I remember where I was on 9/11. My family was living in Olympia, Wash., at the time and I was about nine years old. I remember walking down the stairs for breakfast and hearing my brother yell, “Erin, Erin, bad guys blew up a building!” I had no idea what was going on; I figured he was trying to scare me like older brothers do.
But when I told him to leave me alone, my mother stepped in to say he was telling the truth. She told me that earlier that morning in New York City, a plane had flown into a building and killed a lot of people.
We waited to hear from my cousin who was in the city at the time. We knew it was unlikely he was anywhere near the area, but the thought of him in the vicinity was uncomfortable.
I asked my mother if we were going to be OK. As young as I was, I could tell she did not know. Nobody knew. The atmosphere was eerie, even at school.
Fast-forward to Sept. 11, 2011, ten years after hiding under that table, and I was on a plane, headed to Doha, Qatar, a peninsula off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia.
For an entire year while studying abroad, I listened to the thoughts and opinions of my Qatari peers and how their lives had been affected by what one small group did. They told me how crazy these people were and how the discrimination they faced when visiting friends and family in the United States could bring them to tears.
I feel for them the same way I feel for Americans. It was as much a tragedy to many in the Middle East as well as to us, and the negative effects truly were global.
I hesitate to say that the tragedy was what spurred my interest in the Middle East and Arabic. But I am sure growing up in the post-9/11 era had a major influence.
That one day in history changed the world. It amplified the discourse on the Middle East and changed the global dialogue throughout. It made everyone aware of terrorism and gave Americans an excuse to discriminate.
Since then, the media focuses more on Muslim extremist groups and terrorism in the news. They exacerbate the problem by giving one-sided accounts of the lives and beliefs of Muslims.
Al-Qaeda is a household term. Instead of Russia and Communism being America’s Public Enemy No. 1, it is now Islam and the entire Arab world. We see it in so many popular TV shows and movies.
It is distressing to see that we have allowed this small group of extremists to define us. It disappoints me to see that we gave Al-Qaeda so much of the ground and attention they were looking for.
Terrorists do exactly what their title says — they aim to cause mass terror. In the aftermath of the attack, they did that and more. They created terror that ballooned into misunderstanding.
Many Americans do not understand Islam. They fear Muslims and so, to mask this fear, they disguise it with an emotion uglier than fear — hate.
This fear, hate and ignorance must stop and we at UW are in a unique position to help. We have a large population of foreign students from the Arab world who have come to Laramie to study, and we have an economy that closely parallels those of the Persian Gulf region.
It is a lucky opportunity for us to understand that our peers here at UW, and most Muslims around the world, are not the “other” and we should not define ourselves in terms of opposition to them. They are “us”.
They believe in God, they pray for the same things Christians pray for, and many stories in the Qur’an closely parallel stories in the Bible. They take the same classes, in the same language, they go to movies and football games, and they play soccer.
In the eleven years since 9/11, we have allowed our fear to manifest itself in regrettable ways. We have had our time to mourn, and we will never forget. To do so would be to dishonor those who gave their lives.
However, now is the time to move forward and take back the ground Al-Qaeda took from us by rejecting fear and embracing our friends for who they are. We must acknowledge that the tragedy hurt them as it did us and work together to prevent it from happening again.
