Sept. 11: Embarrassing Questions

Yesterday, I faced a tough test. My six-year-old son asked me who was behind the events of Sept. 11 and if what we were watching was a movie. He was annoyed with me when I said it was all true, that it really happened 10 years ago and we all saw it with our own eyes.

What is peculiar about my son, and what I have noticed in his generation, is that they stopped at the mention of Osama bin Laden. He asked me: So if he is a sheikh, why does he kill people? Why didn’t he attack the White House or a U.S. military camp or any other government site?

The answer is difficult. This young generation does not agree with generally accepted truths regarding the events of Sept. 11. They require more satisfying justifications concerning the attacks. Especially those of the generation after the events, those who didn’t see it like we did. They have not accepted the information given to them in the midst of amazement and they are busy seeking the truth to prove it was not a terrorist attack.

This is what happened with our generation, which grew up alongside the battle in New York. This is the reality we lived in, in the shadow of an event that was followed by the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the emergence of the term “war on terror,” from which the U.S. resigned in May 2010. This is what pushed us to sink into the swamp of media terminology without searching for answers or for the truth about the person behind Sept. 11 — not until America chose a dramatic end for him that satisfied no one.

A six-year-old child made me go back to Abdel Bari Atwan’s book “The Secret History of al Qaeda,” in which he describes a man who was charged with killing nearly a million people, as well as the more than a billion U.S. dollars the American administration spent on the war on terrorism while Western and Eastern secret services and intelligent agencies were chasing public enemy number 1.

Bin Laden, as Abdel Bari Atwan describes him, is educated in Islamic law and jihad. He shows a strong capacity for planning military strategies and tactics, just like al-Qaida, which itself was organized in a way that surprised everyone. When it comes to the official statement of the American administration regarding his assassination, you find out that the operation was executed in an unfortified house located near the most well known site of Pakistani military forces, and where American forces had been headquartered for years. That brings up the question of whether bin Laden exposed himself as a target by choosing to live in a place that was easily accessible.

If we read any book about the organization of al-Qaida apart from what Atwan published in his book, we discover that the ideology of jihad for its leader was not senseless, but based on strong belief and a high ability to improvise and quickly replace leadership, which is exactly what happened after their leader was killed. How did Osama bin Laden choose this living place after hiding for years in caves and mountains and secret places where none of the intelligent agencies could find him? That surprised al-Qaida and wiped it out suddenly. The war on terrorism stopped in one moment, as if an examiner had said, “Put down your pens.”

Many questions run through my head after a period of Arabic coma, during which the term “terrorism” was avoided — that term that the American administration imposed upon us. They decided that they would stop their work in that region just like they chose an unsatisfying end for a man who had enthralled the world for years. And after that, he ended up as shark food.

I am confused about the same subject that I am fed up with. Not because it makes my life uneasy, but because it makes it difficult to answer questions that will be posed by both our young and future generations. And if they throw a question at somebody, he will say “Sorry, I don’t have a response that will satisfy you.”