April 9, 2002

Is U.S. to blame for 9-11?

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

"Is the United States somehow to be blamed for the atrocities that it suffered on Sept. 11?"

The question is the fifth in a series of essays on the Sept. 11 attacks in Straight Answers to Moral Confusion in National Crisis by the Institute on Religion and Democracy. The series authored by Alan F.H. Wisdom focuses on the role of America's churches in response to the attacks.

Wisdom notes that most church statements about the attacks have stayed away from any attempts to "blame the victim." But at the extreme right and left, some church leaders have pointed a finger at the U.S. government and society as somehow to blame.

In the evangelical newsweekly World, Joel Belz wrote the attacks are "the wages we always pay for sin... High on our Western shelf of false deities have been the gods of nominalism, materialism, secularism and pluralism. And it's hard to think of more apt symbols of all these 'isms' than the twin towers of the World Trade Center."

Wisdom reports that Belz wrote later that he regrets the tone of his editorial, but not its basic argument.

From the far left, Wisdom says Tom Driver of Union Theological Seminary in New York implies America has earned the terrorists' hatred "because of its complicity in the poverty of the Third World, its support for Israel and other allegedly unworthy regimes, and its disdain for the United Nations."

Driver quotes Jesus, "Those who take the sword will die by the sword," and adds, "The violence that America has long exported has now come back upon us... We have cultivated a way of life for ourselves that requires the impoverishment of others."

Wisdom rebuts the assumptions of both left and right that the terrorists agree with their critique of the United States. Osama bin Laden "seems far more offended by the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, for example, than by U.S. materialism and involvement in the international arms trade," he says.

I might add, here's the root of Osama's gripe. As long as U.S. troops are in Saudi Arabia, he will be unable to foment the revolt he has in mind to take control of the world's oil riches.

That's what Osama's rage is all about, pure, simple greed. He was kicked out of Saudi Arabia and wants to exact his revenge and at the same time use the power of big oil for his foul aims.

It seems unthinkable that church leaders, of the right or the left, could align themselves with such an obviously evil man.

Wisdom concludes "There is room in our democratic society for debate -- even fierce debate -- over all the sins denounced by the self-styled prophets of the right and left. But it serves neither the church nor the society well when these prophets link their agendas to those of the anti-American terrorists."

I heartily agree, and recall the words of President Bush when he launched his war on terror.

"Now we will find out who our friends are," the President predicted. And anyone, in or out of the church, who sides with the terrorists is no friend of America.