We’re at the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I was wondering how the Pearl Harbor attack was commemorated 25 years later, and all I could find was a YouTube video of some helicopters flying over the battleship Arizona monument at Pearl Harbor. Of course, since 9/11 happened in the center of the center of the known universe, we should expect more commemoration. Still, I think the current commemorations, and our attitude towards 9/11 in general, reveal a lot of the denial and political manipulation around that tragic event.
Since I’m not a politician, I’m able to say the simple truth about 9/11:
The attacks succeeded in their goal to provoke an over-reaction.
The Iraq War was a stupid waste of human life and money that had nothing to do with 9/11.
We should have put all of our resources behind finding and killing bin Laden and everyone associated with him, wiped them off the face of the Earth, declared victory, and went home. That we didn’t is a mostly Republican, but unfortunately also bi-partisan, political failure.
The Republican Party leveraged the attacks very successfully politically over the long haul. Yeah, they took a licking in 2006 until about 2010, but look where we are now, and look who’s still “taking custody” of 9/11.
By “taking custody,” I mean that Republicans and right-wing media use attitudes towards 9/11 to mau-mau Democrats. For example, here’s CBS news trying to make something out of an extremely anodyne statement by AES:
Meanwhile, El-Sayed's past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.
In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped "that means we'll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them."
No lies told by AES in that tweet, but since the Republican Party owns 9/11 in the media, they think that they can make something out of a complete nothing, since 9/11 was mentioned. (Plus, their media policy on the COVID failures of their party is “shut up, shut up, shut up”.)
The subtext of this is that AES is an Arab Muslim and Arab Muslims carry a collective guilt for 9/11. In 1966, 25 years after Pearl Harbor, we were buying cameras, transistor radios and motorcycles from Japan. Japanese-Americans were being treated better than they were during WW II (low bar), and as far as I know, there wasn’t an extra heaping helping of anti-Japanese racism affecting them in their daily lives. I’m sure there were some die hard Americans who were upset about resuming commerce with Japan and Germany, and who felt that Japanese Americans should be shunned, but overall the US had gotten past Pearl Harbor and World War II, mainly because we won.
We lost the “Global War on Terror” — I’d argue that we lost it the moment that we called it that, but if it that loss isn’t clear 25 years later, I don’t know what is. Since that simple truth, and all that flows from it, can’t be mentioned in polite company, we’re stuck with a bunch of 9/11 nonsense. Instead of saying clearly that our 9/11 response was a mistake, we get distracted with Islamophobia. Zohran Mamdani was a kid when 9/11 happened, yet there’s a “controversy” (ginned up by Republicans) over whether he should attend the 9/11 commemoration.
It just gets stupider every year. Trump’s new lies about him being pulled out of the rubble at the WTC is kind of the natural consequence of years and years of Republicans telling lies about 9/11.
This seems like something that an opposition party could publicize and criticize, but I sure haven’t seen much from Democrats on this one.
