Mohamed Atta chose to preface his master’s thesis with these two Qur’anic verses: “My worship, my sacrifice, my life, and my death are for Allah, the God of the Worlds. He hath no partner. This is what I commanded and I am the first of those who surrender [unto Him].”
Atta is the only Egyptian among the 19 jihadists who took part in the 9/11 attacks against the United States in 2001. Atta, who has a master’s degree in city planning from Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, was the mastermind of 9/11, taking decisions that even Osama Bin Laden didn’t know about. Al-Qaida agreed on the broad goals of the attacks and left for Atta to decide the zero hour and all the specifics.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s successor, is a theologian and an eye surgeon. He comes from a distinguished, well-off Egyptian family. His great uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary of the Arab League.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), received a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, and many of his followers also hold advanced degrees.
So promoting the idea that terrorists, as the Western governments call them, appear where ignorance takes place isn’t accurate. Nor is poverty; Bin Laden was a son of a billionaire.
That idea applies only to armed groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Northern Nigeria is suffering from extreme poverty, lack of security, corrupt government and absence of justice. So many of the desperate resort to Boko Haram; they simply have nothing else to do.
The 9/11 attacks occurred out of a deep, severe feeling of injustice and anger against the U.S. foreign policy and military actions. The attacks were executed by people who believed that lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten, and an eye must be for an eye.
The discrepancy is that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was more violence in parallel with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Pakistanis, for instance, aren’t likely to pay attention to the aid that goes to their corrupt government when they see U.S. airstrikes killing some of them from time to time. The U.S.’s war on terror seems to create new enemies of the U.S. and more terror in the world.
In response to 9/11, the U.S. and other Western countries intensified their security measures at airports and made their visas challenging to get. This supposedly was to reassure the public that passengers won’t use planes as weapons. These measures might work with laymen but won’t be effective with pilots, for example. Pilots can do whatever they want with their planes, and a “terrorist” group wouldn’t find it difficult to recruit a pilot since they have already recruited well-educated and rich people.
In 2010, WikiLeaks released a classified video of U.S. military attacks in Baghdad in 2007 that resulted in the killing of a group of Iraqis, including two war correspondents working for Reuters.
A U.S. soldier raped, killed and burned the body of a young Iraqi girl in 2006 after killing her family. In 2011, four U.S. marines were caught on camera urinating on bodies of dead Taliban Jihadists in Afghanistan.
This is in addition to all the reports on the human rights abuses by the U.S. and other Western militaries at prisons all over Iraq, Abu Ghraib in particular, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp. “We tortured some folks” after 9/11, President Barack Obama himself said.
In 2004, on the other hand, after Indonesia’s tragic earthquake, the U.S. responded by a generous aid to the Indonesian people. As polls conducted before and after the catastrophe showed, the U.S. efforts won the appreciation of Indonesia’s Muslims and turned their widespread sympathy with Bin Laden into a remarkable admiration of America.
With the example of Indonesia in mind, the U.S. knows well how to improve its image and spread peace. Just withdraw your troops and stop killing innocent people. It’s as simple as that. If it is not that simple, make it simple, if you really don’t want 9/11 again in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Military strikes, drones and missiles will never put an end to the conflict the world is witnessing now. They just make a vicious circle of blood, revenge and counter-revenge. An eye for an eye, as Gandhi put it, would make the whole world blind. The U.S. should change its foreign policy and discontinue interfering in other countries so that one day we can see someone like Atta prefacing his thesis with a verse on love and helping others, rather than “death and sacrificing life.”
Romany Melek, a native of Egypt, is a master’s student at the University of Maine who will receive a master’s degree in communication in December. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Maine in 2013-14 and has worked as a journalist in Egypt.