Response to Terrorist Attacks
An Open
Letter to American Students
and the American Church
Vinoth
Ramachandra, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
IFES Regional Secretary for South Asia
19 September 2001
The suicide
attacks in the United States were acts of indescribable evil. It is right
that all decent men and women everywhere should feel a deep sense of moral
outrage. Jesus, the icon of God, showed anger when faced with human hard-heartedness
and religious indifference to suffering. But that same Jesus refused to
fight evil with evil, and challenged his disciples to overcome evil with
good. If we treat others the way they treat us, or only show compassion
and anger when our friends and family suffer, how are we different to
others? (Luke 6:27-36). That was-and remains- the challenge of Christian
discipleship, for which the Holy Spirit empowers us.
Christians seek justice, not revenge. Justice in a situation such as
this has to do with collecting, weighing and presenting evidence; respecting
the rule of international law; and not being disproportionate or arbitrary
in punishment. Even the much-maligned Old Testament principle of an "eye
for an eye" was never a prescription for blanket retaliation, but
in a legal context set limits to what punishment could be meted out to
an individual. (If I took out your eye in a fight, the court should not
take my life.) America has constantly obstructed all global efforts to
set up an international criminal court to try those accused of crimes
against humanity. Ironically, both the US and Afghanistan have appeared
in the eyes of the world over the past year as "rogue-states":
nations that want to "go-it-alone" on the world stage, to refuse
to submit to the claims of the international community.
As a non-American, what disturbs me most about the aftermath to the tragedy is the self-righteous hypocrisy and militant jingoism emanating from most sections of the American media and Congress. I listen with amazement to talk of America's "lost innocence" and read with equal disbelief columnist Lance Morrow (in the normally staid TIME magazine) whipping up his fellow-Americans to "learn hatred" and to cultivate the "focused brutality" of their Islamic enemies. The airwaves are filled with the rhetoric of the "global fight of good against evil", with the US clearly identified with the good, and of the "defence of Western civilization" or of "democracy versus terror". President Bush has begun to invoke the "crusades", oblivious to the connotations of that word in the minds of most Muslims (not to mention Eastern European Orthodox Christians!).
Day after day we are reminded by CNN of the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and invited to ponder on another world war. But I wait in vain to be shown footage of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or to hear of Dresden or Tokyo, cities reduced to rubble by the airforces of Western civilization. (Have Americans forgotten that they are the only nation in the history of the world to have unleashed nuclear weapons on civilian populations?)
History, even recent history, appears to be quickly forgotten. Do college students today know about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian and Laotian peasants bombed into oblivion by American B-52s in the "secret wars" of the early 1970s? Do they know of the invasion of East Timor in 1975-78 by an Indonesian army, heavily armed and funded by American taxpayers- an invasion that saw a bigger slaughter of civilians per population than in the Nazi Holocaust? Question: what do Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have in common, apart from being mass murderers? Answer: they were all equipped and supported by the CIA until American interests changed.
Where were the CNN cameras focused when apartment blocks, factories and offices in Baghdad (1991) and Belgrade (1999) were bombed, night after night, by decent, law-abiding American youth as if it were a computer war-game? And where were the endless CNN interviews with victims' families when the US mounted an illicit attack on Sudan (1998), wiping out half that country's supply of pharmaceuticals and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it)? When have we witnessed the righteous indignation of Americans against the mass terror inflicted by the Burmese army on its own people, financed in part by powerful British and American oil companies (the Texas oil men around Bush, including Dick Cheney, were involved)? Or which American evangelical leaders have protested against the deaths of over half a million children in Iraq because of American-led economic sanctions?
I could go on. This is not the whole story, of course, but we are dealing with aspects to events and perceptions that you may not be aware of. Terrorism is depicted on American TV by the lone suicide bomber in Palestine or the fanatical passion of a knife-wielding "savage" from the mountains of Afghanistan. It is hard for American Christians to associate terrorism with cool, sophisticated American bureaucrats with Ivy-league degrees, expensive suits, and homes in suburbia. But they, like the Osama bin Ladens of the world, are the ones who give the orders; they are not brought face to face with the casualties.
It is tempting, therefore, for many non-Americans to feel that, finally, US-sponsored terrorism has come home to roost. The British liberal philosopher John Gray recently wrote that, until Americans suffer economically, they will never question the workings of the global economic order. Similarly, it appears that until Americans suffer on their own soil the effects of global terrorism, they will be indifferent to the terrorism other nations suffer.
Nothing that I have said above is intended to detract from the considerable good that America has done around the world in the past 50 years. Please do not misunderstand. That's another issue. In the warped minds of those who are behind the recent terror, America is the source of all evil. And all American self-justifications and counter-myths of "Innocent us vs. Evil them" plays right into their hands. They are dangerous mirror-images of each other. Military action is what they are expecting. Even if they are killed, they will be seen as martyrs by their supporters and their self-justifications, victim-mentalities and recruitments will continue in the next generation.
