A Gay Man Who Works in the Media World Rebukes His Friends and Family For Their Willful Blindness to Jihad

I have worked in the media world all my life. I have written and produced music, written fiction,  owned an Advertising Agency, and worked in Advertising and Media in various capacities for over twenty years.

Other than the fact that he is coming from the point-of-view of being gay, this man's testimonial very closely resembles my own.

From Big Hollywood:

Dear friends,

I probably should have done this a long time ago, but it has been too convenient (though hardly easy) to simply keep my mouth shut and try not to displease people or get myself into “trouble” in so-called polite society. I’ve always been a people pleaser, constantly changing my opinion to suit others - and frankly, most of the time, I’ve actually been afraid of saying what I really think. But I’m pushing 50 now, I’ve been through a lot – as we all have - and I simply cannot do it anymore.

I am gay and I am American. I didn’t choose either, but those are the facts. I have spent a lifetime working hard to overcome guilt and fear about being gay – and in my lifetime, I have seen a lot of progress in our society regarding the acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex relationships. No matter what obstacles gay people have faced, and no matter who was President, things have always moved forward. That’s a good thing, and at this late stage in my life I see that America is one of few places on earth where that is possible. A lot of people who do not live here are well aware of America as a place of change. But it has taken me all these decades to understand and appreciate how unique and special that is in this world.

Like many people, particularly the young people I work with today, I grew up comfortably and with very little knowledge of American history. I took a lot of things for granted. There were always looming threats, like the atom bomb I had recurring nightmares about as a child – dreams in which my parents and I were in an airplane, flying low over scorched, blackened earth. And I often wondered why, when we were bombarded with endless images of starving children in Africa, that we had a color television and plenty of food at home. I used to worry that we might, like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale, suddenly lose everything and end up on the street – or worse. Certainly, that has happened to real people throughout history, and still happens every single day. But we were lucky.

I always had a sense of being in a luxurious bubble – that could burst at any moment.

On the morning of 9/11, the bubble burst. All my childhood fears of the Brothers Grimm came true – especially for people in my home town. I was glad to be thousands of miles away in sunny LA, which had always seemed to me like a safe place. But as a boy, I had watched those towers go up from our terrace, and I was stunned just like everybody else at the magnitude and horror of the destruction. I am grateful that I was not there to see body parts hitting the sidewalks, or to smell the burning bodies and debris, which I was told you could smell way uptown for weeks. I got out of there just in time. For once, my timing had been perfect (I had relocated in July 2001).

But here in LA, something equally bizarre was happening – or my eyes were being opened to it for the very first time – and it was almost as difficult to comprehend as the devastation. Literally within hours of the attack, an old school chum, now also living in LA, forwarded me a mass email from MoveOn.org – urging people not to give in to their feelings of fear and anger (normal in a grieving process), but to ask why this violence had been directed at us and to take a hard look at what we had done to inspire such an act.

I had never heard of MoveOn.org before. I had always just assumed that my friends and I were on the same smart, liberal wavelength – wanting equal rights for gays and women and minorities, cynical about the US government, distrustful of evangelical Christians and rightwing bigots, suspicious of American history as portrayed in patriotic films and in the textbooks of my boyhood – the usual stuff. The few times I had voted, I simply hit every lever that had a “D” next to it. That’s how I was raised. That’s what I believed in.

But this email was different. I met my friend for dinner and we talked about the attacks, the details that were coming out, this weird religion that appeared to be behind it all. I knew nothing about Islam or the Middle East, except that they had been calling for “death to America” recently and there was always a lot of violence over Israel – which frankly, I could not even locate on a map. I always pictured Israel as an island where Great Britain is. And I was 41 years old.

I was frightened. While I personally did not know anyone who had been killed, I knew several people who had lost family – and there was Berry Berenson, whom I had met briefly and spoken to on the phone and spent years pondering and analyzing and writing about, who was one of the victims on the first plane that hit the WTC. The thought of what the last 45 minutes of her life must have been like haunted and terrified me for a long, long time. Like so many other people, I was scared, mad, confused, a jumble of feelings.

