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240 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

More specific to the challenges of 9/11 and its aftermath, though, is the
particular way the East is represented in the West, and vice versa. My
students expressed the feeling that they had not been well served by media
that have been shown by their nature to be inordinately focused on the
developed world and myopic about international news beyond a few key
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areas of US special interest, such as Israel. Also significant is the obverse,
the issue of how American and Western lives, interests, and values are
portrayed in the other direction. At the root of these concerns, of course, is
an issue near to McLuhan’s concerns, that is how global understanding is
or is not served by the media we consume. There is no doubt that, in all
respects, the events of 9/11, their precursors, and their consequences were
rooted in a mediated knowledge base. This makes 9/11 a media issue in a
fundamental way, to the extent that we are concerned about its roots in
ideology and values, and about ways it might have been avoided or its
causes and consequences ameliorated. That so much of its motivation and
its reception were framed by religious ideas makes it by definition an issue
of media and religion, something that we’ll look at in more detail next.

Media as the source of Islamist critiques
In their early coverage of the attacks, the so-called “mainstream media” of
North America and the West attempted to describe for the first time in a
comprehensive way the roots of Islamist ire against American and Western
culture. While we should not forget that, for most critics, fundamental
political realities of US foreign policy and historic international behavior
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are at the root of the problem, there is no denying that a cultural/moral
critique also motivated the 9/11 attackers. Press reports of Al-Qaida and
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its motivations stressed this moral critique. Simply put, Al-Qaida and
Islamist movements more generally identify their challenge to the West in
historic terms, and identify Western values, particularly Western moral
values, as an important underlying motivation for their particular jihad.A
press report at the time of the attacks quoted a young Islamist seminary
student from Pakistan, “We are happy that many kaffirs (infidels) were
killed in the World Trade Center. We targeted them because they were
kaffirs, unbelievers.” 18
This was echoed in the instructions given to the attackers themselves.
Referring to the passengers they would encounter – and ultimately kill –
on the planes, the instructions carried by Mohammed Atta and others
referred to them as sacrificial animals. “You must make your knife sharp
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and must not discomfort your animal during slaughter,” they said. There
was of course concern that some of the attackers might have become
enculturated during their time in the US, and Atta felt it necessary to
remind them that their basic struggle was against the apostate and
depraved West. It was essential to think of the victims of the attacks in