Eleven days ago, on the seventh anniversary of the tragedies of September 11, I pedaled my bike around after class past the Mission Church with its steeple scraping high into the sky before approaching the mosque at 100 Malcolm X Blvd. with its minaret looming up into the air.
Seven years ago I was in geometry class at Taunton High School when my teacher, sitting at her computer, announced, “Uh-oh, planes just flew into the Twin Towers.” A kid named Karl called his mother to see if she was alright – she worked as a flight attendant. The TV said later that another plane punched into the Pentagon and another disintegrated after smashing into a Pennsylvania field. The people on the TV said it was Islamic jihadists.
Shortly after, I found out that the brother of my Babe Ruth League baseball coach was on American Airlines Flight 11. Everyone knew the brothers for the family law firm they operated together. Ever since then I watched my coach become sickly thin and he sometimes drifted into a straight-faced forlorn stare.
“Why do they hate us?” President George Bush asked soon after. He later concluded that they don’t like our brand of democracy, our freedoms. And then, he demanded, “You’re either with us or against us.”
This was the first time I heard of a Muslim. Until that point I thought there was only “Christian” and “Jew.” Now, at Northeastern, I marvel at the number of girls walking about in their traditional hijabs, and the fact that there’s an Islamic student society.
The other day, I decided to sit down with five students from the Islamic Society at Northeastern to ask about what they experienced during September 11 and its aftermath. One girl was in Algeria watching the news when it happened. The others were in their high school classes here in the United States like me.
“Being a Muslim you were saying, ‘Please, don’t be a Muslim guy'” said Mouaad Lebech, a senior civil engineering major. “And then it was … and it was just like ‘aw, crap.'”
Selma Naidjate, a fourth-year pharmacy major was in English class, in Mansfield, a town over from me, when her teacher turned on the TV: bin-Laden, bin-Laden, bin-Laden.
“‘What’s ‘bin-Laden,’ what?'” Naijdate recalls, with her head scarf wrapped around a grey Patriots sweatshirt. “My friend’s mom called to check on us to ask if we were OK. My dad picked me up from school and he actually walked up to the door and took me holding my hand across the street and said get in the car. I was so confused. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said, ‘things are different now.'”
Arabs here faced increased racial profiling and the positive use of the word “jihad” has been besmirched by the media. We invaded and continue to occupy two Middle Eastern countries. Far more civilians in Afghanistan have died than the nearly 3,000 of those here on September 11, including the 60 children who died in the Middle East during one US air strike in late August. And the Taliban has proven tenacious supposedly killing more than ever, and are also gaining back its popularity with the native population. For some reason, Democrats and Republicans voted to topple Sadaam Hussein’s regime, yet this has resulted in 4,168 US deaths and an indefinite occupation.
And Osama bin-Laden remains an international boogie man.
I’ll be at the Oct. 11 antiwar rally at the Boston Common documenting protesters demanding an end to needless death in the Middle East. After all, we all gaze at the same Heavens, trace our lineage to Abraham and share a unifying conception of God that rejects such acts of evil.
– Marc Larocque can be reached at [email protected]
