Today marks the eighth anniversary of 9/11. On this fateful day, Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed two of them into New York's Twin Towers, the third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and the last one went down into a field in rural Pennsylvania after some of the crew and passengers fought back and tried to regain control of the plane. More than 3,000 people died with thousands more left injured. The tragedy has gone down in history as one of the worst terrorist attacks ever made on a country and its people.
I remember that I was working as nurse here in Riyadh when it happened. I was on morning shift and going about my duties as usual. Then I got a call from my mother, who was also working in the hospital, and she told me that something terrible had happened in the US but nobody had any concrete details as to what it was. Since our patients' rooms had TVs, my colleague and I tried to sneak a view while attending to one of them. The man was a mutawwa and was avidly watching the news unfold on the tube. We couldn't understand what was being reported, since it was in Arabic, but he noticed that we were watching and tried to explain to us what was happening. We couldn't understand him much but we were able to gather from what we saw and from what he said that a building in New York had been destroyed by terrorists. We were, however, unprepared for what he said to us next: Alhamdulillah which means "Praise to God". My friend Julie and I were horrified that this man was thanking God for the dreadful incident. We immediately left the room feeling shocked and disgusted that a person could actually rejoice over the loss of so many innocent human lives.
It's sad that to this day, world peace is still just a dream. I doubt it will be attained in my lifetime but I fervently hope that there will come a time when we can all learn to live with each other, accept and understand our differences and learn to live as one. The sooner, the better.
Mood Music: Imagine by John Lennon