Dr. Roger Ray “Stop Making New Terrorists”
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 11At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse— 12a wind too strong for that.
On December 7th, 1941, my 21-year-old father was sitting in a movie theater in Birmingham, AL. He had recently moved there to work for DuPont Chemical Company. The movie he was watching was interrupted to announce that the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor.
I wasn’t born until nearly 15 years later but I know where my father was when Pearl Harbor was attacked because I heard him tell the story many times. I know a fair amount about how he enlisted, hoping to become an Air Force pilot but ending up on a construction team building the air strips in the south Pacific that eventually led up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What he never mentioned was why the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And, to the best of my recollections, thought the fact that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor often came up in the course of my public school and university education, no one ever mentioned why.
Were they just in the neighborhood? Were they crazy? Were they demonic? We have historians and military veterans here who undoubtedly know the sequence of historical events so I won’t ask you to say anything out loud, but ask yourselves, do you know why Japan sent aircraft carriers and bombers across the Pacific to attack our fleet in Hawaii?
My suspicion is, though it was an event that changed the course of history, many of us here, 75 years later, have no idea why they did it. And because I don’t want to lose your attention for the next 15 minutes, let me give you a short explanation:
Japan was trying to expand their control of trade in Asia and had invaded China. We did not want to lose our trade relationship with China so we cut off exports of oil and metals to Japan, which cut their fuel supply by 90%. This would have crippled them and it was evident that they would either have to surrender control of China or go to war with the USA. By crippling the US Pacific fleet, they thought they could win that war. They were mistaken but in December of 1941, that fact was anything but self-evident.
I am not, in any way, trying to justify the surprise attack on the Hawaiian navel port, I’m just saying that it didn’t happen in a vacuum and there were provocations on both sides. We would likely have been at war with Japan within a few months anyway; they just tried to gain the upper hand by sinking a lot of our navy in port.
But today is not December 7th. Today is September 11th… the anniversary of our generation’s Pearl Harbor . . . the day that changed our history, the day that has led us into 15 years of war…. Wars that have lasted now nearly 4 times as long as the US involvement in WWII.
Again, not that I want you to say it out loud, but do you feel like you know why these 19 men came to the United States, took pilot training, and then hijacked four commercial aircraft killing themselves and nearly 3000 other people on 9-11? You have been told that it was because of religious fanaticism though I doubt that many people believe that today. President George W. Bush preposterously told you at the time that it was because they despised our freedom…. I am surprised that his pants did not spontaneously combust when he said that.
But why did they do it? There is no justification for it. I would no more try to excuse the 9-11 attacks than I would the Pearl Harbor attack. But, then, I might not be right person to ask…. I don’t think there is any excuse for the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nor the bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. Bombing cities, killing civilian populations…. Yeah, I’m against that… always.
For me, the question that really matters is this: How can we keep this from happening again? Can we learn anything, can we understand anything, can we figure out how to buy and sell, trade and build, travel, and immigrate around the globe in the 21stcentury in a way that doesn’t keep ending up in a blind alley where the only way out is to go to war with someone?
Like for my father’s generation, we all know where we were on Sept. 11, 2001. I was actually sitting in my dentist’s office when I heard the news.
It was a Tuesday, we had important and controversial long range planning meetings scheduled at the church where I worked then. No one had the heart to go through with the meetings and, in fact, months of gathering questionnaires and surveys were never looked at again because planning for an uncertain future just didn’t make sense anymore.
I had just returned from a trip to the holocaust museum in Washington, DC. I had been given a grant to write Sunday School curriculum for Christian Churches about the holocaust but I never picked up those notes or worked on the project again…. A new holocaust had happened and all of our energies were devoted to trying to figure that one out.
I correctly believed that there would be a backlash against Muslims living in the USA. The only Muslim I knew at the time was my neighbor across the street who worked for the State government. I went over to speak to him but he had gone into hiding after receiving threats from co-workers. So I mowed his lawn. It didn’t really need it, but I needed to do something, to make some kind of gesture that said, “I’m not mad at you.”
15 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked those four planes were from Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia is an important trading partner to the US so there was no serious consideration given to attacking there. The terrorists involved had training camps in Afghanistan…. We had not been attacked by Afghanistan but they had the misfortune of having a tangential relationship to the terrorists and, because of decades of war, they really had no defenses, so we attacked them…. Not just the terrorist training camps but the whole nation.
Why all of Afghanistan? Because, I’m going to say, we were scared. We were afraid and we felt the need to attack somebody. There was almost no visible protest to attacking Afghanistan. I personally thought that it was unnecessary but I couldn’t find anyone among my church members or among the clergy of our city who did not fully endorse the invasion.
