By Monique Thurston

The notes are rushing in a magnificently exuberant yet perfectly controlled crescendo. The choir erupts alternately in sopranos and altos – it is an exaltation of human love and joy and brotherhood! I am listening to the last movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.

I remember when I first heard that symphony in a concert hall in Brussels. I was 14-year-old, a young soul not yet hurt by political, religious or economical differences between human beings. A perfect idealist, confusing life with music, I remember shivering at the passage exalting human love as the words of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” express Beethoven’s own ideal of the brotherhood of all mankind, I do not shiver. I listen and I feel a little, a very little, human warmth. That is good; it is the best I have done since September 11, 2001 – the day I stopped listening to music.

Music has always been the great consoler of my life. It punctuated the passions of my youth with its romantic eloquence. It soothed the stressful moments of medical school with its structure and balance. September 11th made me lone-deaf. Horror! Rage! Anxiety!

Horror!

The planes hit the Twin Towers, then the Pentagon, then Flight 11 crashes. There is no hope, I thought, this is real and we don’t know yet the effect of the attacks.

I sit on the sofa, riveted to the ‘TV screen, my elderly father visiting from Belgium. We hold hands, watch in horror. I scream, “It is Bin Laden!”  No, I am not a particularly politically minded clairvoyant. But I had just watched a PBS special recounting the AI Qaeda terrorist attacks over the last decade since the first WTC bombing, as well as Bin Laden’s involvement and President Clinton’s missed opportunity to destroy him. (A new book just published reveals Clinton’s further guilt in not acting appropriately. )

Rage and Anger!

After we realize day after day the growing extent of the damage, the media is approaching us on two parallel fronts.

First is the obvious front. There is no way the journalists can escape the power their own medium delivers: the rubble, the dust, the contorted faces of running people, the pictures of the victims, the destroyed families, the heroism of the emergency personnel, firefighters, policemen, medical teams or simply fellow human beings, the generosity of the American people. Those images are powerful, self-explanatory.

The second front, which the media controls entirely, is the spin applied to the genesis of the attack. Who is our enemy? Why were we attacked? How to label our enemy and how to understand it … or not?

The government worked feverishly to restrain further terrorist activity on a legal field with the Patriot Act and on enemy terrain with the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. But here at home, in some schools and universities, the academics were working hard to push their agenda either though omission or through politically correct spin work.

Here are few examples of remarks and behavior rooted in the “Blame America” mode. They all come from the book “Why the Left hates America,” by Daniel J. Flynn:

At the University of Amherst, Bill Israel, professor of journalism, claimed: “Many commentators are describing the disaster in New York as terrorist attacks, the worst since Pearl Harbor 60 years ago. None I’ve seen call them what they are: the predictable result of American policies. President Bush and the Supreme Court that sided’ with him are the real culprits.”

After reading the – New York Times headline “U.S. Attacked!” historian Chalmers Johnson re-marked to a group of students at Yale, “That is insane. In many ways the terrorists rightly identified us as the leaders of those who are trying to keep them down.”

As America itself became the root cause of the attack on so many campuses, the symbol that soothed the heart of many after the bombings, the American flag, became a source of endless hate. At Marquette University, undergraduate students were blocked from holding a moment of silence around an American flag. University administrators worried that the gesture might alienate foreign students.

Residence hall directors in Central Michigan University’s Emmons dormitory scoured the halls in search of dorms adorned with now-forbidden patriotic images.

Rage!

It is 1972, and I am working as a pediatric intern in Algiers, the capital of the Muslim country Algeria. A Muslim patient comes to me with a sick baby. She is 38, has eight children, is pregnant with her ninth and is visibly anemic. I urge her to let me test the severity of her anemia, and I gently raise the correlation between her pregnancies and her extreme weakness.

She refuses the test, explaining that it would be moot: she needs to bear as many children as possible to stay a woman in her husband’s eyes.

I befriend in Algeria a brilliant young journalist. We lunch together, and she explains to me how dim her prospects for marriage are. To my surprise, she tells me that as a professional woman living alone in the city, she is considered to be of light virtue by the male world. Thus, she is not marriage material. I was 22 and had just entered the world of the woman’s condition in the Muslim society.

