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A Pivotal Moment in the History of Humanity

© Brenda Townsend Hall

Mentally I was unable to take in the pictures on my tv screen on Tuesday. Physically, however, the reaction was immediate. I started shaking uncontrollably.

The responses of the frontline world leaders are, of course, entirely understandable - such a barbarous atrocity against unsuspecting civilians about to embark on an ordinary day has no precedent and reveals depths of human depravity that we can scarcely bear to contemplate.

Yet leaders have a responsibility to go beyond the predictable rhetoric of horror. When Bush and Blair talk of attacks on freedom and of good versus evil, they are, in fact, taking the first steps towards compounding this outrage with still more suffering. For such pronouncements lend credence to a delusion that the western world likes to cling on to. That, in some oversimplified view of human behaviour, we are the good guys and those who attack must be the baddies.

This particular assault cannot be justified. Of course it cannot. And that is something we must remember when contemplating our own reaction. If the end does not justify the means for them, then neither does it for us. Yet this attack was undoubtedly carried our for a reason, however twisted the logic may be, and we have to examine our own policies and behaviour to the rest of the world, to the Arab world in particular, to ask ourselves what our role has been in provoking such naked aggression and vicious hatred.

If, as Bush is predictably and, I admit, understandably, even now planning his campaign of retaliation and reprisals, then the memorial to the innocent dead of last Tuesday will be more bloodshed, more suffering, more entirely pointless loss of innocent life. Yet this intensely repulsive act could be a turning point in human history. It could teach us the lesson we have known at least since the biblical warning that those who live by the sword , die by the sword. It could permit us to rethink the parameters of human justice. Do not Iraqi children have the same needs and rights as our own? Do not Palestinians have legitimate land claims? Every time the US and the British release weapons over the Iraqi no-fly zone, do they not cause suffering every bit as heart-breaking for the Arab families involved as for those who saw their loved ones massacred in NewYork?

It is time to stop. It is time to say that not one more drop of innocent blood will be spilt. Yes, we must hunt down the perpetrators of this deed and then, instead of blowing them out of existence, we must interrogate them, learn to understand the mechanisms that can so twist and distort the human psyche that people will carry out these senseless acts. We must show that another way is available to humanity. Words such as freedom, justice and democracy are meaningless if we simply perpetuate the cycle of destruction and despair in their name.