An Open Letter to American Students and the American Church

Vinoth Ramachandra, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

IFES Regional Secretary for South Asia

19 September 2001

            The suicide attacks in the United States were acts of indescribable evil. It

is right that all decent men and women everywhere should feel a deep sense

of moral outrage. Jesus, the icon of God, showed anger when faced with human

hard-heartedness and religious indifference to suffering. But that same

Jesus refused to fight evil with evil, and challenged his disciples to

overcome evil with good. If we treat others the way they treat us, or only

show compassion and anger when our friends and family suffer, how are we

different to others? (Luke 6:27-36). That was-and remains- the challenge of

Christian discipleship, for which the Holy Spirit empowers us.

            Christians seek justice, not revenge. Justice in a situation such as this

has to do with collecting, weighing and presenting evidence; respecting the

rule of international law; and not being disproportionate or arbitrary in

punishment. Even the much-maligned Old Testament principle of an "eye for an

eye" was never a prescription for blanket retaliation, but in a legal

context set limits to what punishment could be meted out to an individual.

(If I took out your eye in a fight, the court should not take my life.)

America has constantly obstructed all global efforts to set up an

international criminal court to try those accused of crimes against

humanity. Ironically, both the US and Afghanistan have appeared in the eyes

of the world over the past year as "rogue-states": nations that want to

"go-it-alone" on the world stage, to refuse to submit to the claims of the

international community.

            As a non-American, what disturbs me most about the aftermath to the tragedy

is the self-righteous hypocrisy and militant jingoism emanating from most

sections of the American media and Congress. I listen with amazement to talk

of America's "lost innocence" and read with equal disbelief columnist Lance

Morrow (in the normally staid TIME magazine) whipping up his

fellow-Americans to "learn hatred" and to cultivate the "focused brutality"

of their Islamic enemies. The airwaves are filled with the rhetoric of the

"global fight of good against evil", with the US clearly identified with the

good, and of the "defence of Western civilization" or of "democracy versus

terror". President Bush has begun to invoke the "crusades", oblivious to the

connotations of that word in the minds of most Muslims (not to mention

Eastern European Orthodox Christians!).

            Day after day we are reminded by CNN of the attack on Pearl Harbour in

December 1941 and invited to ponder on another world war. But I wait in vain

to be shown footage of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or to

hear of Dresden or Tokyo, cities reduced to rubble by the airforces of

Western civilization. (Have Americans forgotten that they are the only

nation in the history of the world to have unleashed nuclear weapons on

civilian populations?)

            History, even recent history, appears to be quickly forgotten. Do college

students today know about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian and Laotian

peasants bombed into oblivion by American B-52s in the "secret wars" of the

early 1970s? Do they know of the invasion of East Timor in 1975-78 by an

Indonesian army, heavily armed and funded by American taxpayers- an invasion

that saw a bigger slaughter of civilians per population than in the Nazi

Holocaust? Question: what do Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden

have in common, apart from being mass murderers? Answer: they were all

equipped and supported by the CIA until American interests changed.

            Where were the CNN cameras focused when apartment blocks, factories and

offices in Baghdad (1991) and Belgrade (1999) were bombed, night after

night, by decent, law-abiding American youth as if it were a computer

war-game? And where were the endless CNN interviews with victims' families

when the US mounted an illicit attack on Sudan (1998), wiping out half that

country's supply of pharmaceuticals and killing unknown numbers of people

(no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares

to pursue it)? When have we witnessed the righteous indignation of Americans

against the mass terror inflicted by the Burmese army on its own people,

financed in part by powerful British and American oil companies (the Texas

oil men around Bush, including Dick Cheney, were involved)? Or which

American evangelical leaders have protested against the deaths of over half

a million children in Iraq because of American-led economic sanctions?

            I could go on. The list is endless. Terrorism is depicted on American TV by

the lone suicide bomber in Palestine or the fanatical passion of a

knife-wielding "savage" from the mountains of Afghanistan. It is hard for

American Christians to associate terrorism with cool, sophisticated American

bureaucrats with Ivy-league degrees, expensive suits, and homes in suburbia.

But they, like the Osama bin Ladens of the world, are the ones who give the

orders; they are not brought face to face with the casualties.

            It is tempting, therefore, for many non-Americans to feel that, finally,

US-sponsored terrorism has come home to roost. The British liberal

philosopher John Gray recently wrote that, until Americans suffer

economically, they will never question the workings of the global economic

order. Similarly, it appears that until Americans suffer on their own soil

the effects of global terrorism, they will be indifferent to the terrorism

other nations suffer.

            What lessons can we learn from this horrendous tragedy?

            (1) We suffer together. What happens in other peoples' backyards eventually

affect our own homes and families. In our globally inter-connected world, we

know that commodity or foreign-exchange speculations on Wall Street can

cripple, say, an African nation's entire economy. Now we know that what

happens in a Palestinian refugee camp can cripple Wall Street. We can no

longer turn our backs on the hurts and brokenness of peoples living on the

other side of the world.

