One Year and Too Many Deaths Later: After 9-11
Commentary By Leonard Zeskind
Searchlight magazine September 2002
11 September 2002. As Searchlight goes to press, New York City is planning an all-borough dawn to midnight commemoration, with a special ceremony at the “pit” for the families of the victims. In Washington, D.C. the country will remember those lost at the Pentagon. And in Pennsylvania, the special heroism of the small band of passengers who attacked their attackers, crashing their plane before it could be used as a missile, will be remembered. These official government sponsored events are neither the beginning nor the end. A sea of American flags has flown from car radio antennas and front porches and windows for the past year. Art displays and music, literature and cultural invention—thousands of expressions of grief and anger, pride and bravado have sprung spontaneously from urban neighborhoods and rural cornfields in every corner of the States. Among other indicators of popular sentiment, the play list on country music stations is inflated with ballads recalling the heroism of firefighters and policemen. Even rocker Bruce Springsteen—whose anthem “Born in the USA” mourned the losses suffered by Vietnam Vets—is launching his next concert tour in the conscious shadow of “9-11.”
On this first anniversary, America’s chest-thumping patriotism and militarized nationalism might evoke more concern than empathy from Europeans. Images of bodies falling off the World Trade Center have faded with time. And to others the United States seems like a wounded and dangerous superpower, blindly warring on the world. Most Americans, however, envision themselves as defenders of democratic values and freedoms, beset by those who value neither. Americans may rue the deaths of innocent civilians in Afghanistan. But few regret bringing down the Taliban regime (even if it was first established with arms the USA supplied to anti-Soviet mujahedin). President W’s pending war on Iraq has little support. It looks too much like an attempt to finish off a job started by Daddy Bush. The anti-war movement, however, is so riddled with anti-Semitism—sometimes in the guise of “anti-Zionism,” sometimes not—that it is unlikely to rally a morally credible opposition. So the so-called “War Against Terrorism” continues, with all the effectiveness of a tank battling a swarm of (deadly) fleas.
In this “war,” like all others, domestic civil liberties have been among the first casualties. One recent plan by Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department called for a nationwide spy-on-your-neighbor program whereby postal carriers, meter readers and others who casually gain access to an individual’s home would be encouraged to report “suspicious activities” to the authorities. Given the untrained nature of these unwarranted searchers and the unspecified character of reportable activity, the possibility of abuse is greater than 100 percent. Even the most trained and warranted have been given to abuse. Last fall, under the guise of searching for terrorists, at least 1,200 resident immigrants were swept up by federal agents and detained in secret. The Justice Department contended that those wanted as potential “material witnesses” could be held indefinitely in jail while waiting to testify before investigative grand juries. Most waited for months before being given legal representation. In addition, another two thirds of those swept up had violated nothing more than their immigration visas, but had their hearings without juries and in secret—until judges opened the hearings up.
The Bush administration’s war on the American jury system prompted one federal judge, a Reagan-era appointee, to comment: “This is the most profound shift in our legal institutions in my lifetime and—most remarkable of all—it has taken place without engaging any broad public interest whatsoever.”
At the moment, the heartland is pre-occupied by the financial crimes of corporate executives and big business bankruptcies. The dot.com telecommunications bubble, which once made millionaires out of info-techies, has burst. The collapse of the stock market now threatens middle class pensions and retirement plans. And for the working poor, jobs and income inequality press more directly at the door. Out of this anxiety, the Democratic Party hopes to fashion a set of victories in November that will keep its control of the Senate and regain the House of Representatives. After a year saying “me too” every time President W belched forth a new foreign policy plan, the Democrats have finally started to speak with their own voice on domestic affairs. Dissent over foreign policy, nevertheless, remains verboten on Capitol Hill.
