As an addition, in response to some of the replies to this post, I didnât see the OP saying that it wasnât terrible that 3K people died, or that we shouldnât care, or that some people arenât still traumatised by it. They simply pointed out itâs been used as propaganda, which is true.
Just one thing that I can attest to myself: I was in East Jerusalem on 9/11. We had been working in a hospital on the Mount of Olives (Princess Basma, if anyone cares), and we had no idea what was happening until we got back to our hotel. We did notice that it was quiet as we walked back, but that was it.
I had turned 23 a few days before, also in Jerusalem. A new graduate, doing some voluntary work in the Middle East.
We only found out when our group leader met us at the hotel and told us what had happened - and by the way, I vividly remember thinking it sounded like something out of a movie, and that when he said the Pentagon was on fire, I almost laughed. Not because I thought it was funny, but because it seemed so absurd, and for a second I honestly thought he was joking.
Until I got home almost a week later, the only footage I saw of the attacks was on a tiny TV screen in a darkened room that was where the proprietor of the hotel (a Muslim man named Ibrahim) was watching it. It was very surreal. Ibrahim was scared, because it was initially being blamed on Palestinians, and as he put it, âif we did this, no one will ever care about us ever again.â (Paraphrased, because this was a long time ago, but I remember the sense of what he said very clearly.)
Later that day, we went down to call home from a payphone near (if memory serves) the Damascus gate to let our friends and family know we were okay. (The biggest fear at that point for us was that America would attack the West Bank, in which case, we wouldâve been toast.) It was quieter than weâd seen it. The whole city, to my memory, was quiet. The Damascus Gate was almost deserted, where itâs frequently a morass of people.
When I got back to the UK, and saw the footage of the towers collapsing, it was shocking and surreal. But one of the things that shocked me almost as much was that there was some footage being shown of Palestinians celebrating in Jerusalem. And I was very, very shocked, because barring one day when we went up to visit Galilee, I was in Jerusalem every day from 9/11 to the following weekend - I forget when we flew, I think it might have been the Monday. And what I remember about Jerusalem that week was that everyoneâs mood was low and shocked and scared.
What I saw with my own eyes on the streets of Jerusalem was not what I saw being reported in some channels at home or what I have seen in YouTube clips since. Iâm not saying âno one celebrated, everyone was sadâ, because I didnât spend those five or six days scouring Jerusalem to make sure no one was happy about it. But what I can say for sure is that I have seen videos of these supposed celebrations happening on streets I recognised, on streets I walked down in the aftermath of 9/11, on streets in predominantly Muslim/Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, and when I was there, when I was seeing those streets with my own eyes, those things were not happening. (My memory is shakier on this, but I think I actually saw footage from the Damascus Gate as a throng of happy people, and again, my own firsthand memory was totally the reverse.)
Thatâs one small aspect of how 9/11 was misreported, twisted, and misused. I can only speak for my experience - I was in Jerusalem, I wasnât in Gaza, I wasnât in another country in the Middle East. But I have seen the contradictions with my own eyes, and I know that at least some of how it was reported and the footage thatâs been said since to show what happened in Jerusalem is, at best, misleading as to the extent and nature of the reactions, and at worst is deliberate lying and misrepresentation that is completely the reverse of the truth.
Itâs not contradictory to say that 9/11 was a terrible tragedy, that none of those people deserved to die, that the first responders were brave and incredible, that what happened was awful, and at the same time admit that the portrayal of the event and the way itâs been used in the 17 years since it happened has often been dishonest, misleading, and a political tool to make sure that the people at home hate and mistrusted the right people so that our governments could get their hands dirty for reasons that often had little or nothing to do with 9/11.
In fact, to mislead, to lie, to pretend it was other than it was is unconscionable. The people who died in horrible, horrible ways in those attacks shouldnât have their deaths used as propaganda. They deserve better, and frankly, so do we. Both those of us who were alive at the time, who remember watching in disbelief and horror, and those born since. Thatâs not contradictory at all.
