National security reporter Spencer Ackerman talks about how the censorious post-9/11 culture cancelled Susan Sontag and "the Ground Zero mos
In the book, you recounted how the writer Susan Sontag was "cancelled" for a post-9/11 New Yorker essay in which she argued that the attacks were politically motivated as a reaction to US foreign policy â and that it wasn't because the terrorists "hated us for our freedoms." Why was that a significant moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?
The point of canceling Sontag was to make sure that others didn't rally to that cause. The point of canceling Sontag was making sure the connection between 9/11 and US foreign policy was considered a toxic, scandalous, victim-blaming thing to discuss. And it had the effect of really scaring people in the mainstream discourse away from making this really vital connection that the more the United States tries to violently dominate the Muslim world, the more a violent response is going to happen as a result.
That's not remotely the same thing as blaming the 3,000 Americans who Al-Qaeda murdered on 9/11. But cancelling Sontag collapsed that distinction, and removed it from respectable discourse. Once that is accomplished, without a historical or material analysis of what led to 9/11, the foreign policy response could proceed unimpeded down a very violent path.
As you note in the book, the rock band The Strokes â who were never bigger than right at the moment in 2001 â had to remove the song "New York City Cops" from their debut album because of the line "New York City Cops, they ain't too smart." And then there was Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer's disturbingly cryptic comment that Americans "need to watch what they say." People talk a lot about how 9/11 was a moment of great tragedy that ultimately united us. That it was a good moment. But there was a real air of menace about what was or was not ok to say.
First off, I ride for "New York City Cops." That is the best Strokes song. I got an advance copy of the record while working at my college paper. I remember listening and saying, "This one's good. And this song is good. But this song is amazing." And that was "New York City Cops." And then when the record finally comes out, it's not there.
This was barely two years after the NYPD murder of Amadou Diallo with 41 shots in his own vestibule for holding up a wallet. Suddenly, you could not talk about that anymore. You couldn't portray people in uniform as anything but the most selfless of heroes. It was very conspicuous to me how that narrative was promulgated by the people who very likely have the least actual contact with people in uniform.
9/11 was a cancel culture, as we would understand it today. It was extremely censorious, especially in a way that fed into nativism, to sort out real Americans from conditional Americans. After 9/11, a still unknown number of Muslims, immigrants, people from majority Muslim countries, and people presumed to be Muslim from New York and New Jersey were shuffled into the Metropolitan Corrections Center in Sunset Park and effectively disappeared for long periods of time.
People had to flee their neighborhoods out of fear of deportation or fear of arrest. These were people who had come to America seeking not just safety, but seeking prosperity and seeking freedom. Basically, people who came to America seeking what America tells you it is on the package. And they learned quite quickly who the so-called national unity was directed against.
In the book, you recount in great detail the "Ground Zero Mosque" episode from 2010 â where bad faith actors shut down plans for a community center that wasn't a mosque and wasn't at Ground Zero. Why was it an important episode in War on Terror culture?
A critical aspect of this is that the War on Terror had been going terribly, particularly the Iraq War. And there was a cognitive dissonance on the nativist right, whereby its American exceptionalism was glitching over the fact that people that they considered little better than subhuman were able to frustrate the United States' grand military ambitions. Accordingly, [the right] went seeking enemies they could beat far closer to home.
And one of the ways they had always been successful since the start of the 9/11 era was to constrain the space for American Muslims to feel free and to meaningfully contribute to civic life. And nowhere did this crystallize more intensely than over this community center that these very bourgeois people tried to create in Manhattan. It was basically a Muslim version of the 92nd Street Y, which is a Jewish space in New York City, but its Jewishness is a background aspect of it compared to what it offers the intellectual life of the city.
It was the right and, we also have to confront it, 9/11 survivors and the relatives of those who perished. They had been so misled by the 9/11 era and by the political and journalistic discourse about who was truly responsible for 9/11. [It was depicted as] the equivalent of Mehmed the Conqueror transforming Hagia Sophia into a mosque after his conquest of Constantinople. They called this proposed community center a "victory mosque."
It was of course, no such thing. But the point wasn't to accurately reflect what this thing was. The point was an assertion of dominance and to constrain the space for Muslims to exist safely and freely in the United States. There was an intensity to the response, and it entirely intimidated all of the so-called liberal allies of the project in the city, from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the city council to mainstream Democratic politicians like Harry Reed â who was the Senate Democratic leader at the time and said that the mosque ought to move. He was aligned in that view with Donald Trump.
I've come to believe this was a moment that flipped a switch. In retrospect, I think that's where a Trump-like figure becomes inevitable.
