9/11: After a decade has the US learned anything?

The U.S. government’s account of 9/11 terrorist attacks the foundation of the open-ended wars that are exhausting America’s resources and destroying its reputation. Americans have been bound to the story of the Muslim instigated terrorist attack, because it is exactly the program needed to stampede Americans into forfeiting their civil rights.

Ten years after the attacks, Americans are unsafe, not because of terrorists and domestic extremists, but because we have lost our civil liberties and have no protection from unbridled government power.

There are illusions showing us that we’re safer.

Osama is dead. Bin Laden despised the US. .because it supports oppressive and corrupt regimes. Like others in the Middle East, he was outraged by long-standing US support for Israel’s brutal military occupation — now in its 45 year-Washington’s decisive diplomatic, military and economic intervention in support of the killings, the daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements, the gross violations of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world which the US continues to employ.

We’re fighting cultural disposition. Although the Army has taken cues to focus more effort toward understanding the Middle Eastern culture and its impact on operations and has committed resources toward incorporating the knowledge of the culture and language into its professional military education curriculum, possessing these skills does little to shape the dispositions of our military students when our policymakers persistently spread the disease of misinformation, scare-tactics and fear mongering.
To even begin to collaborate with such dramatically different cultural norms and values requires an examination of the foundations of a culture’s philosophy.

But we’re not there to collaborate. SAC and SCC’s political science Professor Nooshan Shekarabi, says how “we as a nation are really good at marginalizing the unknown. The unknown to us is either degraded or dehumanized. While I have tremendous love for this country and it’s very disheartening for me because I think this country has all the potential to be so much greater that it already is,” she said.

Among the majority of people suffering deep poverty and oppression, exists the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings; if the world refuses to listen what other the alternative is there? The Arab Spring, which has demanded the world’s attention, stemmed from an overall consensus that has been and will continue to be widely shared so long as there remains resentment of the American policies of supporting war crimes.

The US and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. One that protection rackets our preoccupied and let’s face it, numbed out of our mind’s society from the “perpetrators that acted out of hatred for cherished Western values as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.”

So much for our tolerance and religious pluralism; for the uninitiated, there were plans to construct an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan also known as “Ground Zero Mosque” by the logic-hating, herd-mentality rhetoric that has been used in opposition to the community center. And, of course, lower Manhattan is where the World Trade Center stood before-for the sake of being politically and patriotically correct-terrorists destroyed it- thereby murdering 3,000 Americans.

I was in the sixth grade. My father was in New York City. I remember my father’s stark voice over the phone telling me I needed to stay home from school for the rest of the week (due to my cultural and religious background). It is with this backdrop that I can say to every politician spouting off and opposing the construction of this Islamic community center: “Shut up. Go away. You hate America.”

People like professional political tumor Newt Gingrich, and future worst president ever, Sarah Palin, who have both slammed supporters of the Islamic community center. But it’s not just them. Due to the wave of propaganda being spread, apparently 68% of Americans also opposed the community center.

How did this happen? Well, basically a complicit and complacent media helped perpetuate ideas that are either outright lies or intellectually dishonest arguments designed to bring out the worst in all of us.

The dehumanizing approach of the government is not however a representation of the thought process of its citizenry. For Professor Shekerabi, “it changed my teaching in the sense that I realized how much more I needed to stress cultural competence, and a hunger to question authority. It’s easy for an impressionable student to be swayed by the media. Looking back, it gave me an opportunity to be a better teacher.”

Then there were those who said that any location in lower Manhattan was too close for a Muslim structure. Sarah Palin’s Twitter Feed, “we all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?” Why? Because mosques are religious and the 9-11 terrorists perverted Islam into something violent and hateful? Guess what? You can’t simultaneously acknowledge a right and insist that your government suppress it. Spineless panderer Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spewed, “while respecting that Muslims have a First Amendment right to religious freedom, this mosque should be built some place else.”

To make these statements you must hate two things: logic and America. There is NO way to say that an individual has a protected right to do something and simultaneously criticize your government for not suppressing the execution of that right. Should I say it more simply? OK. You can’t legally stop people from obeying the law.

What are we saying to Muslims? That if they were good Americans they would willingly give up their rights? Can you think of anything less American than that? This is America. We do what we want. And all you have to do to have that right is be a citizen here. And if you’re a traitor, we’ll prosecute you for treason and penalize you for taking up arms against the greatest country in the world. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work right? Wrong. We’re living in (as Fareed Zakaria would say) a Post American world where we curtail your freedoms based on mere speculation fueled by misinformation and lies.

For those still expecting any truths about 9-11 to surface, the truth is that this country needs a fundamental cultural shift. It has to start at the grassroots level. It has to be a bottom-up approach and it has to begin with you. In the name of our beloved lost ones, ask questions and demand answers.

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