Responding to Terror

 

By Richard Wilkinson

 

Associate Professor of International Relations Maryann Cusimano Love was supposed to be at the Pentagon at 9:30 a.m. the day that the Boeing 747 crashed into that building at 9:40 a.m.  She was scheduled to report to the part of the Pentagon that the plane destroyed. But her 1972 Volkswagen wouldn’t start that morning. The battery — although only a year and a half old — was dead. 

 

When her husband tried to jump-start the car, the engine still wouldn’t turn over. So she had to miss the appointment.

 

From left: Rebecca Sesny, Mary McHale and Kara Crawford, all seniors, join hundreds of other students in paying tribute to more than 50 friends and relatives of members of the CUA community who perished in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

She planned to be at the Pentagon that morning to renew her security clearance, since she teaches a CUA class there entitled Security After the Cold War — part of Catholic University’s master’s and doctoral programs for Pentagon employees. Ironically, the class she teaches addresses ways to protect our country from the kind of terrorist threat that was visited upon the Pentagon that day.

 

“My grandfather says my guardian angel was looking out for me,” Professor Love says.  “I feel blessed, but I hate to focus on it because so many others did not have such happy endings.”

 

Professor Love and her CUA students who are Pentagon employees represent just a few of the many connections between Catholic University and the terrorism of Sept. 11.

 

One of the most tragic connections is that one of the passengers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was Columbus School of Law Lecturer Karen Kincaid. A partner in the law firm of Wiley Rein & Fielding, Ms. Kincaid had joined Catholic University’s faculty just three weeks before her death, teaching a class entitled Legal Externship: Becoming a Communications Lawyer. She is survived by her husband and several siblings.

 

Other members of the extended CUA community died Sept. 11. The father of a current CUA student perished in the World Trade Center.  Many other relatives and friend of students and students’ families also died in the attacks.

 

A few Catholic University alumni are currently presumed to have been among the thousands killed in New York City on Sept. 11.  More happily, several alumni who worked in the World Trade Center escaped death, including Shawn Lenahan, B.S. Arch. 1987, B.A. Arch. 1988, who was working on the 65th floor of the first tower that was hit. It took him an hour and 15 minutes to walk down the stairs because of the dozens of firemen going up and burn victims on stretchers being carried down.  The building collapsed 10 minutes after he got out.

 

Since the crisis of Sept. 11, CUA has responded with the following events:

Students and faculty filled the Columbus School of Law atrium for a symposium on terrorism held the day after the attacks.

 

 

In addition, CUA Counseling Center staff met with distraught students on the day of the attack and thereafter, and the university community organized blood-donor drives to aid the victims of terrorism.

 

A Vigil for the Dead

 

“We have felt great fear this past week. Take heart: Christ was fearful at Gethsemane,” said Brian Fox, president of CUA’s Graduate Student Association, in an address at the Sept. 18 candlelight vigil.

 

“We lift God’s light high in these dark days,” said the Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., President, as he led hundreds of students, faculty and staff in lifting lighted candles “as a sign that CUA remembers but also that no power on earth, no grief, no fear, no person can every extinguish our hope.”

 

Making personal connections to the tragedy, more than 50 CUA students at the vigil filed to the podium, each reciting the name of a different CUA student’s parent, relative or friend who died in the terrorist attacks. Organized by the Office of Campus Ministry, the vigil also included the establishment of “Walls of Hope” — huge placards on which members of the university community wrote prayers and messages of hope in remembrance of the victims.

 

The terrorist attack “is causing me to have a much deeper faith than I had before — because we have been tested,” staff member Judy Falk said after the vigil. After something so drastic has happened, said the secretary in the Department of Psychology, “it’s very positive to have to be focused on God.”

 

“I think it unites us,” agreed Maria Cortez, administrative assistant in the Department of Education. “I think we’ve drawn away from God, and this is drawing us back.”

 

A Just Response to Terrorism

 

Catholic moral teaching does not rule out a military response to the attacks, said at least one of the 10 professors who spoke at the Sept. 12 law school symposium, “A Just Response to Terrorist Warfare.” But the speakers said that both the Catholic “just war” tradition and U.S.-signed international agreements limit permissible motivations for waging war to self-defense and the maintenance of order — not mere retaliation or vengeance. The speakers weighed possible U.S. responses — military, political, economic and juridical (e.g., war crimes tribunals and extradition of terrorists to stand trial in the United States) — all of which are problematic or difficult to implement in such a case of terrorism perpetrated by individuals not aligned with a nation-state.

 

Speaking before up to 200 law students who filled the law school’s atrium and the surrounding corridors on the second and third floors, the professors groped for an effective but measured response to the attack, but also left room for self-reflection on what God might be saying to us as Americans.