What lessons can we learn from this horrendous tragedy?
(1) We suffer together. What happens in other peoples' backyards eventually affect our own homes and families. In our globally inter-connected world, we know that commodity or foreign-exchange speculations on Wall Street can cripple, say, an African nation's entire economy. Now we know that what happens in a Palestinian refugee camp can cripple Wall Street. We can no longer turn our backs on the hurts and brokenness of peoples living on the other side of the world.
Just as Pearl Harbor awoke America from her self-imposed isolation, so we must hope that the events of 11 September 2001 will move America to see that her "national interests" can never be asserted against the global good. In the past few months, America has failed to honour the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and refused to sign international agreements on the reduction of trade in small arms and another on the development of biological weapons. Will Christians in America challenge their nation to put the good of all peoples on the planet before American commercial greed?
(2) History is important. These events didn't arise in a vacuum, but they are the latest links in a tragic chain of numerous acts of brutality, cowardice and broken promises that have marred the Middle East since the colonial break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917. You need to take the trouble to investigate, to learn about the peoples whose histories have suddenly enmeshed with your own. Many of the petty, despotic regimes of the Middle Eastern and gulf states have been propped up by American and British governments and companies. From the late Shah of Iran to the present Saudi regime, America has armed and funded governments that have been loathed by their own people. (Saudi Arabia is the world's largest buyer of American weapons). And the American public has watched idly by while the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, backed up by a vicious system of apartheid, state-sponsored executions, and indiscriminate bombings of Palestinian villages have continued unabated.
The distinguished British journalist Robert Fisk, an authority on the Middle East, described the 11th September attacks as the "wickedness and awesome cruelty" of a "crushed and humiliated people"
Fisk observes:
But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps ...
No, Israel was not to blame though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so; but the malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel's wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so.
(3) There are no safe havens in this world. Many from Asia, Africa and Latin America flock to the US in search of personal and economic "security". The economic might of the US (symbolized by the twin towers of the WTC), all its military might (symbolized by the Pentagon), and all the "think-tanks" and the billions of dollars poured into intelligence-gathering technology did not save America from this tragedy. It never will. If proof were needed of how misguided Bush's plans for an infallible "missile defence" system were, then we received it last week. If Americans think that, once Osama bin Laden and his shadowy network of terrorists are destroyed, they can return to their comfortable worship of Mammon, they deceive themselves. The story of the Tower of Babel is re-enacted in every age and in every society.
What should Christians on American college campuses do?
(1) Protect all those students, janitors, secretaries, professors and others who are likely to suffer "hate attacks" because of their colour, religion (Muslim) or country of origin (especially Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Africa). In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing in 1996, there were numerous attacks by vengeful mobs on mosques, Arab churches and neighbourhoods. Let Christians be foremost in providing shelter for the fearful and in countering the graffiti and e-mail attacks that stem from ignorance and racial prejudice. Iranians, Afghans and Arabs are more dissimilar to one another than are Russians and Irish, and all these peoples have suffered far more than Americans at the hands of extremist Islamic groups.
(2) Be a genuine counter-culture: by proclaiming and living out a radical Biblical gospel. Avoid simplistic pronouncements of "God's judgement" (as if suffering and judgement were in a neat one-to-one relation) while you publicly challenge every form of self-righteousness, militant jingoism and the racist caricatures of other peoples. Do not allow the political "right" in America to co-opt Christianity to serve their own agenda. Question the equation of America with "goodness" or "innocence" or "Christian civilization", and challenge the renewed calls to pump more funds into the military and the rebuilding of American symbols of power.
Remember that the majority of Christians in the world live outside the Western nations. Even as I write, Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia and other majority-Muslim countries are fearful of the backlash in the event of an indiscriminate airstrike by the US against Afghanistan. These are your brothers and sisters in Christ. We need to learn to think and respond not primarily as Americans, but as Christians who belong to a global community, the Body of Christ, which claims our final allegiance.
The famous Barmen Declaration of 1934, produced by some Christian leaders in Germany to counter the propaganda and subversion of the Church by the Nazis, reminds us that
All the churches of Jesus Christ, scattered in diverse cultures, have been redeemed for God by the blood of the Lamb to form one multicultural community of faith. The 'blood' that binds them as brothers and sisters is more precious than the 'blood', the language, the customs, political allegiances, or economic interests that may separate them. We reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the culture it inhabits and the nation to which it belongs above the commitment to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God's new community.
In conclusion, if the dreadful events of 11 September 2001 can, in the merciful providence of God, lead to a deeper humility among all of us - which, in the case of America, will include a recognition of the limits to power and a willingness to embrace weakness- and a deeper commitment to pursue a more just and equitable world order, then those Americans who died would not have died in vain.
Vinoth Ramachandra
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