Donna Marsh O'Connor, the national spokesperson for the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, lost her pregnant daughter in the terror attack on September 11, 2001 in one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.
The September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows is a nationwide group founded by family members of the victims of the 2001 attacks. The group advocates non-violent options and actions in pursuit of justice, hoping to break the cycle of violence.
O'Connor spoke to Haaretz on the recent controversy surrounding a plan to build an Islamic center close to the site of the World Trade Center attack. The specific location has offended many Americans, and many around the world, who contend the proximity to the site of the attack, perpetrated by Islamist terrorists, disrespects the victims. The imam behind the initiative, however, insists that the Islamic center's goals are to inspire peace.
O'Connor, and the organization she heads, support the building of the Islamic center.
This remembrance day seems like no other, with the controversy surrounding the Islamic center meant to be built in Lower Manhattan. Why do you support this project?
"I am an American citizen, and I know that my family and many American families have the same story – families that came here to escape religious persecution. It doesn’t make sense in America that we say no to the Muslim people – to the very people who denounced this horrible tragedy. This is, in our opinion, an act of peace and understanding and reconciliation. That’s what 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows stands for."
"I have been teaching writing and rhetoric for 26 years, and I have been teaching students what rhetoric and racism are and what mechanisms are at work here – how no one thinks they are racist or bigoted, and still we are a nation that has a very bad history regarding racist tendencies and religious intolerance. These Muslim people didn’t perpetrate the crime on 9/11. 19 hijackers backed by the horrible criminal group al-Qaida did it, and also the Taliban supported that work, but not Muslim American people."
Did the Islamic center backers contact you asking to intervene on their behalf?
"No. We reached out to Daisy Khan (Executive Director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement , wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who stands behind the Park 51 initiative), though not right away. But when it was clear that they were being ripped on by a lot of people who we thought were using 9/11 families as a monolithic voice against Daisy Khan – we as an organization reached out to her to say: 'Look, we don't think you are these horrible conquerors, we don't think that this Islamic cultural center is more than just an attempt to build the facility, to support residents of Lower Manhattan with a swimming pool, with a gym, with a prayer center, with a memorial to 9/11, with all the other things this center was going to be for the use of people in Lower Manhattan.'"
"So we reached out to her to say: 'We are sorry you are going through this.' When it got huge and reached a crescendo, Daisy actually tried to call me one day, and I couldn’t talk to her – I was inundated with people from the press calling and asking why we were 9/11 family members and we didn’t agree with other 9/11 family members who basically took the position that if we are going to do this, Allah is going to kill all the Americans."
"It was so hyper inflated on the part of other people that should know better that to use the inflated inflammatory diction. I am happy they have the right to do it, just as I am happy that Imam Rauf and Daisy Kahn have the right to build this Islamic cultural center. So frankly, I never had an opportunity to have a conversation with Daisy after things got to a crescendo. But I look forward to having this conversation at some point. I don’t know what necessarily we would say, except for how stunned we are at all of this."
"But as for the question - are we collaborators and in coalition with the imam and Daisy Khan - no, we are not. We don't have to be. But we support the Muslim American efforts to build this facility. And we think it will be really shameful if they’ll be forced to move it elsewhere. I think it says to Muslim American people, who are peace-loving people and raising children in this nation, that they are another group in this nation that is not valued. I know what pain can be inflicted on groups of people when they have rhetoric shout at them in negative way."
Did it take time for you to reach this position?
"In part this was always my position. My first response was on 9/11. We were in Canada when the attacks happened, and my husband and I barely made it over the border when they closed the border to Canada. I can’t tell you what it felt like to not be on American soil during those attacks, and hearing that the Pentagon had been hit. When we got home, I remember thinking absolutely what I think today – we should not have attacked one other country before our government looked into how to keep American commercial airliners from flying into buildings. That was my number one question – how could that have happened?"
"And we need to really think about American foreign policy. I do not condone acts of terrorism – criminal acts perpetrated against civilians. It’s always horrible, evil and wrong. I don’t think there is one good reason on Earth my child had to be murdered because she went to work. At the same time I don’t think the first response to acts of violence had to be retribution. I think when we defend ourselves, we used to take measures after careful solid thought – some attempts of diplomacy. I am not naïve, I am not a pacifist, I just believe that human beings should not be murdered. And I don’t think the first act after a crime like that should be dropping a bomb."
What kind of reactions have you received?
"No matter how many people in this nation spoke out against the Iraq war, we still went to war. In 2006, when the American people elected a new Senate and Congress, we issued a mandate that we wanted the Iraq war stopped – and still no one heard us. So the response to our call that it wasn’t done in our families or in our children's names fell on deaf ears."
In the last year we saw rise in attempted domestic terrorism attacks. Do you believe that U.S. President Barack Obama was right in his approach of dialogue with the Muslim world?
