On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 criminals from the Middle East hijacked passenger jets and flew them into buildings in New York and Arlington, Virginia. They killed 3,000 people and caused millions of dollars in property damage. Several lessons have been drawn from that act. Some of those lessons made sense. Some lessons spectacularly did not.
The attack was a crime that threatened the safety of air travel in the United States. Eventually our government hunted down and captured or killed the perpetrators. That punished the crime. Airports began screening passengers for weapons. That made our airlines safer and appears to have eliminated that particular threat.
But unfortunately, other lessons were drawn that were unjustified and continue to haunt our politics today.
The attack was the act of a small number of criminals. It was not the act of a hostile nation. It was not a prelude to an invasion, nor was it an attempt to overthrow our government. The attackers did not even represent a political faction in the United States.
The mistakes were to attribute this not just to the criminals, but to a country, Iraq, which itself had nothing to do with their crime, and to a religion, Islam, which they had twisted to justify their crimes.
The Iraq invasion, which only recently ended, carried a heavy price. In the conflict, 4,492 Americans and perhaps 200,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives. That nation is no longer a dictatorship, but it has fallen under the influence of Iran, a Shiite country with which we are now at war. The conflict also sparked the rise of ISIS, which remains a violent threat in Syria and other countries.
And now some politicians want to treat all Muslims as if they were somehow responsible for these crimes. The criminals and their imitators did wrap themselves in religious garb, but that is a common extremist tactic. The truth is that Muslims are no more responsible for those crimes than Christians are responsible for the crimes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claims to be following Christ as he murders people in boats in the Caribbean without affording them any element of due process and proclaims a need for “lethality, not legality” in our military.
Not too long ago our Agriculture Commissioner, Andy Gipson, falsely claimed that a graduate of Mississippi College Law School, a Baptist institution, was not qualified to be a judge in a small Delta town because she is a Muslim and that meant she would impose “Sharia law.”
Perhaps he overlooked that our judges take an oath to follow the U.S. Constitution which requires the separation of church and state. By definition that means that our judges are required to follow secular, not religious, law. It requires religious neutrality. Commissioner Gipson is a Baptist preacher but no one seems to be afraid that he is going to follow the command of the Old Testament and urge that every 50th year be treated as a year of Jubilee in which no crops are planted. Nor does anyone question whether Christian judges would ignore sentencing guidelines just because Jesus said to turn the other cheek.
Recently it was suggested that Muslims should not be allowed to vote because they believe they should follow God’s commands, and that is inconsistent with acting based on reason which is a foundation of good government. In England, where there is no First Amendment protection for religion, that kind of thinking has led to the cry that in some areas “England should be Abdul free.”
But Christians, or at least most of them, also believe they should follow God’s commands. That is at least suggested by the phrase “under God” in the pledge of allegiance. And Christians have long believed that morality drawn from religious teaching, not just a rational calculus of self-interest, is necessary for good government.
If Christians can believe in God and also make rational decisions about good government, there is no reason to think that Muslims cannot do the same.
The 9/11 attack was a terrible crime. It has been punished and to date it has not been repeated. It was a mistake to use it as a reason to attack Iraq, and it is a mistake to use it today to discriminate against Muslims. President George W. Bush recognized this after the attack when he observed that Muslims were horrified by the attack said American Muslims “love America as much as I do.” His strategist Karl Rove recently observed that “religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots” are hurting the Republican party and “taking aim at the American experiment itself.”
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
