Truth in Mundine 9/11 insult
AUSTRALIAN Muslim boxer Anthony Mundine was savaged for his comments on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the weeks after the toxic dust from the Twin Towers’ disintegration had settled on New York, the Aboriginal pugilist suggested the US had brought the horror upon itself.
“They call it an act of terrorism, but if you can understand religion, and our way of life, it’s not about terrorism. It’s about fighting for God’s law, and America’s brought it upon themselves,” Mundine infamously said.
They were ill-informed, poorly chosen and badly timed words as the war drums were beating for revenge on whoever was to blame for the attacks on the World Trade Center, Congress and the Pentagon. Like a riled-up junkyard dog, the US was all teeth and menace. Americans were rowdily united in the hunt for someone to blame.
Standing in the smoking skeletal ruin of the towers, as rescue teams pulled corpses from the mess of mangled steel and crumbled concrete, the then American president George W. Bush pledged vengeance, and firefighters saluted him with a thundering chant of “USA, USA, USA” and raised the Star-Spangled Banner on what became known as Ground Zero.
Nothing can excuse such a vicious strike on civilians.
The terrorists who hijacked the airliners planned it in cold blood, spending years getting pilots’ licences, and secretly plotting deadly flight paths into the economic, military and government headquarters of the world’s superpower.
In Australia, Mundine was abused by most commentators in the land, hounded by media and castigated by angry sports fans. He fled to Germany, where he was less well known, to hide out, but to this day the backlash still follows him.
In 2012, while warming up at the Mayweather Boxing Club in Las Vegas in preparation for his fight against US light middleweight Bronco McKart, Mundine was taunted in the ring by sparring partners who, rather than helping him work out, were trying to knock his head off.
Mundine’s team were told that the Americans recruited as sparring partners were angry “he had disrespected us and our country”. Afterwards, Mundine said: “They don’t know how I was taken out of context about the whole 9/11 thing. I am just anti-war but back then, 10 years ago, it was made out I was happy for the killings or I supported what happened, which is not the case. Those comments were just spun around like I was clapping my hands … the point I was trying to get across was that it was in a war state of mind and there is always going to be tit for tat, so why put yourself in a situation where you can endanger people?”
When the three-time world champion and former rugby league star retired in March, aged 45, he apologised for his “dumb” and “hurtful” remarks.
“I feel like I was crucified for that, probably rightly so, and I said it raw and pretty dumb at the time,” he struggled to explain for the umpteenth time in the past 20 years. The champ may spend the rest of his life explaining.
ICONFESS my response to TV footage of the two jets scything into the World Trade Center was similar to Mundine’s. As unprecedented, surreal and unbelievable as it was, I felt something like this had long been on the cards.
The US had led military strikes and invasions in the
Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, including freeing Kuwait from the Iraq invasion led by Saddam Hussein, the Iraq War and Hussein’s killing.
The attacks were presented as hi-tech TV wars, with new weapons capable of precision strikes, killing only the enemy while those doing the shooting and bombing were safe and sound, off at a distance, too far from the carnage to hear the blood-curdling screams.
In 1986 the US hit five military targets in Libya, including the HQ of leader Muammar Gaddafi. The US anchored a warship in the Persian Gulf, fired missiles, sent in the bombers and the mission was accomplished. Crisp, clean warfare with a TV wow factor off the charts.
But for all the talk of clean strikes there seemed as many examples of civilian casualties broadcast on TV, along with haunting footage of ancient Arabian cities in rubble and tearful Muslim mothers on their hands and knees wailing in the streets for lost sons and daughters.
A United Nations report said the bombing of Iraq in 1991 was “near apocalyptic” and had blasted the land, known to archaeologists as the Cradle of Civilisation, back to the “preindustrial age”, with 35,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed and twice as many injured.
The grief and destruction was dismissed summarily as collateral damage by the mighty US war machine, which appeared to have few concerns about reprisals. But many, including me and perhaps Mundine, feared payback for the Western governmentsanctioned slaughter.
This may be what Mundine meant when he said Americans brought it on themselves, not that they deserved it, nor that he felt good about it, but that the lives lost in the Twin Towers were as innocent and full of human potential as those blown to smithereens in Iraq.
A mother who warns her son not to tease ants in the
I said it raw and pretty dumb at the time Mundine boxer Anthony Aussie
garden does not think he deserves it when he falls into anaphylactic shock after being bitten by a jack jumper but, once the adrenalin and antihistamines kick in, she may chide him, “I told you so”.
Mundine’s comments that “they call it an act of terrorism, but if you can understand religion, and our way of life, it’s not about terrorism. It’s about fighting for God’s law” are not as defensible because they contradict the central tenet of peace held dear by most Muslims worldwide.
But while ill-informed, poorly chosen and badly timed, Mundine’s words nonethe-less reflect the mindset of aggrieved Muslims who adopt extreme dogmatic versions of their creed and wage holy war against America and its allies.
After all, they watched the West march into nations to impose democratic values and, in the case of Afghanistan, pull out 20 years later, leaving Afghan civilians in the hands of those they most feared.
They witnessed missiles launched from drones and aircraft carriers transform the hustle and bustle of urban streets into shrieking chaos, bloodshed and turmoil.
They saw the carnage of car bombs and suicide vests.
Trauma creates hostility and some have come to see the West as an enemy who opposes their religion, their way of life and their God.
The inhumane images of torture at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay did nothing to dissuade them.
SPEAKING with Australian historian Henry Reynolds this week, we discussed similarities between the invasion of Van Diemen’s Land at the start of the 19th century and that of Afghanistan 20 years ago.
Of course, they were vastly different theatres of war, but Professor Reynolds noted the British colonists and US-led forces were ignorant, and too often and easily dismissive, of the sophistication and complexity of the ancient societies they were invading.
There was also a cultural and technological gulf between the warring parties, both of which had vastly different understandings of what the conflict was about. Two centuries since the Brits landed in Tasmania, we still struggle to comprehend the Aboriginal perspective of the cultural collision.
The discussion got me thinking about how little was known about the Middle East when US-led forces attacked. Aussies knew the region was made up mostly of Arabs and Muslims, but such general terms mean little in context of the ethnic, cultural, political, religious and historic divides.
Over the past three decades most in the West have learnt of the schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, varying cultural groups such as the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Hazara in Afghanistan, and friction between militant religious sects such as Islamic State, al-Qa’ida and the Taliban.
To complicate it all, Middle East nations are defined by lines drawn on a map by foreign powers, which divide some ethnic groups while encompassing warring tribes. Imperial invasions, conflict between neighbours and civil wars have exiled millions. Toss in royal families, oil barons, opium warlords, despots and various degrees of democracy and you can start to develop a veneer of comprehension of the complexities at play.
It’s a pity comments like Mundine’s were so forcefully shut down in 2001 because — as ill-informed, poorly chosen and badly timed as they were — the thrust of what the Aussie pugilist was trying to say, prudently examined, may have saved us 20 years of heartache in Afghanistan.
My thoughts on this 20th anniversary of 9/11 are with all the innocent civilians lost and families destroyed throughout this miserable unholy mess.