*Hijackers who took over and crashed the four airplanes on September 11 came from countries now blockading Qatar
Seventeen years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, long enough for an entire generation to grow up under its shadow. Kids born on 9/11 are beginning their senior year in high school and finalising their college applications and people must be in their 20s to hold any direct memories of the day itself.
As a college instructor teaching the history and politics of the modern Middle East, I really became aware of the generational shift when I heard my students talking about 9/11 the way I do about the Iranian revolution as something that happened before my time but whose legacy continues to resonate powerfully today. There is nothing quite like realising that one’s students were barely born when events took place that still seem as if they happened yesterday to make one feel they are getting old.
As with any other major world event, the inexorable passage of 9/11 from lived experience into history triggers a secondary debate about how memories of that era-defining day are recalled. Throughout the ages, history and memory have been contested and recreated as time has passed and agendas have changed. In Britain, the way the First World War was remembered shifted markedly in the 1950s as the generation of parents of the soldiers who had died in that war passed away and the horrors of 1914-18 were superseded by those of the Second World War. As it became more socially acceptable in Britain to question why the First World War had been fought in the first place, radical critiques such as Oh! What a Lovely War and The Donkeys redefined popular images of the war for an entire generation, immortalised in the lampooning of the bungling generals in Blackadder Goes Forth in the early 1990s.
Memories of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC have come under renewed focus over the past year as they have intersected with the Gulf crisis caused by the blockade of Qatar by four regional states posing as an ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Between them, the four members of the so-called Quartet – Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – constituted the nationalities of 18 of the 19 hijackers who took over and crashed the four airplanes on 9/11. Moreover, the attacks were masterminded by a Saudi citizen, albeit one who had been stripped of his citizenship by the Saudi authorities and were facilitated by funding which largely flowed through Dubai on its way to the US.
And yet, one of the first acts of the 'Anti-Terror Quartet' was to commission a documentary by Sky News Arabia – a joint venture between the UK-based Sky group and the Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a leading figure in Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. The documentary – for which I was approached to appear in but declined out of concern at its lack of integrity – sought to recast the entire history of 9/11 by focusing on the role of its mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, and the circumstances of his time and departure from Qatar in the mid-1990s.
Qatar…The Road to Manhattan covered material that had long been in the public domain and was catalogued in the official report of the 9/11 Commission that was released in 2004. While the circumstances of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed’s time in Qatar are indeed damning, using an event from 1996 to pin 9/11 on Qatar is a stretch, and the documentary’s producers inexplicably omitted another mention of 1996 in the 9/11 Commission Report which had noted that the plane that carried Osama bin Laden from his exile in Sudan to his new haven in Afghanistan made a stopover in the UAE.
It is inevitable that the meaning of historical events will change over time, but we live in a world of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ that give new meaning to George Orwell’s famous line from 1984 that "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." It was perhaps no surprise that the day of the hacking of the Qatar News Agency, an article recalling the Khalid Sheikh Mohamed episode was published in Foreign Policy by a senior figure at the Foundation of the Defence of Democracies to coincide with a conference that it later transpired was financed by funds later traced back to special interests acting on behalf of the UAE.
In this environment where perceptions are mixed with facts and fiction until they become indistinguishable from one another narratives matter, especially to a White House that took office in January 2017 with so little experience or interest in international affairs, and which showed itself so vulnerable to influence-shaping attempts in its turbulent opening months in office which now are being investigated by Robert Mueller and his team. ([email protected])
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen Baker
As with any other major world event, the inexorable passage of 9/11 from lived experience into history triggers a secondary debate about how memories of that era-defining day are recalled. Throughout the ages, history and memory have been contested and recreated as time has passed and agendas have changed. In Britain, the way the First World War was remembered shifted markedly in the 1950s as the generation of parents of the soldiers who had died in that war passed away and the horrors of 1914-18 were superseded by those of the Second World War. As it became more socially acceptable in Britain to question why the First World War had been fought in the first place, radical critiques such as Oh! What a Lovely War and The Donkeys redefined popular images of the war for an entire generation, immortalised in the lampooning of the bungling generals in Blackadder Goes Forth in the early 1990s.
Memories of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC have come under renewed focus over the past year as they have intersected with the Gulf crisis caused by the blockade of Qatar by four regional states posing as an ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Between them, the four members of the so-called Quartet – Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – constituted the nationalities of 18 of the 19 hijackers who took over and crashed the four airplanes on 9/11. Moreover, the attacks were masterminded by a Saudi citizen, albeit one who had been stripped of his citizenship by the Saudi authorities and were facilitated by funding which largely flowed through Dubai on its way to the US.
And yet, one of the first acts of the 'Anti-Terror Quartet' was to commission a documentary by Sky News Arabia – a joint venture between the UK-based Sky group and the Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a leading figure in Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. The documentary – for which I was approached to appear in but declined out of concern at its lack of integrity – sought to recast the entire history of 9/11 by focusing on the role of its mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, and the circumstances of his time and departure from Qatar in the mid-1990s.
Qatar…The Road to Manhattan covered material that had long been in the public domain and was catalogued in the official report of the 9/11 Commission that was released in 2004. While the circumstances of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed’s time in Qatar are indeed damning, using an event from 1996 to pin 9/11 on Qatar is a stretch, and the documentary’s producers inexplicably omitted another mention of 1996 in the 9/11 Commission Report which had noted that the plane that carried Osama bin Laden from his exile in Sudan to his new haven in Afghanistan made a stopover in the UAE.
It is inevitable that the meaning of historical events will change over time, but we live in a world of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ that give new meaning to George Orwell’s famous line from 1984 that "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." It was perhaps no surprise that the day of the hacking of the Qatar News Agency, an article recalling the Khalid Sheikh Mohamed episode was published in Foreign Policy by a senior figure at the Foundation of the Defence of Democracies to coincide with a conference that it later transpired was financed by funds later traced back to special interests acting on behalf of the UAE.
In this environment where perceptions are mixed with facts and fiction until they become indistinguishable from one another narratives matter, especially to a White House that took office in January 2017 with so little experience or interest in international affairs, and which showed itself so vulnerable to influence-shaping attempts in its turbulent opening months in office which now are being investigated by Robert Mueller and his team. ([email protected])