11th.
There is no refuge from the insults, the remarks and the derogatory terms hurled at Muslims and the Middle East every day.
If we do not care about the present we should at least think about how history will remember us years from now.
Supposing a student in an ordinary school, thirty years from now, is asked to write about 9/11 and its effects on the world by a history teacher will the student write something like this:
‘It was on the 11th of September and the year was two thousand and one when planes hijacked by Muslim Terrorists, largely of Arab descent, hit The Pentagon, The Twin Towers and The World Trade Center in the United States of America. Three thousand innocent people lost their lives; fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, wives, uncles and aunts perished.
It was a tragedy, people still shed tears and hearts still break with pain and love for the ones that were killed in that calamity.
This incident soon became to be known as ‘9/11’.
Mr. Bush, the President of America in that year decided to take action by taking revenge. Months after that news channels all over the world exploded with the headlines that America was going to attack Afghanistan to avenge the killing of its people. America was going to hunt down the terrorists who had so brutally snatched away America’s peace. Bush was going to leave no stone unturned, no hut uninvestigated and no cave uncharted.
A country already exploited by war, famine and destitution the most technologically advanced nation was going to ask it for revenge.
Thus, the United States, standing united and firm in the decision to avenge the death of three thousand of its innocent people was going to take thousands of other more lives.
All over the world people waited with bated breath to learn what would happen next, they sat glued to their television screens (a monitor like device that was very popular especially in the 19th till the early 21st century), some thought that this attack on Afghanistan would initiate World War III and almost all of the world was thinking the same thing, ‘If the most powerful country in the world could get struck by terrorists there is no knowing what will happen next?’
People could not believe that terrorists had attacked the world power (America was the world power in those days) when no country even dared to disagree with it policies.
These terrorists were terrible Muslims (followers of the faith of Islam) who had sworn to kill democracy as Bush had stated in many of his press conferences. These people employed any means necessary to fulfill their purpose and as a result thousand of innocents died every year. It has been said that these terrorists would say the Arabic words ‘Allah-O-Akbar’ meaning ‘God is great’ before blowing up or igniting any bomb. Their tactics were strictly unorthodox and extremely perilous. Even though almost every country in the Middle East and other countries besides America in the West had ‘terrorist problems’, the incident of 9/11 has remained by far the only attack that was avenged by annexing other countries.
From September the 11th onwards nothing would ever be the same again. The start of the twenty-first century was to be the start of a new era; an era we define as ‘The Terrible Times of Terrorism’.
To combat this ‘evil’ America would take drastic measures and in its rage fueled by the lava of revenge would go further in pursuit of terrorists that it became as brutal as the enemy it pledged to fight against.
Being a Muslim would become hard now.
New Immigration Laws of the rich and powerful nations especially in Muslim countries would become exceedingly strict; security at international airports would become extra stringent, no one could pass the guards without them scrutinizing passengers’ faces looking for terrorists. An Arab on board meant added security on the plane. People became berserk; they would travel by road if possible to avoid traveling in an airplane.
In the West a change was taking place; the Westerners started to look at all Muslims with increasing mistrust and suspicion, companies began firing their Muslim employees on the grounds that their work was not satisfactory.
Muslim children began to be harassed at schools, the men and women at work places and even the police contributed to a large part of the abuse. Many Muslims were taken into custody and harshly interrogated for no reason and hundreds of Muslim Americans came back to the countries of their parents and grandparents to escape the prejudice and the resentment their fellow citizens subjected them to.
A gulf was forming between the West and the East, a gap so intense that no form of technology could hope to bridge. “Americans were isolating themselves from the rest of the world”, as the BBC said.
Then something happened in the year two thousand and three that would alter the world history again and make the mighty United States appear as the culprit rather than the victim.
Mr. Oily Bush attacked Iraq; on the grounds that the much poorer and war ridden country had ‘weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere and that it should be freed from the dictatorship of a brutal tyrant, Saddam Hussein, the very same tyrant whose government the Bush Administration had funded and supported to carry out the genocide of the Shia population in the early 1990s.
Oily Bush after attacking Iraq searched even under the layers of Iraqi desert, where he struck gold and found tons of Iraq’s natural oil and gas reserves. Since Mr. Oily could not let such findings go to waste (strictly for the good of mankind) he gave contracts to large oil companies like Bechtel, Chevron and Halliburton to dig up the assets and consume the goods.
Bush is a man who is remembered in history as the one who stood against the ‘forces of evil’ and ‘terror’ as a beacon of heavenly light. One who occupied Iraq and bombed its desert for the good of Iraqi people.
Even though Bush was doing so much for Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the American public was against his government policies concerning the invasion of Iraq and wanted to bring its troops back home. But Bush remained adamant and kept sending more and more troops till thousand of innocent people had died and each and every piece of land of the occupied territories had been infested with lethal biological and nuclear chemicals.
These ordinary American citizens feared the Middle East; it was to them a place that bred terrorists and suicide bombers, a region whose people despised them. With the help of the media, in fact all thanks to the Western media (which ruled the world media in those days and was controlled by the government) these fears were reconfirmed till not a doubt remained in most minds about what and who Islam and Muslims are.
Thus, after 9/11 the words Islam and Terrorism were joined together in an inseparable union of misunderstandings and hate for the entire world and the future generations to watch and wonder.
Was 9/11 a political propaganda that the Bush administration used to force entry in the Middle East? If not, then was avenging the killings of three thousand American people justified by killing thousands of Iraqi and Afghani citizens? If yes, then surely it was a poor way to repay their innocent lives.
Our Presidents and governments of the past have left us with more hate then we can deal with.
The fact that the gap between Muslims and the West has become unsurpassable is a clear example of the kind of lives we live today.’
Back to the present, and if the future student in question does write something like this do we really want to continue with the hate?
I think that we should ask some governments that.
About the Author
I am a seventeen-year-old adolescent and I believe in making a change for the better in this world. Whether I succeed in my attempt is of coarse a matter for fate to decide.
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