We actually saw the second plane fly into the tower. You could see the people jumping out of the towers. Our first reaction was, maybe we should evacuate. So we start getting our stuff, at which point I was like, “Oh God, please don’t let this be a Muslim attack,” because you know it’s a terrorist attack at this point. In the past it was a Muslim faction that carried out an attack on the Twin Towers.
I decided to go over to a family friend’s place on Long Island, and the only way to do that was to walk to Penn Station, which wasn’t that bad, and catch a train out because the trains had been restored. As I took a train out it was obvious that I was frazzled, and there was this lady sitting across from me, obviously in shock as well, and at some point she looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with these people? Why do they have to kill?” I don’t think she realized I was Pakistani or pretty much from that area. I was like, “I don’t know.”’
The very next morning there were all these occurrences, like a Sikh man was killed. And to be honest nothing ever happened to me, but there was always that fear. Initially I used to carry my passport with me everywhere in case someone ever stopped me. I don’t know what good a passport would have done except to show that I was an American citizen, but, yeah, there was a tremendous fear of violence. My parents had the same feelings. They don’t live in America. At the time my dad lived in Saudi Arabia and my mom lived in Pakistan. They told me, “Don’t be too obvious, go out with your friends, and don’t go out alone.” Strangely enough, in Manhattan itself, I didn’t feel any kind of discrimination or threat at any point.
I was born in New York and moved to Pakistan when I was 12. I thought America was the greatest place. I had this attachment to the United States, which I don’t anymore. It’s the mass consumerism and capitalism that it is—the McDonald’s, the Doritos, the cartoons. I would come home and grab a bag of Doritos and watch cartoons until whatever time, and the ability to go out and buy these things—I loved it.
Then I moved to London when I was 15, and over there they don’t have such a great opinion of America. I was the one kid in politics class who thought America had a great system of democracy, and they used to laugh at me. And the more I learned I was like, Actually they’re right, you know. It’s not that great; it’s not really a democracy. And so I changed my views on what I thought of America.
And then 9/11, after the initial shock of what happened, after it all sank in and the way we reacted, it just cemented my opinion. That as great a place as this is, the way it’s run, the country is not necessarily the ideal that I thought it was when I was a kid. It just made me feel that we were kind of like a cowboy country, and the rest of the world was right in their opinion—they have been all along. I think it was a general progression of how I felt.
What 9/11 did was kind of reveal America and American foreign policy abroad. It was predominantly because of our foreign policy in the past that 9/11 happened. I think 9/11 was an opportunity to change and use the foreign support that we got to make things different, but we just went full steam ahead in the direction that we were always going. I think it revealed to a lot of people abroad what our foreign policy is.
It has been more of a dividing point in history. There is a sentiment that because of 9/11, because of the actions we’ve taken since, that it may be a changing point for America in terms of history, as in a loss in the importance of our power. The weakened dollar, the economy, especially since the war in Iraq—perhaps it’s the endgame for American dominance as far as being the sole superpower.
Regarding the attacks of 9/11, Omer believes that “there’s no justification, but there is an explanation.” He was contacted by the CIA to work as a translator in Guantánamo Bay, but he refused because he does not support the CIA’s “methodology and what they do over there.”
Mega Jain is a Rutgers-Newark student. Omer Nisar is a legal consultant for SONY/BMG.