            Just as Pearl Harbour awoke America from her self-imposed isolation, so we

must hope that the events of 11 September 2001 will move America to see that

her "national interests" can never be asserted against the global good. In

the past few months, America has failed to honour the Kyoto Protocol on

global warming, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and

refused to sign international agreements on the reduction of trade in small

arms and another on the development of biological weapons. Will Christians

in America challenge their nation to put the good of all peoples on the

planet before American commercial greed?

            (2) History is important. These events didn't arise in a vacuum, but they

are the latest links in a tragic chain of numerous acts of brutality,

cowardice and broken promises that have marred the Middle East since the

colonial break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

You in America need to take the trouble to investigate, to learn about the

peoples whose histories have suddenly enmeshed with your own. Many of the

petty, despotic regimes of the Middle Eastern and gulf states have been

propped up by American and British governments and companies. From the late

Shah of Iran to the present Saudi regime, America has armed and funded

governments that have been loathed by their own people. (Saudi Arabia is the

world's largest buyer of American weapons). And the American public has

watched idly by while the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, backed up by a

vicious system of apartheid, state-sponsored executions, and indiscriminate

bombings of Palestinian villages have continued unabated.

            The distinguished British journalist Robert Fisk, an authority on the Middle

East, described the 11th September attacks as the "wickedness and awesome

cruelty" of a "crushed and humiliated people" [click here for entire story].

            Fisk observes: "But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the

world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American

missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles

into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a

village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by

America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and murdering their way through

refugee camps... No, Israel was not to blame though we can be sure that

Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so; but the

malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in

the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our

destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America

has bankrolled Israel's wars for so many years that it believed this would

be cost-free. No longer so."

            (3) There are no safe havens in this world. Many from Asia, Africa and Latin

America flock to the US in search of personal and economic "security". The

economic might of the US (symbolized by the twin towers of the WTC), all its

military might (symbolized by the Pentagon), and all the "think-tanks" and

the billions of dollars poured into intelligence-gathering technology did

not save America from this tragedy. It never will. If proof were needed of

how misguided Bush's plans for an infallible "missile defence" system were,

then we received it last week. If Americans think that, once Osama bin Laden

and his shadowy network of terrorists are destroyed, they can return to

their comfortable worship of Mammon, they deceive themselves. The story of

the Tower of Babel is re-enacted in every age.

            What should Christians on American college campuses do?

            (1) Protect all those students, janitors, secretaries, professors and others

who are likely to suffer "hate attacks" because of their colour, religion

(Muslim) or country of origin (especially Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North

Africa). In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing in 1996, there were numerous

attacks by vengeful mobs on mosques, Arab churches and neighbourhoods. Let

Christians be foremost in providing shelter for the fearful and in

countering the graffiti and e-mail attacks that stem from ignorance and

racial prejudice. Iranians, Afghans and Arabs are more dissimilar to one

another than are Russians and Irish, and all these peoples have suffered far

more than Americans at the hands of extremist Islamic groups.

            (2) Be a genuine counter-culture: by proclaiming and living out a radical

Biblical gospel. Avoid simplistic pronouncements of "God's judgement" (as if

suffering and judgement were in a neat one-to-one relation) while you

publicly challenge every form of self-righteousness, militant jingoism and

the racist caricatures of other peoples. Remind people in your classrooms

and dormitories of some of the historical facts I gave above. Do not allow

the political "right" in America to co-opt Christianity to serve their own

agenda. Question the equation of America with "goodness" or "innocence" or

"Christian civilization", and challenge the renewed calls to pump more funds

into the military and the rebuilding of American symbols of power.

            Remember that the majority of Christians in the world live outside the

Western nations. Even as I write, Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia and

other majority-Muslim countries are fearful of the backlash in the event of

an indiscriminate airstrike by the US against Afghanistan. These are your

brothers and sisters in Christ. We need to learn to think and respond not

primarily as Americans, but as Christians who belong to a global community,

the Body of Christ, which claims our final allegiance.

            The famous Barmen Declaration of 1934, produced by some Christian leaders

in Germany to counter the propaganda and subversion of the Church by the Nazis,

reminds us that: "All the churches of Jesus Christ, scattered in diverse

cultures, have been redeemed for God by the blood of the Lamb to form one

multicultural community of faith. The 'blood' that binds them as brothers

and sisters is more precious than the 'blood', the language, the customs,

political allegiances, or economic interests that may separate them. We

reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the

culture it inhabits and the nation to which it belongs above the commitment

to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one

Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God's new community."

            In conclusion, if the dreadful events of 11 September 2001 can, in the

merciful providence of God, lead to a deeper humility among all of us -

which, in the case of Americans, will include a recognition of the limits to

power and a willingness to embrace weakness- and a deeper commitment to

pursue a more just and equitable world order, then those Americans who died

would not have died in vain.