9:02 + 13 Years

Christopher Nguyen is graduating from high school.

A simple statement, a seemingly random sentence, plucked out of nowhere and presented on this page. Christopher Nguyen is graduating from high school. So are millions of other students across the country. So what makes this one noteworthy?

13 years ago, Christopher Nguyen was a four year old child in a day care center while his parents were at work. One day in April, he was one of 21 children at the America's Kids Day Care Center. By the end of that day, 15 of his playmates died in what was at that time the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history. Christopher Nguyen is a survivor of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Since that fateful day in the spring of 1995, Timothy McVeigh, who drove the truck, has been executed for the death of eight federal officials. Terry Nichols, McVeigh's co-conspirator, was sentenced to life in prison for those eight officials, plus on 161 counts of murder by Oklahoma state courts. The Murrah building was razed to the ground and replaced by a national memorial, and a new federal building has been built in Oklahoma City. Life has gone on, for Oklahoma, for the United States, and for the survivors.

And now, the first of the six child survivors is about to graduate from high school. Christopher Nguyen carries forward. He does not remember the bombing, which is hardly surprising, but seeing him standing, staring at the last remaining pieces of the Murrah building that today stand at one side of the memorial, you can see in his eyes the questions that will likely dominate his life. Why did he survive, when so many others did not?

On the outside of one of the gates to the memorial are the following words:

We come here to remember those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever. May all who leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.

Now Christopher Nguyen will take his first steps out into the world. He is both a survivor and a symbol. I wish him nothing but the best, and a long, happy, and healthy life. And I hope that the survivor of this ultimate act of violence and hate will see in his lifetime even a glimmer of peace for us all.

Slipping Further Away

As rockets continue to fall on Israel, and the Israeli military steps up operations in Gaza, gunmen shot up a school in Jerusalem.

There is no peace in the Middle East, and the ramping up of the attacks as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets with Olmert and Abbas show just how hollow President Bush's call for peace in the region by the end of his term really is. A timetable cannot be put on a conflict of this magnitude, and Israel cannot be realistically asked to negotiate with a gun to its head.

I was reading a TIME article about the possibility of Israel conducting a full assault on Gaza, getting itself into an Iraq-type quagmire, when an email popped up. A friend of mine who I am not in regular touch with is not only in Israel right now, not only in Jerusalem, but studying at a seminary there. He did not mention the attacks directly, but only said not to worry, that he is OK, and goes to a different school, a neighboring school from the one attacked.

And once again, events so far away hit so close to home for me.

Israel cannot negotiate as rockets keep falling on Sderot and Ashkelon. Abbas has to clean his own house before he can negotiate in good faith. Otherwise, we will merely return to (or continue) the hollow promises of the Arafat decades, where he would say in English what the west wanted to hear, and then turn around in Arabic and say "go get 'em."

I do not know what the answers are. All I know is that, unlike the optimism expressed in the Lincoln quote that peace is not so distant as it has been, I feel like hope and peace are slipping further and further away.

Words and (Hypothetical) Deeds

Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo on Friday deplorably undermined the United States when he painted the war on terrorism as a war on Islam. Speaking on a talk show in Florida, Tancredo said that if the United States were attacked with nuclear weapons, and if it was determined that "extremist, fundamentalist Muslims" were responsible for the attack, then the United States could "take out" Islam's holy places, including the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Time and time again the war on terrorism has been stressed as not a war on Islam or on Muslims. The terrorists who committed the attacks of September 11, 2001 were just as he put it, extremists. Attacking Mecca because of the actions of a radical fringe group of Muslims is just as deplorable as incarcerating Japanese Americans was during World War II. Mecca is the holiest site in Islam for all Muslims, including those who live in the United States and want nothing more than to go about their daily lives. Osama Bin Laden's followers make up only a tiny fraction of the worldwide Muslim population. It goes against the very nature of the United States to punish the entire Muslim community for the actions of a few extremists.

This is not to say that there should be no response in the event of this kind of attack. The United States would have to respond, and bring those responsible to justice. Those who planned, financed, advised, aided, abetted, and carried out an attack should be captured, brought to the United States, stand before a judge, face a jury, have a fair, public trial, and sentenced to a prison term that will have them locked up for the rest of their lives in a federal prison. But their families, their friends, and their fellow Muslims are off limits. The Constitution expressly forbids punishing a family for the crimes of one of its members. We would deny our own identity if we resorted to this extreme measure to punish what would be a relatively small number of people who attack our country.

In addition, if the United States were to attack Mecca, we would quickly have on our hands a crime to fit our punishment. All over the world, Muslims would be united against America, and we would truly have a holy war on our hands, and this time it may even be on legitimate grounds. If the war on terrorism became a war on Islam, as the bombing of Mecca would indicate, then we would be justifying Osama Bin Laden, and the September 11 attacks, as well as this theoretical future attack, would look like a small riot in comparison with the world-wide bloodshed that would follow.

