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Acts of Horror Sure to Beget More of the Same
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Acts of Horror Sure to Beget More of the Same
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by Michele Landsberg
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ON SEPT. 8, I sat in the synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse in Berlin as my talented niece became a Bat Mitzvah. She was the first Bat Mitzvah since 1938 in this place - the same modest little room where Albert Einstein once performed the identical ceremony.
At the door of the synagogue, armed police officers with a green tank-like vehicle marked ``Polizei'' were standing by to protect us Jews.
My niece lives in Berlin because her father, Daniel Libeskind, is the architect of the Jewish Museum there. On that same weekend, a parade of glittering state dinners, festivities and concerts greeted the opening of the first exhibits in Libeskind's stunning and justly famed building.
While in Germany for this double occasion, I took a solo 3 1/2-hour train trip to Osnabruck to see the Felix Nussbaum art museum, another of my brother-in-law's profoundly evocative buildings. Nussbaum was hunted down and murdered by the Nazis, but his wrenching and terror-filled paintings remain to shake our souls with their testimony.
All the way to Osnabruck and back, I had to ask strangers for their help in interpreting the German-only train announcements. It turned out to be mostly young men who knew English and eagerly helped me find my way. Across my reluctant mind slid a ghostly template: In my childhood, young men just like these would have been in uniform and would have been screaming unspeakable hatred while shoving me on to those trains with their rifle butts. I tell all this background - forgive me - to try to convey my overpowering sensation, that weekend, of how deeply cultural are the roots of race hatred. Those kind young men are no different in their humanity than the young Nazis of half a century ago. Even before Sept.11, I was preoccupied with sadness for the bottomless human grief caused by such hatreds.
Three days later I was getting off an airplane in Paris when I heard the news. Paris was obsessed with the horror. Everywhere I went, people who detected my North American accent wanted to talk about the terrorist attack and to share their sympathy and outrage.
On a street in Montmartre the next day, I stopped to buy a white peach from a fruit stall. At that moment, a middle-aged Parisian couple walked by, glanced at the North African appearance of the two young men running the stall, and hissed, ``Terroristes!''
It was the stricken look in the street vendors' eyes that riveted me. Anxiously, they turned to me and began talking about their revulsion against the attack, their indignation that innocent people should be killed.
Their vulnerability reminded me of all that I had felt in Germany about racial stereotyping and inculcated hatred. I resolved to write a cautionary column against any targeting of Muslims as soon as I returned to Toronto. At Charles de Gaulle airport, a striking moment: Thousands of rushed travelers - Japanese tourists, women in hijab, Africans - fell utterly still and silent for three minutes. It was an almost eerie, and deeply affecting, hush as we remembered the victims of the terrorists. By the time I got home, the letters columns and news pages were already filled with expressions of determined anti-racism. Some, I noted with a familiar twist of painfully conflicted feelings, were from the same Muslim leaders who failed to utter a word against the Goebbels-like anti-Jewish propaganda that blanketed the Durban anti-racism conference only a few weeks ago.
But events moved on. The tolerance being extended to Arab Canadians was, in some quarters, sharply withheld from anyone who dissented from the American war rhetoric. It was shocking to read the almost infantile tantrums in the right-wing press, attacking all those commentators who tried to parse the attackers' motives. A Globe editorial, for example, accused them of ``blaming the victim,'' of ``kicking a neighbor when he is down,'' of anti-Americanism, of showing ``no sense of decency.''
Hot words - and frightening. The angry silencing of dissent reminded me of the dismaying bigotries aroused by the War Measures Act, when poisonous hate calls and bomb threats were hurled against New Democrats because of their principled opposition. It's scary how quickly a war atmosphere enforces complete unanimity as a patriotic duty. Where has that happened before? And why not question George Bush's cowboy rhetoric and hasty war plans? Many Americans are doing just that, with a groundswell of cautionary petitions and peace rallies. Missiles and bullets sow the toxic seeds of hatred and revenge wherever they explode.
The repercussions of a failed venture could be staggering. If Pakistan is dragged into a civil war, with triumphant fundamentalists getting their hands on power and the nuclear bomb, it will be too late then for critics and dissenters to make their voices heard. As for probing the possible causes and motives of the terrorists, only a simpleton could assume that the actions of the Western superpowers have never contributed to the fungal spread of fanaticism. What is journalism for, if not to explore ideas as well as describe events?
I fear the triumphalism of the ultra-conservatives, now hastening to demand billions in public money for private enterprises, including the aviation and weapons industries, while gleefully reminding us not to expect anything for human needs like education and health.
I fear for legitimate refugees, whose very lives may be lost as they become entangled in the net of suspicion cast for their tormentors. It reminds me of the way Britain and Canada interned German Jews - along with German Nazis - as ``enemy aliens,'' failing to distinguish between killers and their intended victims.
I fear the return of an even more virulent patriarchy, as frightened citizens look to strong father figures to protect them. Patriarchy, the rule by powerful men as of right, has time and again helped lead us to war and savagery. The women of Afghanistan, enslaved and terrorized by the Taliban for the last six years, have begged the world, in vain, to pay attention to the brutishness of their oppressors. Had women in Western capitals really wielded a fair share of power, perhaps there would have been no Taliban left to play host to Osama bin Laden.
Every injustice leads to sharper injustices; every wrong exacts its dreadful retribution; every act of horror leads to more horror. If only the United States had exercised its immense resources and power to insist on peace and justice in the Middle East, and to relieve the dreadful sufferings of the oppressed Afghans, we might not have come to this agonizing moment. As it is, it is not only our right to question, it is surely our human obligation.
Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star Saturday and Sunday.
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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