Monday marked 22 years since the 9/11 attacks.
I was 13 years old when I watched the towers fall on live television in my math class. I remember the American flags that popped up seemingly overnight, waving proudly from every single home in my neighborhood. And I remember the yellow ribbons tied around oak trees in front of the homes of families for months after praying for the safe return of their beloved service members shipped off to fight a losing war.
My friend Yusra Farzan was 11 years old. As the planes hit the World Trade Center, she was in Colombo, Sri Lanka, attending her grandmother’s funeral wondering if her father would be able to make it from Dubai in time for the service.
“Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I also became hyper aware of how American media was portraying the Middle East; the very place that offered my parents a safe space to raise their children away from the terrors of Sri Lanka’s civil war,” she wrote this week for LAist. “I have a complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia, where I was born, and the UAE, where I have lived the longest. But in the media I saw a place I did not recognize from my own experiences: an unsafe, backward, almost barbaric place where women are oppressed and locked away by men who are terrorists.”
In the U.S., this villainization led to almost instantaneous backlash targeting Muslims, Sikhs, Afghans, Iraqis, Arabs, South Asians, and anyone else otherwise believed to be “an outsider.”
“Those initial days catalyzed South Asians, Muslims, Arabs, Afghans, Iraqis, and Sikhs to advocate and organize against the climate of hate and flawed government policies, which led to devastating consequences that still reverberate 20 years later,” Deepa Iyer wrote about the 20th anniversary for URL Media partner Prism.
With this disparagement came the narrative that being a good American meant supporting the troops, the war on terror, and the extreme growth of the military budget. It meant going along with policies that allowed for the surveillance of those the government deemed suspicious. It meant proudly pledging allegiance to the flag of a nation that was actively curtailing civil liberties of its citizens in the name of national security. It meant those who spoke out were deemed un-American.
Now, two decades removed from the attacks, we are seeing the consequences of bigotry, Islamophobia, and xenophobia being normalized at the highest levels of our government with today’s rise in extremism.
“We have seen the normalization of violent rhetoric become so extreme,” Kristofer Goldsmith told Our Body Politic host Farai Chideya. “Just a little while ago, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, talked about on day one of his presidency, slitting the throats of public servants, many of whom are like him, veterans. When leaders talk like that, violence follows.”
Goldsmith, a veteran himself, is the CEO and founder of Task Force Butler, a nonprofit organization with a mission to “identify, expose, and interrupt organized extremist gangs and their illegal activities,” according to the organization’s website.
“Task Force Butler was founded in part kind of as a response to January 6 because we veterans feel a responsibility to continue serving our country and protecting democracy and marginalized populations in ways that, you know, speaking for myself, I didn’t get to do while I was in uniform and I didn’t get to do while I was in Iraq,” Goldsmith said. “But today, we are in very real, tangible ways protecting democracy, standing up for our Constitution, and hopefully rehabilitating the image that Americans have in their minds about veterans after January 6th.”
While Goldsmith is doing the work of holding individual extremists and groups legally accountable, what we need as a nation is for our elected officials to acknowledge the ways in which our own government has been complicit with extremism followed by concrete actions to address the harm caused.
“Let’s acknowledge what happened over the past 20 years and commit to breaking the cycle of vengeance, war and bigotry,” Iyer wrote back in 2021. “Let’s put in place new policies and programs anchored in compassion and justice while dismantling the architecture of the war on terror.” —Alicia Ramirez
Uplift. Respect. Love.