At the Sept. 18 candlelight vigil, students remember the victims of terror and respond as Father O’Connell urges them to “lift God’s light high in these dark days.”

 

“God is the Lord of history, and he chastens the ones he loves,” said Professor William J. Wagner. This attack could be God’s call for the United States to reform, he said, mentioning, in particular, the depravity of much of the American media, in which “violence like yesterday’s is a staple of our entertainment. If those who perpetrate these crimes are motivated in part by the perception that American cultural influences around the world are destructive of the fabric of society, what can we say in our defense? Can we really fail to realize how base the culture has become which we export and promote throughout the world?”

 

Unfortunately, added Professor Robert A. Destro, history shows that in times of war, Americans have looked around for domestic populations as targets of their suspicion. It happened in World War II, when the United States interned Japanese-Americans and some Italian and German immigrants. “We tend to suspect recent immigrants,” he said. “In this crisis, those of minority religions will likely be the targets. American Muslims will be put to the test in a very big way.”

 

In order to better understand Muslims and Islam, Professor Destro said that Catholic University will expand its series of meetings and lectures that focus on developing understanding among religious groups on issues of mutual importance. These meetings on religion, culture and law have been sponsored or co-sponsored by the law school’s Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion and by CUA’s Center for the Study of Culture and Values.

 

“I thought the symposium, coming only one day after the attack, would be an emotional meeting designed to place blame for the attack,” said Bassel Bakhos, an Arab-American law student, “but the professors expressed their views respectfully on how the United States can respond under Catholic teachings and international law.  I also appreciated what Professor Destro announced about the university setting up lectures to help students understand Islam.”

 

The symposium was reassuring and well organized on short notice, said Munjed Ahmad, another CUA law student who is a Muslim of Palestinian descent. “I liked the differentiation the speakers made between Islam and Islamists [the latter being those who promote Islam as a political force, according to the symposium speakers],” Mr. Ahmad said. “There is a huge misunderstanding of Islam in the Western world, and a lot of false generalizations about Muslims. Myself and other Arab students at CUA are concerned about the safety of American Muslims.”

 

To help prevent and combat hate crimes against Muslims, President George W. Bush met with American Muslim leaders on Sept. 17, one of whom was Catholic University’s Associate Professor of Business and Economics Jamshed Y. Uppal.

 

Understanding Islam

 

At the Sept. 20 panel discussion designed to foster a better understanding of Islam and stem unprovoked reprisals on American Muslims, Professor of Anthropology Jon Anderson spoke of the diversity of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, their history of civilization that incorporated Christians and Jews, and the situation of Muslims today.  “There is nothing like the Inquisition in Muslim history,” he noted.  “But there is a century of Western takeovers of Muslim lands that has left many angry. 

 

“Most Muslims around the world are positively engaged with the West,” Professor Anderson said. “The conflict we now face is not one of Islam versus the West. Rather, there are many conflicts pitting the Third World against the West,” and in those conflicts religion is a powerful means for mobilizing people. 

 

The motivation of religion cuts both ways.  Professor Anderson mentioned a Muslim scholar whom he recently asked to give a talk on Islam and said, "He replied, ‘I’ll go anywhere and talk anytime about Islam, because terrorists have hijacked my religion.’"

 

Another panel speaker, John Borelli of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, urged individual Christians to pledge their friendship to individual U.S. Muslims and offer to accompany frightened Muslims on errands or carry out the errands for them.

 

The panel discussion was sponsored by the School of Religious Studies’ Institute for Interreligious Study and Dialogue.

 

Seizing the Opportunity

 

Professor Love, whose car trouble kept her from driving to the Pentagon on the morning of the attack, sees the opportunity for America to learn from the tragedy of Sept. 11. “For the past several years I have been writing, teaching and speaking around the world for a Council on Foreign Relations project, warning of the vulnerabilities of our present trade and transportation infrastructures to terrorism,” she wrote after the attack. “My sound bite has been ‘Terrorists and tourists alike use the same infrastructure.’

 

“The very open societies and open economies we all enjoy make us vulnerable to the downsides of globalization:  terrorism, international crime, etc.  Great cooperation between the public and private sectors is needed, since most of the vulnerable infrastructures (like the airlines) are privately owned and operated.

 

“As an academic working within the security policy community,” she wrote, “usually one works hard to be right, but there is no pleasure this week in being right about what has occurred.  However, there is a teachable moment now. Beyond the current short-term concern with military response lies the more pressing long-term concern with how we will organize ourselves internally to better manage the risks of the changed world we live in.”