Twenty-five years after 9/11, there are still questions we’re not allowed to ask

Twenty-five years ago, a Canadian academic delivered a speech about America in the aftermath of 9/11 that many found deplorable.

Sunera Thobani, then a professor at the University of British Columbia, received hate messages and death threats. Political commentators across North America accused her of blaming the United States for the attacks. An RCMP complaint alleged that her speech constituted a hate crime. Even then-prime minister Jean Chrétien called it a “terrible speech that we are 100 per cent against.”

So what did she say?

Speaking at a conference in Ottawa on October 1, 2001 —  three weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people — she described the U.S. as “one of the most dangerous and the most powerful global forces” in the world, arguing that its foreign policy had “soaked” a path across the globe “in blood.”

“Today, the United States is one of the most dangerous and the most powerful global forces that is unleashing prolific levels of violence all over the world. From Chile to El Salvador, to Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood.” 

She acknowledged the horror of 9/11. Then she asked: “But do we feel any pain for the victims of U.S. aggression?”           

Those were the lines that were clipped, repeated and circulated across the country, often without the broader context of the speech. For the sake of brevity, I’m not including more excerpts here, but I strongly urge you to read the speech in its entirety, republished by Herizons magazine in 2022. The passages above, however, became the most provocative and easily digestible parts of her remarks, fitting neatly into the news cycle of a country still trying to make sense of the attacks. 

And the context matters. At the time, simply asking such a question was incendiary. The United States was still in mourning. Images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the buildings burning and collapsing, and people trapped inside, some jumping to their deaths, were played repeatedly on news networks. Anchors broke down in tears describing the attacks. Memorials and tributes were held across Canada and the U.S. — in workplaces, schools, churches and mosques.

There were things you could say and things you couldn’t. You could condemn the attacks. You could mourn the victims. You could ask how such an atrocity had happened (“they hate our freedom; they hate who we are”). Or: as so many pundits at the time did, how do we defeat terrorism?  

But Thobani was asking different questions, rooted in the longer histories of colonialism, racism, U.S. foreign policy, and North-South power relations. Questions like: Why did this violence emerge? What preceded it? Who gets defined as innocent and who gets defined as threatening? What happens to racialized minorities during wartime? 

Her words were considered anathema at the time. Was she being callous? Disloyal? Was this really the moment for such scrutiny? 

The questions she posed then mattered to me because, at a formative moment in my own life, they gave voice to something I was struggling to articulate: that condemning terrorism and examining the political history surrounding it were not mutually exclusive.

I was beginning a journalism career with a focus on Middle East politics. My own family had been touched by political violence; relatives had been affected by the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. I also remembered what followed: the U.S. responded with missile strikes on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, including the controversial bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum. Al-Qaeda was not distant to me. It was a murderous group whose grotesque distortion of Islam led to the deaths of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

But neither was the history of Western intervention in the countries from which many Muslims came from. 

Another reason the speech stayed with me was its warning about what could happen next. Thobani accused Canadian leaders of “talking out of both sides of their mouth”: condemning anti-Muslim racism while supporting intensified racialized security practices.

Some of those concerns were becoming visible almost immediately. The Globe and Mail reported at the time on a confidential government leak instructing Canadian border officials to look for particular employment, educational and travel characteristics when assessing potential terrorist risk.

The contradiction is worth remembering — because some propositions that made Thobani’s speech so controversial were, almost simultaneously, becoming matters of government policy and investigative journalism.

Yet it was Thobani who was punished for having the audacity to say them.

Twenty years later, one could argue that things have gotten better: Discussions around decolonization, systemic racism and inequity have become more normalized (depending of course on where you’re situated, geographically, or professionally). And yet, so much remains the same. 

Consider what a U.S. conservative news outlet reported last week in an attempt to discredit Dr Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan by rehashing one of his now-deleted tweets comparing the Americans killed on 9/11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll. Writing on September 11 2021, Dr El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the September 11 attacks, he hoped “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global War on Terror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”

Which raises the question: Are we actually any more media literate or capable of critical thinking as a society than we were 20 years ago? It’s a baffling thought when you think about how much more news content we’re consuming on a daily (hourly!) basis.

One of the most intelligent and brave perspectives on 9/11 this past week came from American-Jewish journalist Peter Beinhart. 

In a Substack post titled Explanation not Justification, Beinart compares the moral blindness and ignorance of Western society in recognizing the role Western powers played in enabling 9/11 with its deafening silence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza after October 7, 2001. 

“We should have realized how conceptually, morally crucial it is to be able to say we can have a conversation about why something happens without justifying that action. It’s still so difficult in the United States to do that,” he laments. “It was so difficult… in the Jewish community and beyond the Jewish community, in the wake of October 7th, to have any conversation about the reasons that October 7th happened, about the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza and beyond Gaza that might have helped us to explain why October 7th happened, while, of course, also saying that October 7th was a series of war crimes that were wrong.”

Prof. Thobani, Dr El Sayed and Beinart all challenge us to become better listeners — better at hearing arguments that disturb us without immediately treating them as ones to be suppressed.

Jewish Canadians can experience some anti-Israel rhetoric as anti-Jewish hostility. Palestinians and their supporters can experience criticism of Palestinian advocacy as an attempt to erase Palestinian suffering. Both perspectives deserve to be taken seriously. 

And Canadians should be able to question their government’s foreign policy without being accused of disloyalty for doing so.

Twenty-five years later, we need to keep asking those questions. Because 9/11 amounts to more than after those horrific images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and nearly 3,000 people killed that morning. It also calls to memory the hundreds of thousands more men, women and children who died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon in the conflicts that followed.

This is not an easy form of democracy. But a democracy in which we only listen to people we agree with is not much of a democracy at all.