Alex Wong: Tragedies not fodder for debate

When tragedy descends upon us, the media is often accused of throwing common decency out the window.

The stories are familiar by now. Parents learning of their child's deaths from a reporter's cold call. Camera crews camping out on a victim's front lawn. A photographer taking the time to snap photos of Princess Diana's twisted car before calling the police.

As a member of the media, I acknowledge the criticism, even though I don't agree with the stereotype. There are times -- times that occur much too often -- when other journalists not only anger me, but shame me. Two days after last week's tragic events, at a time when one would think decency would reign, Seumas Milne, a columnist with the U.K.-based Guardian, did just that.

In a vindictive potshot at the United States, and in an unabashed effort to kick us while we're down, Milne all but says that the leveling of the World Trade Center, the crashing of airliners into the Pentagon and the killing thousands of civilians was our own fault. Due to our "unabashed national egotism and arrogance," America had it coming.

In a column titled, "They can't see why they are hated," Milne purports that bitter and -- as he deems it -- justified hatred of the United States found "across the developing world" is the real reason behind these attacks. He draws a more than casual equivalence between what the United States "has visited upon the world" and what has been "visited upon" us.

In an effort to spin the most tragic event on our shores since the Civil War towards his own communist sympathies, Milne writes that the terrorists were responding to "injustices and inequalities" born from "social conditions" spawned by American world hegemony. He turns the most barbarous of terrorists into freedom fighters -- the coldest suicide bombers into martyrs.

The problem with Milne's commentary is that not only is it terribly insensitive, but it is factually myopic, obscured by his own political agenda.

He recklessly attempts to link the terrorists' actions with the world's now overwhelmingly capitalist financial system. He believes the attackers were motivated by America's unwillingness to "trouble the United Nations" when it rightly bombed the evil regimes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodon Milosevic. He thinks that if America simply lifted its embargoes on Iraq and Cuba, those airliners wouldn't have been flown into our institutions like knives stabbed into our hearts.

What he chooses to ignore is that terrorists neither represent nor draw motivation from the feelings of the world at large. They are on the fringes of civilization, beyond the borders of legitimate politics. Tuesday's terrorists were not political, but fanatically religious. People don't willingly die to protest American unilateralism.

The extreme branch of Islam most likely adopted by the attackers sees America as the "great Satan," and views any other secular government as its cohort.

The goal of Islamic extremists is not to right "social injustice" or lift unfair economic sanctions. They are fighting a religious war to place the world at their god's feet. They are not aiming to fix a flawed system. They are aiming to bring it to its knees.

If Milne was the only one making his argument of American culpability, I wouldn't be so troubled by it. I wouldn't even be writing this piece. But I've read it elsewhere, and most hurtfully, heard it here at Penn.

I left a class discussion Thursday angered by what made up the majority of comments. One student said we should have "expected" such actions since we "stick our nose" in the conflicts of other nations. Another claimed that America was "angered" by the events only because of our "ignorance" of other's people's worldview, as if the deaths of thousands wouldn't have been so bad as long as we understood the motivation behind them.

One student followed that same line of reasoning, saying that Bush's "cowboy, `we're gonna hunt you down'" rhetoric was the "exact opposite" of what he should have said, that it would only make the terrorists angrier. Maybe America should have responded with a listening ear and an acknowledging smile.

Like a rape victim being told it is her fault, these comments add fuel to the greatest pain of a generation.

As thousands lay dead under the crushing weight of burning metal, this is not an event from which to draw lessons of "tolerance" for other "worldviews." This is not an event that can be shaped to reflect anti-American political agendas.

Because this is not a matter of the United States being nicer to its neighbors. It doesn't boil down to an argument over America's role in the world. This is not a political conflict.

It is a moral one. Behind the spin, it is a war between good and evil.

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