Rev. Dr. Chris Ayers
A Good Sunday To Listen To Osama bin Laden (if we take the gospel seriously)
Our scripture lesson reports the celebration of the death of the Egyptians.
This Sunday we mourn the tremendous loss of American lives a decade ago. Today, as is true of all days, is a good day for us not to celebrate the deaths of our enemies, but to listen to our enemies.
There is no defense for Osama bin Laden’s actions. The question for us is there a defense for some of our actions. Is there any understanding of why certain people would hate our country? Is there any justification for any part of our enemies’ feelings toward us? Only when these questions are addressed will the vicious cycle of violence have a chance of being broken.
To love an enemy you must first listen to the enemy.
I have to confess I have never listened to Osama bin Laden. I tuned him out. Upon his death, though, I read a speech of his shared with the public in October of 2004.
People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.
We fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Today I feel sadness.
Prayers, many prayers, for all the survivors of loved ones who died on 9-11. And prayers for the survivors of loved ones killed by US violence.
