A hundred years from now, will Americans who come to Ground Zero know what motivated the hijackers who flew two planes into the Twin Towers?
That’s one of the purposes of the National Sept. 11 Memorial Museum. But now a brief documentary called “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” which is supposed to be part of the permanent exhibit, has drawn howls of protest from an interfaith clergy committee. Among their objections is the use of words such as “Islamist” and “jihad.”
These words, the members say, “greatly offend our local Muslim believers” and will cause “unsophisticated visitors” to “come away with a prejudiced view of Islam.”
Never mind that the man who narrates the film, NBC News anchor Brian Williams, agreed to do so only after he sent the script to two experts for careful review. Never mind, too, that the rest of the exhibits go out of their way to emphasize that Muslims were also among the victims, mourners and recovery workers of 9/11. Never mind, in short, that this film is not the work of some anti-Muslim outfit but a collaboration of scholars trying to tell the 9/11 story.
Unquestionably, the vast majority of Muslims have no sympathy with al Qaeda. In fact, fellow Muslims have suffered much from al Qaeda. That said, the 9/11 hijackers justified their actions by citing their religious beliefs — however much they may have been distorting Islam to do so.
Pretending this isn’t true will not alter reality. And a museum that would present what happened on 9/11 as simply a bad event without addressing the hard issues it raises isn’t worthy of the name.
Likewise for the absurd claim, repeated just recently by Secretary of State John Kerry, that poverty “in many cases is the root cause of terrorism” whose cure is “providing more economic opportunities.”
Again the reality is the perpetrators of 9/11 were hardly poor or uneducated. Most were college-educated and middle class. Nearly half were engineers. And let’s be clear: Even the use of the word “Islamist,” which is among the objections from the committee, is meant to help distinguish terrorists from innocent believers in Islam.
Joseph Daniels, president and CEO of the museum, insists, “We have gone out of the way to tell the truth.” Shouldn’t that be the only standard that matters?