Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

     To an old member of the Organization of American Historians your special issue on 9/11 (September 2002) is deeply troubling, but not I think for the reasons you anticipated, that is, preferring "history that refrains from commenting on current events or broadcasting its political passions" (p. 415).

     Your contributors to the special issue on 9/11 have chopped events and evidence from their rich context, and, with the help of some scholarly constructed amnesia, deposited them in the rubble left by the murderous events of 9/11. All so unnecessary if only you had held your contributors to your stated guidelines:

In the end, we chose scholars with noted expertise on issues pertaining to terrorism, anti-Americanism, the Middle East, fundamental religious movements, and foreign relations, and we asked them for deliberative essays, scholarly pieces with deeper research and greater intellectual engagement than typically found in newspapers and magazines. (p. 413)

     Quite properly, Israel's special relationship to the United States was part of the focus of your contributors seeking to provide readers of the journal with a deeper understanding of 9/11 than they would find in, say, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, or the New Republic. But that orientation or those kinds of models would have required, at the least, some passages referring to the bigotry, hostility, and wars the Jewish state has faced since its establishment. For without such contextual passages readers are left with the impression that Israel, by following unprovoked and unjustified policies, contributed significantly to 9/11.

     Here are some examples of what can be designated constructed amnesia. For the period between 1948 and today your contributors have given us only an Israeli belligerent, no others that threatened and attacked a state created under the umbrella of UN decisions. Indeed, except for a brief reference to the 1967 war, there are no deadly wars at all, only Israeli deeds of expansion, invasion, or occupation. In the discussion of one of the most dramatic stories of skyjacking and rescue involving Israel there is no anti-Semitism. Even though Paul Berman, via the career of Germany's current minister of foreign affairs, Joskel Fischer, has demonstrated important connections between the German "New Left" and the anti-Jewish measures in the Entebbe hijacking, there is not a whisper of the empowering mix of anti-Jewish/anti-Israeli flights of transvaluative rhetoric charged with the afterlife of Nazi fascism. And one other act of constructed amnesia by your authors deserves attention. This one highlights the deeply rooted affinity for anti-Jewish passions that Israeli decision makers face among diverse militant groups in the Near East. In your entire issue, so concerned with colonial and imperial power, there is no mention of Nazi Germany and its supporters in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine.

     In light of our current history lessons about cross burnings and segregation, about fearsome symbols and dreadful language, I find these acts of amnesia in the 9/11 issue especially troubling.

Gerd Korman,

Emeritus Cornell University Ithaca, New York

To the Editor:

     Ussama Makdisi's article, "'Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History," (JAH, Sept. 2002), is more interesting for what it omits than for what it includes. Even for a "brief history," one might have expected that reference would be made to the fact that 9/11 cannot be understood without noting that throughout the ages Arab history has been punctuated by waves of Moslem religious fanaticism expressing itself in Jihad. On countless occasions Moslem radicals have arisen with the intent of subduing unbelievers and, in particular, of eradicating all sources of Satanic evil from the world. Ultimately, they believe, Islam will dominate the globe, and Jihad, involving conquest of infidels, is the means by which the world will be brought under Islamic control. This long record of violence against unbelievers helps us understand how Al Qaida could have perpetrated the destruction of the Twin Towers involving the loss of life for thousands of ordinary Americans. . . .