"I don’t think we are ever going to stop these kinds of acts in a world once invoked language becomes part of the conversation culture. To me everything is language, everything is in a linguistic realm. And once those kinds of behaviors have been enacted, they will continue to be enacted until the emotion stops. I don‘t know any individual or government who can stop this. I think it is disingenuous of any political party to claim they are going to keep us safe. Nothing is going to keep us safe until we either run out of hate, or run out of weapons."
"I think that's unfortunate, whatever we can do to stop the hate, the motivation for using the weapons. But we are always going to have criminals and criminal behavior. Law enforcement is something we can get better at, but I think it is really part and parcel of what has happened in the U.S. over the past 9 years – that anything that occurs has political ramifications and political use. And I think that it’s exacerbating the crisis. To me it’s like throwing oil on a fire."
Some people claim that there are legitimate reasons to be wary of Islam. For example, you never hear about Buddhist terrorist attacks.
"I am not going to dismiss horror that was perpetrated on our nation on 9/11. I would be the last person to minimize it. My kid is dead and I miss her profoundly. I am not diminishing terrorism. It's a natural thing to fear that thing happening again and from those same people. But as a nation we had 9 years of 'be afraid' from our leaders, when one said: 'Let’s get Saddam Hussein.' And we went as a nation and started war in Iraq when Osama Bin-Laden was nowhere near Iraq, looked nothing like Saddam Hussein. So part of this anti-Muslim sentiment comes out of 9 years of this fear mongering. That's the part of our leaders, it could have been minimized – but it wasn’t."
"Since 9/11, I have known a lot of ordinary American people who never would have said 'Look what those Muslims have done.' They never would have said that. Now they think they are doing me a favor, as a person who lost a loved one in September 11, by saying, 'Look at those terrible people – and they are trying to rub your nose in this Ground Zero mosque victory.' And I’d like to ask them – who told you that? Where you are getting this from? Two months ago, you would never have said that. Why would you say it now? And clearly it’s because of what we’ve been told for 9 years. And it’s wrong."
Do you go to the remembrance ceremonies?
"I never go to the ceremony at Ground Zero, because it was used for political purposes for several years, and frankly, it is excruciating for me to see it replayed in this way. I have spent 9/11 speaking out on certain issues, I have spent 9/11 at home with my family, trying to forget that 9/11 is a day when everybody remembers this horrific crime, as most of us live with it every single day of our lives. I have spent it at my daughter's grave. I will never, however, think that it’s okay to participate in this ceremony until it’s said that the way 9/11 was used at a nation is over. And on that day, I might participate."
A couple of years ago you urged the government to reopen the investigation.
"I will never do it again. It’s over, because I think that we have choice in our lives: to continue to be angry, or to move on with our lives. I have two sons and I want them to see a happy, forgiving and loving mother. And I want them to see me experiencing joy again. And it’s over for me. If American people are comfortable with the fact that 18 minutes of air traffic control didn’t mean that my daughter was saved, and no one wanted a deeper investigation – I am not going to ask any more for it, it’s over for me. It’s better to move on. Whatever happened on that day will be discovered at some point, not in my lifetime. I am done with that, I will never do it again publicly."
So why do you stay involved in the current project, 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows?
"It’s a group of family members that get together and say: there is a different response to violence, than anger, hate and retribution and more war. We don’t believe its advancing the cause for peace and we believe that all people should have the opportunity to live in peace."
Some 9/11 first responders claim that they feel abandoned.
"When congress is debating whether or not 9/11 first responders – and some of them weren’t even from New York, they came from all over the country – it was months digging through the pile. How we could ever say, 'We are going to think whether or not to pay for your medical expenses?' That it mind boggling. They were abandoned. They are not me, they are not my family, but I feel like they singlehandedly, in many cases, tried to save my daughter, that’s my feeling for them. They are heroic, and America has abandoned them – they shouldn’t go and ask for help. We should have been there with open arms for them."
Do you feel safe in today’s America?
"There are so many threats. I guess I am afraid right now of a kind of hate that is growing, where political leaders are capitalizing on our fears. And I actually had a conversation on radio yesterday with a woman named Hedy Epstein, who is a Holocaust survivor – and her thinking about what is happening around Ground Zero and the way it’s being exploited, the way terrorism is being exploited by some people for political reasons. Her feeling was that there was a kind of rampant fear and intolerance running through Germany before Hitler came to power. And I am worried that when and if fascism comes here, we won’t even have resources to recognize it before it’s full blown – and there won’t be allies to save us."
"I think sometimes we all get caught up in what acts of war and aggression ought to be – we forget to stop and think of what are the logical consequences of maintaining this level of hostility. I am one of those people trying to say simply 'Can we just take a look and understand that the logical consequences are dire?' And so, for me, the only comfort is to talk to people like Hedy Epstein who say, 'The biggest danger, the biggest threat to America is that we will scare ourselves into fascism, or into war.' That is, I think, the biggest danger here."
