Empathy is the essence of tragedy. To be able to mourn for others we have to feel their loss and make it our own. Most Americans never lost anyone on September 11. Most never knew anyone who died that day in the planes above or the buildings below. And yet we as a nation felt that blow. Their pain was our pain. And that response was not limited to the United States as millions of people beyond these shores reached out and took in the full weight of that tragedy and grief.
All-American Muslim: The Day the World Changed, an episode of the reality series that has the cast interacting emotionally with the attacks of September 11, is less about those who were murdered on that day than about the cast’s feelings and exploitation of that day. It may be unfair to criticize the cast of a reality television show for being self-centered. An obsessive focus on one’s own feelings and needs to the exclusion of all else seems to be a standard prerequisite for appearing on one of these shows. The perfect reality show performer must be a sociopath or capable of playing one on television. And yet this self-centered reaction to the attacks of September 11 is disturbingly common among Muslim leaders and activists in the United States.
Perhaps the most odious aspect of this is the incorporation of the Islamophobia theme into a day of remembrance for the dead, until the very act of remembrance becomes tarred with accusations of bigotry. Every commemoration of the day by Muslim leaders seems determined to not only foist the Islamophobia myth on us, but to also associate it with some national overreaction to that day. Like the family of a cop killer arriving at a memorial determined to make their own sense of victimization the center of attention, the need by some Muslims to turn their own sense of victimization into the focus of September 11 is inappropriate and flies on the face of what should be basic decency.
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