Biblical Job by Gustave Gore, surrounded by his so-called “friends”

In biblical times when an individual mourned, it involved tearing up everyday clothes and putting on coarse sackcloth and ashes. This is what the patriarch Jacob did when told his young son Joseph had been killed. When Job lost his family he sat on a dung pile. Both acts were motivated by humility rather than thoughts of revenge. As fitting as Job’s location might be for some of the memorial scenes yesterday, several of those making the news headlines represented the Empire (it is hard not to think of the United States superpower as anything else but an empire) in what they thought were patriotic “red, white, and blue” cloth, but which even a little child could see were politically naked to the core. The New York Times reports a woman at the 9/11 site holding up a sign that read ““Today is ONLY about my sister and the other innocents killed nine years ago.” Would that were true.

The loss of life nine years ago in a terrorist act deserves reflection for many reasons. For those of us who live in the New York area, there but for the grace of timing go we. Those who died had pulled no triggers, pushed no buttons to drop bombs, made no political decisions to invade another country, burned no Qur’ans. They died because politically motivated extremists so hated the policies of the United States in the Middle East that they were willing to commit an atrocious suicidal act to make a symbolic statement. It did not matter that among those killed were Americans who strongly disagreed with America’s foreign policy or were in fact Muslims. Such is the ethical nothingness that hate sets as a trap, no matter which God is being called upon to condone an evil act.

Yes, there were people yesterday who paused to reflect, who prayed to the God of their particular belief. But there were also the hatemongers on parade. Among those with naked ambition was the infamous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose speech near Ground Zero only tarnishes the memory of those who died. It is bad enough that he spews hate against fellow Dutch citizens who happen to be Muslim, but now he sets himself up as a citizen spokesman of the world. To Wilders the world has no color, only his white vs the other’s black. He did not even play the nuance game of only attacking “terrorist” Muslims.

For Wilders, America pre-9/11 was a peaceful Garden of Eden, like his “tolerant” Dutch homeland (somehow the Dutch control of Indonesia is written off as another result of imperial tolerance). “The West never ‘harmed’ Islam before it harmed us,” he claimed. Just about everything that is wrong with Islamophobic discourse oozes out of this terse Himmleresque screed. For the simple minded the world is bipolar: the unbounded “West” standing for a particular secular, white bastion of political power vs “Islam” which has no border. It is no longer Christianity vs. Islam, as propagandized during the crusades, nor West vs East, nor even North vs South nor Cold War Free World vs. Communism. Dear Geert, the harm is there in full color and has been a two-way blood-soaked street throughout the history of this geographic space known as the “West” and “Orient.” The Crusades were surely harmful, as was the expulsion of Jews and Moors from 15th century Spain. The Ottoman intrusion into eastern Europe to the gates of Vienna was just as harmful. As was the mentality that fueled wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. As was the lust for power that drove the Mongols to utterly destroy the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 CE. The history of the world is all about harm, and there is plenty of blame to go around. As a historian I dredge up the murky past only to silence the nonsense that anyone today is pure. As a concerned citizen of the United States I love my country but not because I hate someone else’s nation or faith.

Wilders was not the only morally nude performer on display yesterday for the media to cover with fig-leaf reporting. In Alaska Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck took to the stage to a packed, paying crowd, to flaunt their own commercial and political ambitions at the expense of the memory of those who died. Palin noted that when she heard about the attack on September 11, 2001, she went to her church to pray. So why did she not do the same yesterday? Prayer in a church strikes me as a fitting memorial; using such an event for self promotion (as quite a few desperate politicians have done over the years) is hardly any different from exposing yourself in a Playboy centerfold. Beck only noted that at the time he was getting ready for work and suggested we are somehow “forgetting” so many years later. For a day that the media relished and covered all across the country, Mr. Beck seems strangely out of touch. Was the Mormon Tabernacle, where he might have offered a prayer, sold out?

Then there is Terry Jones, who continued to make news by not making news. Here is a fringe lunatic (yes, lunatic by any rational measure in the 21st century) who now has the wrath of Gainesville upon him, who had no permit to build a bonfire and who had his ten seconds of fame. How newsworthy is the fact that he so reluctantly decided not to burn Qur’ans, managing to put his calculated act on a par with the building of an Islamic community center several blocks away from the Ground Zero site.

Here’s news for Wilders, Palin, Beck and Jones: there is a Bible verse written just for you, way back in Genesis, although I suspect the irony will be lost on the lot of you: “They were both naked, and were not ashamed.”

Daniel Martin Varisco