When almost forty years ago I naively set foot on the Sufi Path, inspired by its humanity, refinement, and love, I never imagined I would find myself on this battlefield. And yet now there is no way I can leave it, a battlefield on which innocents have been turned into enemies, religious discourse has been degraded, and where the ineptness and hypocrisy of Western Powers have caused millions to leave their homelands and seek refuge in foreign lands.
We can only attempt to stand for truth in the shadow of a Great Lie, a lie which begins on 9/11/2001. The old adage holds true: it is easer to deceive with a preposterously big lie than a small one. There are a hundred, perhaps a thousand facts that are not explained by the official narrative about 9/11. A sane and rational society would have initiated a criminal investigation for a crime so big. But most, as if hypnotized by the trauma of the event, accepted the story offered by an administration that lied about so many things. If our attention span were longer than 13 seconds, we would demand a real investigation with subpoena powers. But Americans are too distracted or or intellectually incapable of connecting the dots, especially this number of dots. And the tragedy continues to unfold.
Anybody who knows a little about the Middle East, knows that in 2001 Islamist movements were failing both politically, rarely drawing more than 10% in elections , and ideologically, unable to provide solutions to social problems. Al Qaeda had a few hundred followers, and our government had a handful of people working on counter-terrorism. Quite suddenly a new enemy could be created to replace the communist threat: Islamic Terrorism. We had been provided with a new reason for living, and the Patriot Act could be pulled out of a drawer and approved by Congress without its many hundreds of pages being read by those who voted for it.
Anyone should be able to reason that it is virtually impossible to defend a society from terrorist acts, especially if we have given terrorists good reason to want revenge. You don’t need an international terrorist organization to set off a bomb in a crowded public place: in a mall, a train station, a sporting event, the downtown of any city.
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Tikkun 2017 Volume 32, Number 3:27-28