I was thinking about the latest settler pogroms in the West Bank, and how no matter how many noncombatants were killed by Hamas/PIJ small arms on October 7th, the Zionist entity inflicts a substantial fraction of that total on Palestinians every single day. Possibly even a mixed fraction.

Zoom out a bit and you see the GWOT, waged within at least a dozen countries, with the casus belli of one attack that killed around 3000 American noncombatants. In the following ~20 years, at least 4.5 million people across the Middle East were killed in the conflict. If you put that in units of 9/11s, it’s 1500 9/11s, or 75 per year, or one every 5 days. The level of collective punishment is almost unfathomable. The disproportionate, wanton slaughter of people around the globe makes any framework of a “national tragedy” thoroughly hypocritical.

In Western countries we saw a distrust of people of South/West Asian and North African descent, and of Muslims in particular. In the USA especially we saw hate crimes against these demographics, spurred on by rhetoric of “we should glass the entire region for this”. To this day it is still shockingly common for Americans to say that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed entry to America, or that Manhattan shouldn’t have a mosque. Identitarian animosity pervades all of the discourse on the September 11th attacks.

It’s racist to talk about 9/11 as the reason for any foreign policy. It’s especially racist to talk about 10/7 as a rationale for anything. It’s possibly even classist and ableist too, in light of the daily death toll of 3000 or so just in America during the half-assed lockdowns. Or the hundreds of thousands of people who die every year of complications from poverty or pollution. To invoke 9/11 as an international indignation, or as anything other than a fluke that happened on a single day in history is to wield immense chauvinism and disregard for human life. Even without assessing how much it was blowback, it truly is a drop in the bucket of violence of the past 50 years. To give any special significance to the people who died that day is to say that American lives are thousands of times more valuable than those of people in the Global South. It is to imply that some people’s lives matter vastly more than others. Until I see a memorial for every set of 3000 people who were killed in the past half century, I don’t want to hear anything about 9/11. It doesn’t deserve equal time to what followed it, it shouldn’t be seen as lesser, it should be seen as basically nothing. If 3000 people died across the country on a single day as the result of overdoses, car crashes, and contagious diseases, no one would bat an eyelid. Americans shouldn’t just get over 9/11, they should treat it with the same indifference that they show to every comparable case of mass death far from home.

I looked up “9/11 is racist” on multiple search engines and didn’t get any headlines; the closest equivalent to what I was looking for was something by a guy called Gideon Polya, who puts the blame where it belongs but gets into some flimsy 9/11 trutherism.

We need to run deep with this thesis, and write a bunch of opinion pieces with the headline “Any special commemoration of 9/11 is racist”. I’m a dumdum (it took me an embarrassingly long time to reach this conclusion explicitly after witnessing two decades of American jingoism), and this rant is nowhere near long enough to be sufficient, but we should have a competition of who can state it the best.

Any right-wing media picking it up will declare a panic over it. The controversy is sure to be viral. But the more people notice it, the more people will read it and agree and be swayed by it. The more it gets repeated the more familiar it will feel. It’s an egalitarian, anti-imperialist talking point that will get amplified and echoed. It sounds exactly like what the projection of a “loony left” would say. But this idea can only propagate by being repeated, and the further people examine it the more sense it will make.

There are just over 3 weeks until the 25th anniversary of a day for which one country had a mere 30% higher death rate than expected. Say it loud, say it boldly. To commemorate 9/11 as a singular tragedy is inhumane.