Fouad Ajami: The Ways of American Memory
Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
The most amazing thing about remembering 9/11 was that there was hardly anything said about the assailants. We recalled the horror, but generously. Perhaps now and then, I thought, too generously. The American capacity to forgive and forget is without parallel. A source of pride and strength, but perhaps on occasion for worry as well.
Nothing was said on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 of Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, of the 19 Arabs who assaulted America on that day of grief. Nothing was said of the radical Islamist preachers who had filled the air with sedition and bigotry in the decade prior to 9/11. And those financiers and “charities” who had sustained the jihad were entirely forgotten. The regimes that had winked at the terror – the enablers the peerless Charles Hill called them – were given a pass as well. The grief was remembered in the manner akin to recalling a natural disaster. Tragedy was the word most invoked as we called back that day.
I searched in vain, through the medium of Arabic, my ancestral language, for a compelling and honest Arab retrospective of 9/11. I found none that spoke to me, that spoke to that day. No surprise, the occasion served as a way of Arabs pronouncing on America yet again. The anniversary, said one Saudi pundit with an air of worldliness, had come to “resemble a major consumer festival, similar to that of Christmas or the summer seasons. The mass of books, documentaries, news programs and commemorative souvenirs relating to the occasion have created an ‘industry’ around the September 11th anniversary, of which there are many beneficiaries.” The title of a column in The Daily Star, the Beirut-based English language paper, by the journalist Rami Khouri, tells the story; “A decade on, does the U.S. quite get it?” America comes up short in Khouri’s analysis, its people “unable or unwilling to adequately or honestly explore why this happened to them – because they still fail to address the wider context of the world in which dwell both the criminal attacker and the honest victim.”...