Posted on 07/31/2002 3:19:24 PM PDT by Michael2001
We've come along a bit since 9-11. In late June 2002, I was flying from New York to Toronto, and two gentlemen of much facial hair and full-dress Islamic attire were seated at the gate area ready to board.
Shortly after 9-11 their neo-terrorist appearance might have occasioned screams of protest, or at least a muffled moan or two, from the other passengers. Now there were just curious glances.
I was seated opposite them in the gate area and, when we boarded, it turned out we three were seatmates in one of the back rows. As a journalist, I wanted to talk to them, but I was hoping somehow they would start it. Sure enough, just after takeoff one of them asked if I had a pen.
I did, and I gave it to him. I addressed them politely in Arabic and they replied in Arabic.
I then asked where they were from. Bangladesh. I thereupon addressed them in their language, Bengali, and they seemed delighted. They didn't realize my Arabic was limited to six sentences and my Bengali to four. All they knew was, "Hey, this American speaks two Islamic languages."
I think that prompted the younger one, who spoke fluent English, to light into me in a way he would never had done if he hadn't classified me as an "unusual target." I suspect that's what broke the dam, or at least opened the floodgates, and prompted him to hit on me in earnest.
He was born in America but was now completely indistinguishable from a fundamentalist worshipper in the mosques of Dacca. It seemed a bit eerie discussing the World Cup and American football, which he'd played in his Queens high school, with someone Hollywood might cast as a hijacker, if his appearance weren't too cliché Hollywood.
It was a short flight, so he didn't let talk of football long delay his agenda.
"Do you understand why everybody in the world must be a Moslem?" he asked. I conceded I did not.
"The Jews loved Moses and accepted him as God's messenger," he said. "So when the new messenger, Jesus, appeared, the Jews were so locked into Moses they had no interest in Jesus.
"Then, when Jesus came," he continued, "his followers were so locked into Jesus they had no interest in the still newer messenger, Mohammed.
"This is the world's terrible mistake we Moslems must correct. God, Allah, wants us to hear and heed His latest messenger at all times. And His latest messenger is Mohammed."
I repeated the response William F. Buckley Jr. gave Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when Ginsberg interrupted Buckley on his TV show and asked if he'd like to hear a poem he'd written under the influence of LSD on a mountaintop in Nepal.
After Buckley's ill-concealed agony listening to what sounded exactly like a poem written under the influence of LSD on a Nepalese mountaintop, Buckley smiled at Ginsberg and said simply, "Nice. Nice!"
My new Islamic friend then asked to what religion I belonged.
"I'm Jewish," I said.
He leaned in and said, "Your ancient rabbis deleted the prophecy about the coming of Mohammed from the Torah."
"Beg pardon?" I said.
"It's well known, " he said. "Your Torah clearly told of the arrival of 'Achmed.' Achmed is the same name as Mohammed."
"How do you know all this?" I asked.
"Why, it's all there. It's all there," he replied, implying it was all fully documented in places where only the most venal religious villain could deny it. Yet he never quite specified where those corrobatory documents resided.
What about 9-11?
He answered with an annoyed confidence that suggested one of the crescents he was fated to bear was putting up with illiterate infidels who still don't know who staged 9-11.
"It was all arranged by the United States government," he said. "Your government needed 9-11 as an excuse to take Afghanistan," he said.
"How do you know?"
"It's all there. It's all there, my friend. All you have to do is read." Again he failed to say what it was that had to be read.
"Are you saying we Americans ourselves staged that attack?" I asked.
"Of course," he replied. "Cheney and Enron had tried to negotiate deals with the Taliban prior to 9-11. This administration decided it needed a pretext to take over Afghanistan when the Taliban refused to roll over to your demands. 9-11 had to precede an American conquest of Afghanistan."
He took advantage of my bewildered silence to "corroborate" his claim. "It's all there," he said. "You just have to read it. It's all there."
My thoughts as we landed in Toronto revolved around how little we have to travel nowadays to hear grotesquery presented as history.
I had to go all the way to Yugoslavia in 1951 to hear that the workers of America envied the Tito twist on communism and were preparing revolution to copy it.
I had to go all the way to Moscow in 1956 to hear that "South Korea started the Korean War by attacking North Korea in June 1950, but the action was soon transferred southward."
But I wouldn't have had to leave the Air Canada lounge at LaGuardia Airport to learn that corrupt rabbis had censored the arrival of the Prophet Mohammed from the Torah, that Jews and Christians had to be liberated from their spiritual blindness, freeing everybody in the world to become Moslem, and that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Enron had failed to negotiate what they wanted from Taliban Afghanistan, so they had to stage 9-11 as a pretext to go in and take it.
I liked political and religious insanity better when I had to cross an ocean or two and an Iron Curtain to get it from the expectably indoctrinated.
Arguing rationally with such a person is rather like dropping honeysuckles down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo. Parents whose small children have been mind-poisoned by the other parent are equipped to feel that particular kind of frustration.
A classic movie made in 1944, "Tomorrow the World," dealt with an obnoxious member of the Hitler Youth, played brilliantly by Skippy Homeier. In the movie, his parents sent him, against his violent objections, from Germany to live with relatives in the United States. He immediately began to spread his Hitler-hate throughout the schoolyard and interrupted his democracy-loving teachers with lectures of Aryan supremacy.
The denouement was his assault in the playground on a Polish kid he called a "stupid inferior Slav" who thereupon handily beat the hog-hell out of the little Nazi. (Hollywood was too skittish in those days to make the triumphant kid Jewish!)
This encounter left me aware of what I can only call my incompleteness. I can easily imagine a Hitler Youth spouting Nazi hate in a New Jersey classroom in 1944. I can easily imagine Yugoslav Communist students parroting the absurdities of their dictatorship to a visiting American in 1951.
My Moslem seatmate, however, was raised in the USA. His Christian and Jewish classmates may have cheered him as he ran for touchdowns in Queens. Nothing in my experience has prepared me to have such people hate America.
When a foreigner has a terrible experience at the hands of an American, we know America can't count on the affection and allegiance of that one abused foreigner. When people who don't know America are force-fed the worst about us, we can understand their antipathy.
What's scary is when sizable numbers of those who know us full well hate us nonetheless.
I had the feeling that the only praise this young man had for America is what a great job we did on ourselves on 9-11. And I evaluated his commitment to defend America as roughly equal to that of a Swedish tourist on a Caribbean vacation to defend Barbados.
Any enemy of the United States after Pearl Harbor would have had a terrible time trying to find Americans willing to harm America, even in the German, Japanese and Italian communities.
That may not be such a "Mission Impossible" today in our Islamic communities.
Those Moslem seatmates of mine are perfectly free to hate America.
All we're free to do, if I understand our Constitution, is hope they don't amount to much.
And that may not be enough.
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