By March of 2003, it became evident that sweeping through Afghanistan had not slaked our need for revenge and so we were going to attack Iraq. By then, at least the local peaceniks had organized enough to protest though I was the only active member of clergy to be seen at the public protests at that time. Others eventually joined but for the first year or so, I don’t think that anyone who drew a paycheck from a church had decided to join me… and maybe they were right, in a way, because I was certainly laying the groundwork for my own eventual Waterloo with my former church and the whole of my former denomination.
So far as intuitional religious politics goes, there is no crime more vigorously punished than being too right when the institution is too wrong.
Our nation moved into what has been euphemistically called a “War on Terrorism.” The phrase never made much sense. You can go to war pitting one army against another. You can attack a geographical location but how do you go to war on an idea, a way of thinking?
The terrorists who conspired to attack the USA on 9-11, fifteen years ago, were motivated both by generations of anger at the west for the exploitation of colonialism, the cultural domination of western corporations, fashion, foods, TV, movies, and education that they felt was undermining both their culture and their religion. They are furious about American support for Israel, which they still see as an occupation of Muslim territory…. And why wouldn’t they? It is, after all, occupation of Muslim territory.
The fuse was lit by the placement of American military bases in the Middle East following the Persian Gulf War and our support for secular dictatorships in their region of the world. But that was then…. Nearly a generation ago.
And here is what I wanted to say today… and it seems so obvious that I don’t know why that I need to say it except for the fact that all but the tiniest fraction of Americans will find it to be offensive and possibly un-American or even treasonous.
You remember how you felt in the days, weeks, and months after 9-11. You know how you felt when you saw the repeated news footage of the planes hitting the twin towers, the horrific images of people falling from the buildings after jumping to their deaths to avoid the flames inside. You know the sorrow, anger, and fear you felt as the months went by and the stories of the slain were being told.
You saw the stock market fall and you know of the retirement savings of millions literally disappearing. You felt the pain of the housing crash, and then the rising body count of our fallen soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. You are reminded of 9-11 every time you have to try to board an airplane.
You may never have spent ten minutes trying to understand why those terrorists struck here on 9-11 but you have felt in your own body the anger and fear that has prompted the creation of the Homeland Security Administration, the TSA, and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t really anyone who was actually from Iraq or Afghanistan but 19 Muslims from somewhere over there killed 3000 Americans, many of whom were also Muslims from the Middle East who happened to be working in the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and in response to those heartless murders of civilians, we have waged 15 years of war in retribution.
So, is terrorism now dead? Given what we have done in response to 3000 civilian deaths, what might we have done if the number were much higher… what if it had been ten times as many, 30,000, or a hundred times as many, 300,000? What if it were even more, what it were 200 times as many, 600,000 deaths…. I ask that because a conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just that, 600,000 though the actual death toll is likely to be much higher?
So, how many people do we have to kill before they all decide that they like us better? Have our wars killed terrorism…. Or, honestly, have we not simply created new generations of future terrorists by killing their mothers while they were hanging laundry out to dry, their fathers while they worked in the fields, their brothers and sisters while they played in the streets?
You, in one of the most information saturated nations in the world, may have had little idea as to why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor or why Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, . . .
how much do you think the impoverished and largely illiterate people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen know about why our armies invaded and why drones still fly over head and fire missiles at homes, schools, and hospitals? Many have never heard of 9-11 and many who have heard of what happened on that day assume that it was in retaliation for our invasion of their country.
One of my favorite people in the world, Malala Yousafzai, was, herself, a victim of violent Taliban extremism. She was just 15 years old when a man boarded her school bus and shot her in the head just for going to school. Two years after she was shot, while still recovering, still trying to finish high school, she visited the White House and met with President Barack Obama.
This 17 year old, badly injured child, the victim of Islamic extremism, patently explained to the leader of the free world what I am trying to say to you now…. Drone strikes, bombing of cities, invading armies do not being an end to terrorism, they cause terrorism.
None of us here today will live long enough to see terrorism’s end because there are too many young people throughout the Middle East whose Pearl Harbor, whose 9-11, has come early in their lives and for most of them, it has come over and over until they are hardened in their resolve to take revenge.
There is no giving them back their mother, their father, their siblings, neighbors, or cousins but there is one thing that we can do. We can stop creating new generations of terrorists. We can begin to work for peace.
We can try to understand them and their culture and work to help them to understand us and our culture. As you have heard me quote Malala before, with a gun you can kill a terrorist, with education you can kill terrorism.
It is time for people of conscience to start leading the world in the ways of peace.
