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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
September 5, 2004
When Islamist murderers killed some 3,000 Americans three years ago, America was awakened to the awful reality of modern terrorism. Perhaps we had thought that terror was always elsewhere -- if no longer in Northern Ireland, than maybe in Russia or Kashmir or, yet again, in Israel.
After all, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 must have been an aberration, and Timothy McVeigh's blowing up a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was the work of a demented American, not some foreigner.
With 9-11, however, the pattern was clear: Al Qaida's terrorist reach spanned from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and attacks on American troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, to the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the 2000 assault on the guided missile destroyer USS Cole near Yemen. These people hate us, indiscriminately, and are prepared to do absolutely anything that will take American lives.
What they hope to accomplish, beyond the killing itself, isn't clear. But the fact that they are not going to go away is sickeningly evident.
We had thought that after we got out of Vietnam 30 years earlier, we were the universal good guys, the ones the rest of the world wanted to emulate. How foolish could we be?
In the intervening three years, we have had to learn to think like Israelis. How safe is that nightclub? Should my parents take that flight? Can I put my child on that bus?
We are paying a price for our vigilance. We have acceded to government invasion of our privacy, to ethnic profiling, to suspension of legal rights, even to preemptive war in our battle to stay safe. In this pursuit of survival, we have made ourselves less of the Americans we thought we were, much as we did by interning Japanese Americans during World War II and tolerating Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Our challenge is figuring out just how far we can go between our liberties and our self-preservation.
The curious fact is that we cannot be sure that we are really safer as a result of our tighter security and vigilance since 9-11. Osama bin Laden is still at large, and the number of Muslims violently angry with the United States has grown since the invasion of Iraq. Al Qaida's terrorists might still find ways to get a nuclear device into a container ship and blow up Los Angeles. They might still find chemical or biological agents to release into water supplies or on subways.
People who do not care if they die in attacking us, who actually believe they are morally superior for murdering innocents, are almost impossible to stop. If you don't believe that, think about Chechen terrorists who blew up two planes in Russia and took hundreds of children hostage at a school. Or think about the Hamas bus bombers in Beer Sheva, happy to die and to take 16 Israelis with them.
War is not the right term for how we must deal with this evil madness, because warfare implies an equal enemy, one who observes some central human decencies.
To go to war is to put everything else aside. But we cannot let terror and the fear of terror preoccupy us. We have too much work to do, in this country and abroad. As we fight the terrorists, we must work twice as hard to remain who we are. Like the Jewish nation, America must continue to hold up its light to the world, to be a beacon that shines above the 3-year-old ashes of Ground Zero.
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