In fact, disagreement with the War Against Terrorism is hard to muster in any quarter. A visceral anger at the violations of American soil remains like a rock caught in the collective throat—a resentment compounded by the sense of lost safety once bred by the oceanic distances between North America and Europe, Asia and Africa. Under cover of that national rage, President W has aimed his administration’s repressive measures at potential terrorists as well as legitimate dissenters and innocent immigrants. Add pumped up patriotism to wounded pride and the political space for a reasoned discussion of policy is small indeed. Enter, therefore, the unreasonable.
As Devin Burghart of the Chicago-based Center for New Community (CNC) reported in Searchlight last January, a brutal craze of violence—over 500 reported incidents—targeted Arab-Americans, their newly arrived cousins, and others, such as Sikhs, who are darkly-complected and visibly “foreign” in appearance. So-called mainstream political figures have abetted this mass hysteria. One Republican congressman, in a fit of unapologetic chauvinism, recently told listeners on a radio talk show: “If I see someone comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.”
Out of this anti-immigrant hysteria, white nationalists hope to grow. The two most active, stable organizations are the Council of Conservative Citizens, which has been attempting to carve a broad white swath of out of the conservative movement, and the National Alliance—which now semi-officially describes itself as “national socialist influenced.” They have differed in approach as well as constituency, but taken together, they have staged almost 20 different anti-immigrant rallies and meetings since the beginning of the year, according to a count on the Center for New Community’s website, www.newcomm.org.
The Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) has become the central address for former Populist Party activists, David Duke campaign staffers, American Renaissance-style scientific racists as well as a smattering of local—primarily southern—Republican politicians and activists. Much like the old segregationist Jim Crow-era white Citizens Councils, which included a handful of Jewish racists in its ranks, the contemporary CofCC has eschewed overt expressions of organizational anti-Semitism. The events of 11 September may have changed that, however. In the last year several CofCC officials have joined the chorus of those who blame the terror attacks on the USA’s support for Israel. And in that small turn of organizational positioning may lay one of the least discussed aspects of Post-9-11 American life: the growth of anti-Semitism.
This version of anti-Semitism is not exactly the same as that promoted by National Alliance and others who cheered the deaths and destruction at the World Trade Center as a blow against “Satan” or the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Instead, the Council follows the Buchananite “America-first” model, as if it is the Israeli tail that wags the American superpower dog. And in this regard, the Council comes closer still to those pro-Palestinian campus activists who talk as if a microchip containing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was recently implanted on their brains. The belief in international Jewish conspiracies is now dangerously frequent on the so-called left. The rumor that Jews were warned of the coming Trade Center’s destruction, and stayed home from work last 11 September is now repeated as truth on both ends of the political spectrum. Although the meaning of polling data is contested, Dan Levitas reported in a 22 July article in The Nation that an estimated 35 million Americans—17% of those polled—held significantly anti-Semitic views, and that fully one out of five “blame America’s support for Israel for the attacks.” Never mind the ideological nature of Wahabism or the American troops in Saudi Arabia guarding the Gates of Oil.
Some American Jews, feeling stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, have recently embraced a new set of allies on the Christian right. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, acknowledged former Christian Coalition chief Ralph Reed in this regard. It is a self-delusional belief, however, in which short-term allies have very different long-term agendas. Christian fundamentalists have long supported the most far-right Israelis in the theological belief that by doing so they hasten the second advent of Jesus Christ. An often-unstated corollary of this eschatology is that the so-called Second Coming is also accompanied by the destruction of Israel and all but 144,000 Jews who accept Christ. While mainline Jewish institutions flirt with Christian right Republicans, the majority of American Jews do not. And in one recent poll, while 85% of American Jews supported Israel in the conflict with Palestinians, a full 63% of Jews also said they favored the establishment of a Palestinian state—a position at odds with those on the Christian right.
Add one more casualty to the Post 9-11 world, the old Jewish adage: “the Left hates Israel but loves Jews, while the Right loves Israel but hates Jews.” It no longer seems to be as simple as that anymore.
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