Congressman Tancredo tried to walk back his comments, saying he was speaking hypothetically, but a four-term Congressman should know better. His words mean something, not only to his district in Colorado, but to the entire country and the world at large. Words like these seem to justify the very hate that brings about the terrorism we are trying to fight. Congressman Tancredo should be ashamed of what he has said. His so-called explanation has left a lot wanting. His words portray him as an out-of-touch extremist filled with hate.

There is no appropriate time to speak about bombing Mecca, just as there is no appropriate to speak about bombing Jerusalem, just as there is no appropriate time to speak about bombing Washington. And beyond all of this, there is never a time when these words should be translated into deeds.

Half a World Away, and Yet so Close to Home

I am consistently amazed by my personal experience of locations where events around the world take place. A suicide bomber murdered four people and wounded 90 others in the Israeli city of Netanya today. While it has been posted on various news web sites, America for the large part has ignored this type of attack since the war in Iraq began. While the Israeli peace process is still said to be important to this country, very often it is ignored and relegated to the back burner in the field of foreign policy. Of course it is true that a war that has American troops in harm's way should take precedence in our government over another country's security, but the security of Israel is and should be linked with the security of the United States.

Israel sits on one of the most inhospitable strips of land in the world, and has thrived in the region. It is a beautiful land, rich in history and culture. It is the center of the three great western religious movements, and, until the recent elections in Iraq, the only democracy in the Middle East. For nearly 60 years, Israel's single goal has been survival. Everything else has been secondary and subordinate to this one thing. To this end, Israel has pursued peace with its neighbors as well as with the Palestinians, and has offered everything that has ever been asked of it, only to have the offer thrown back in its face and rejected.

The bombing in Netanya today strikes especially close to home for me. Five years ago I spent six weeks in Israel, traveling around the country getting to know the culture and history personally. I spent a long weekend in Netanya, including a good amount of time at that same shopping mall, and am struck by the prospect that for at least the third time in my life, I have personal experience at a place that has seen an attack of one sort or another. Shortly after I returned home from Israel in August of 2000, the second major Palestinian uprising against Israel began. A news clip showed a group of youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem at an intersection that I recognized as being about a block from a hotel where I had spent over a week that summer. In June of 2001, I took a tour of the Pentagon, and walked around the hallways of the Department of Defense headquarters. We all remember what happened there less than three months later. Now I read about the bombing in Netanya at a place that I can picture with complete clarity in my mind.

Israel has been living with this kind of attack on almost a daily basis for close to its entire history. We in the west have only started to experience it on a larger scale for the last decade. The solution is to be vigilant, to watch for attacks, to be careful, but most importantly, to continue and maintain our way of life, and not to have the reaction that they are going for, namely to instill terror in all of us. We can find their leaders and freeze their funding, but in the last analysis the only way to end terrorism long-term is to capture the hearts and minds. The vast majority of Arabs want peace with Israel. The vast majority of Muslims want the United States as an ally. The vast majority of the followers of Islam in Great Britain just want to go about their daily lives. The few who actually want to conduct terrorism will die out. The hope is that we do not lose the next generation of minds to terrorism and extremism.

"Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost." – Abraham Lincoln.

On Open Society

On June 7, terrorists attacked London's mass transit system. Three bombs were detonated in the subway, and another destroyed a double-decker commuter bus. The attacks are deplorable. While they are on a smaller scale, and, thankfully, fewer people were killed, the attacks are no different than the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. A faceless enemy struck a vulnerable city center, killing indiscriminately and grinding the city to a halt.

Hopefully, however, this is where the similarities end and the stories of September 11 and June 7 diverge. Hopefully our friends in Great Britain will learn from the disastrous mistakes that the Bush administration, aided and abetted by the Republican-controlled Congress, has been shoving down the throats of the American people over the last four years. The Patriot Act, habeas corpus violations, and military tribunals have been hallmarks of this administration that is driven to "protect" us from anything, including ourselves and our neighbors.

This is not how a free society operates, and this is how terrorists win. When we change the very foundations of our society, when we give up those very rights and freedoms that they were trying to attack, when we give in to the fear, to the terror, that they tried to implant in us, then we are letting the terrorists win. Spying on the American people, be it through library records, phone taps, or any other totalitarian method, takes away from what we stand for. America should stand for freedom of speech and of thought, as well as freedom from fear and from tyranny. America should not be about authority and power, except for the power to persuade that comes from being honest, open, and respected.

Britain, and specifically Tony Blair, is now in the unenviable position of having to make decisions about the security of the citizens of his country. He has to decide if he will follow a model of freedom, or the model of the United States. I wish that these were the same, or at least similar, but this administration has denied all of us that. Britain now needs to lead the way in showing how a democracy responds to terrorists. Increase security in the subway, but do not go digging into personal records.

There are risks that have to be run in order to have an open society. One of these risks is that people from all over can come into the society and change it. Sometimes, as in the case of Congressman Tom Lantos of California, who came from Europe and today chairs the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, these changes are for the better. Sometimes, as in the case of terrorist attacks, they are for the worse. But an open society has to take the bad with the good. The only other option is to change the very nature of the society, and to become something that we have always fought against. The Bush administration made the wrong choice for the United States. Hopefully Tony Blair will make the right one for Great Britain.