(Updated below)
Frank Smitha wrote it best: "We can know about gruesome instances in the past and remain specific in our animosities. Collective animosities are primitive. Collective guilt - ages old - is one of humanity's dumber ideas (...) Let us leave guilt with the fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers and not collectively. We need not forgive everybody. Let us be specific."
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America had a choice: stay strong in its principles and resolve, or give into the pain, grief and blind desire for vengeance. In other words: walk the high road or tumble down the low road. Despite an unprecedented international outpouring of sympathy, compassion and support, America chose the latter.
"Part of American psyche after 9/11 was to strike back against people who resembled the hijackers, who speak the same language, who share a common religious faith", recently said Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute.
In other words - all Muslims were (and still are) guilty for 9/11.
We've heard it largely (and still do) from neocon/right-wing/madhater luminaries such as the Coulters, Malkins and Co., as well as from religious Christianist leaders, U.S. representatives and MSM show hosts.
Remember this? "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
Or this? "These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with."
Or this? "A few fringe jihadists here, a few fringe jihadists there, and soon you're talking about bloody real numbers."
Or this? "(...) we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers."
Or this? "(It is) not too much to ask people not to gather in groups of five or six and loudly denounce western foreign policy while reciting similar prayers to those used by suicide bombers the world over."
Or this? "I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'"
Or this? "(...) if American citizens don’t wake up (...) there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy (...) and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary."
Or this? "They've got all kinds of Muslim crazies up in Canada running around."
Or this? "All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin' hands the whole time (...) I'm telling you, with God as my witness (...) human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it."
Or this? "(...) we have failed to do what’s necessary to combat our enemies on American soil (e.g., airport profiling, immigration enforcement, heightened scrutiny of Muslim chaplains and soldiers, etc.)."
Or this? "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina (...) This shows that we mean business (...) There's no more effective deterrent than that."
And I could on and on and on, with such quotes. They have been legion since 9/11 and they keep on coming to this very day.
But we've heard it as well from so-called political pundits and scholars.
Take this, for instance: "We needed to go over there, basically (...) take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it."
Then this: "(...) the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the recruitment of terrorists or the effect of the bombings in Madrid and London? It is certainly possible that these events produced an increase in would-be terrorists by showing the possibility of sensational success."
Or this: "Calling Islam a peaceful religion is an increasingly hard argument to make."
Or this: "Islamists have more than a century of humiliation to look back on (...) which is partly why even Muslims who are neither radical nor fundamentalist proffer their sympathy and even their support to violent extremists."
Or this: "What's happening in the Middle East, then, isn't just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. (...) You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West (...)"
And once again - I could go on and on with similar quotes from such political and foreign policy luminairies.
Hence, the modus operandi since 9/11 has been, and still is, "collective guilt and punishment".
You are skeptical of this?
Then what to make of a State Department employee leaving messages such as "The only good Arab is a dead Arab" at the Arab American Institute?
Of a seven years old Muslim boy being repeatedly stopped and denied flying for having a "wrong name"?
Of a caucasian American rock icon being stopped by British airport customs officers and detained because his beard was deemed "Taliban-like"?
Of the shooting to death of a Brazilian-born electrician by British police because he looked like a radical Islamist terrorist?
Of the removal, detention and interrogation of six Muslim imams from a plane following complaints from "worried" passengers?
Of at least 80 Gitmo detainees who, despite being cleared of all charges and deemed no threat to U.S. security, must still languish there because no one wants them?
Etc.
This is also why we have the Afghanistan and Iraq quagmires, and why there is ever increasing calls for attacking Iran.
All in the sacrosanct name of security and of American strength, power and hegemony.
Fear, ignorance, intolerance and hate: all intellectual sloth-driven, all making us incompetents and all constituting the very foundations of bigotry - whether racial, religious or otherwise.
Yet once again, I state here what I have previously written: "(...) when will we acknowledge the fact, once and for all, that it is the incompetents among us who consistently promulgate violence as a solution for anything, to everything? (...) rationalizations supporting the use of violence - other than the need for the rightful exercise of self-defense when set upon by a genuinely clear, present and immediate danger - invariably constitute deceitful fabrications meant to conceal, disguise or justify incompetence ... including our very own for embracing such mendacity."
America faced a choice in the aftermath of 9/11 and it definitely picked the wrong option.
Considering the prevalence in Human History of the primitive mind-mode of thinking which validates absurd concepts such as collective guilt and punishment, I find myself asking the question:
"What, in the end, have we learned?"
Sadly, the only answer that keeps coming to me is "absolutely nothing".
And just to give you an idea of the enormity of it all, here is one relatively recent example whereby one group lashed out at another, using collective guilt and punishment as the main rationale behind their atrocious and horrific act: al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11.
My only remaining hope lies with the possibility that it is not too late, that we may yet veer off the road to perdition upon which we are fast riding on and take another, more enlightened, one.
After all, were our noble principles of democracy, liberty, human rights and peace indeed nothing but empty, boastful and hypocritical shams?
Seul l'avenir le dira - only time will tell.
Update: 08/21/2007 - Via Raw Story today, a Catholic priest on Fox News said this: "(...) there are people all over the world ... who are using the word Allah in order to refer to a supreme being who supposedly invites them or commands them to kill the innocent in his name." I wonder how this priest feels about those who use the same line of collective guilt and punishment reasoning as he uses to declare that all Catholic priests are pedophiles? Or that all Christian fundamentalists are terrorists?
Such is the way of intellectual sloth-driven fear, ignorance, pettiness, intolerance and bigotry.
(Cross-posted from APOV)
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