Back to the days after 9-11. The war in Afghanistan has started. We see women covered head-to-toe in blue tents. We see the male police of “Vice and Virtue” running around with sticks, beating women viciously if their ankles show underneath their garments. Women have no access to health care or education, and they have no legal rights.

In a soccer stadium we see women being dragged over to be gunned down by goons after a court named Sharia, comprised exclusively of men, had accused them of adultery. A bullet in their heads, they fall like broken dolls under their miserable, suffocating garb, never seeing their executioner.

Here in America, there is no outrage in the voices of the commentators. Where are the screams of the feminist organizations? Where is the National Organization of Women? I track for a reaction, either in the media or on the campuses. I find none. I hope I missed it. But I didn’t.

The outrage won’t come. To recognize the horror of the female condition under the Taliban would be to give credibility to the war in Afghanistan, which then would give credibility to President Bush, which would be unacceptable to the leftist, feminist milieu. One’s political leaning is more important than one’s social aim. Moreover, screaming bloody murder about the women’s plight in the Muslim world would be a total rejection of the academic credo of cultural relativism, which states that all cultures are equal and should not to be judged.

September 11th has wounded our country with all the human horror and affliction the attacks imposed on 3,000 of our people and on their broken families and friends, who will suffer forever an unspeakable pain of separation and loss. But September 11th has also become the mirror of the pervasive malady affecting the thinking process of many academics and media professionals in America.

Accusing America to be the very cause for the attack! Burning the flag on campuses! Keeping discreet on the true nature of Islamic fundamentalism! Refraining from judging part of a culture that envelopes women in suffocating tents! That is the intellectual climate of the media.

In his 1996 “Declaration of War against America,” Osama Bin Laden refers to Third World Revolution, in which “Non-Western people would regain the dignity they lost to colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness and immorality.” (“Post-modem Jihad,” by Walter Newell)

All of those principles come from French-leftist intellectuals, who in their own days justified the genocide of Stalin, then the mass murders perpetrated during the cultural revolution in China.

Socialism did not bring down capitalism in the Western world, but a Republican president brought down the Soviet empire. So, the leftists invented Third World socialism as a new cause celeb, which explains the “Blame America” self-flagellation by our “enlightened” professors after September 11th.

Somehow, though, I feel oppressed at the sight of a burkha and empowered by the Constitution!

September 11 as a mirror

I shiver when I think of those who had to choose between being burned alive or jumping to their death from the Twin Towers. I cringe when I think of those who entered a doomed building to save others, knowing they may never come out alive. And I tremble with rage at the perpetrators of this martyrdom and the twisted reasons that drove them to commit this murder.

Those murderers were racist bigots, hateful, radical Islamic extremists who were not the poor, wretched souls of the earth – as some of the elite academia would like you to believe. A lot of them were from very wealthy families, educated in the West at democratic universities.

It is time that mainstream media, the academic world and Islamic intellectuals both abroad and in this country analyze the reason why in today’s enormous Arab world, only one country, Turkey, is a democracy.

It was vile, racist, anti-Semitic individuals who slowly slit the throat of Danny Pearl, the investigative journalist from the Wall Street Journal, who was forced to say while being beheaded and filmed, “I am a Jew. My mother and father are Jews”.  Danny Pearl was a man who loved diversity and who believed in bridging the gaps between cultures, all cultures. He was a victim of hate and prejudice, not of American foreign policies. So were the victims of September 11th.

In a way, the academic and media world considers the American public in an infantile fashion. It refuses to describe and analyze radical Islam for fear of retribution against mainstream Muslims. No major motion picture has been made describing Islamic terrorism.

It is a grave mistake! Nothing would be better for interfaith relations in this country than an open dialogue about all religious fanaticism, the extreme interpretation of their sacred texts, and their consequences on our society. It would bring reassurance and peace and trust among all Americans, whether they are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindu, Buddhists or atheists.

 Anxiety!

I know that today, in some dark alleys of Karachi or in some gloomy apartment in Hamburg or in some mountain cave in Afghanistan – or even in some tenement in an U.S. city – more terrorist attacks against our country are being plotted. But I will try to listen to music each day with a little more passion. Whatever the cultural-relativism adherents at some of America’s colleges believe, good must prevail over evil. Democracy, pluralism, freedom for women and freedom of expression must triumph over darkness.

Music must win over silence.

The author is an Addison County resident. This commentary is republished from September 11, 2024.