My friend John, an NYPD officer and a very liberal guy, lost his wife in the attack. When I finally touched based with him again a few months later, he would often tell me proudly about the sensitivity training the NYPD was undergoing - even despite the fact that the department had been informed of hundreds of sleeper cells spread all over the NY/NJ area.

He also told me how, during the 4th of July fireworks at the FDR Drive, officers he knew had detained a Middle Eastern couple. The couple had asked a cop, in English, where the restrooms were; later that night, they were found wandering beneath the FDR Drive, snapping photos of the structural underbelly. When they were brought in for questioning, they pretended not to speak a word of English.

It took years for John’s wife’s remains to be found. They had two sons, who were too frightened to live in NYC anymore after that. John sent them to boarding school in another state.

Meanwhile, back in LA, my old school friend paid lip service to the tragedy of it all and to the disturbing emotions that were running high. But she was always quick to remind me of what the MoveOn.org email had said: we needed to ask why - and we needed to learn to listen. She had taken a Native American Talking Stick Circle workshop; she and others were taught to pass the “talking stick” and to listen quietly as whoever’s turn it was to hold the stick, spoke. When you got the stick, then it was your turn to speak.

I didn’t argue with her, though the anecdote struck me as more than condescending. And the meaning was clear: 3000 people had been murdered in Manhattan, but it was just part of a broader human dialogue. America was arrogant and hadn’t listened, and now we were paying the price – so don’t be emotional, we deserve it. We need to rise above the violence and hear what the perpetrators are trying to tell us – after all, they are downtrodden. We owe them.

I tried to process this line of thinking, but it was so soon after the attack, it only added to my guilt, confusion and anger. Meanwhile, the MoveOn.org emails kept being forwarded to me everyday, with similar messages. It began to seem like MoveOn.org did not want ordinary people like myself to go through a full grieving process – which would include, at the very least, a period of anger (denial), and then sadness. There seemed to be a mass effort afoot to undermine peoples’ natural human reaction to 9/11 – to take away the power of their emotions, and try to replace those emotions with correct thinking ASAP. (In retrospect, someone must have been very afraid of those emotions.)

I was very torn about this. I certainly didn’t want to antagonize anyone. I had always thought I was a cool person. Maybe I wasn’t? Part of me felt guilty for being angry. I wondered if it was wrong - when in fact it was perfectly natural.

In early November 2001, I was at another friend’s house one evening, watching the NBC Nightly News. During a commercial break, the words HAPPY RAMADAN suddenly flashed on the screen, then vanished. I wasn’t sure what I had just seen – or if I had really seen it at all. It was so fast, subliminal. My friend wasn’t sure he had really seen it either. We looked at each other, perplexed. On top of that, I couldn’t recall any network ever celebrating Ramadan before – I barely even knew what Ramadan was. Yet right after mass devastation in my home town, suddenly there it was on the screen. HAPPY RAMADAN - blink and you missed it. We saw the words flash one more time after that, then no more.

I wondered why NBC had done that. More to the point: why had they been so sneaky about it? What were they trying to prove? Were they afraid that angry Americans - like me - were going to grab torches and pitchforks and hunt down Middle Easterners en masse? Or were they trying to reassure Arab-Americans that our hearts were in the right place? The more I thought about it, the more insulting it seemed – to everyone. Yes, people were angry. And yes, there were some cases of vandalism and violence against Arab-Americans. But surprisingly few. For the most part, Americans did not act on their feelings of fury and revenge. We tried to understand what we were feeling and tried to understand what was really going on. There were no lynchings. Still, someone in Rockefeller Center obviously thought very little of their viewership.

People I knew were generally very quick to blame their own country for the attack, and this notion was spreading fast. The ongoing email campaign didn’t hurt. Under most circumstances, I would have been happy to join in with this idea – there was comfort in it. It was familiar. But for the first time in my life, I felt it was inappropriate, and too easy. I began to realize that I did not really believe in the knee-jerk attitudes I had affected for most of my life, in New York. Like most people, I was too worried about what was yet to come – and I also looked back.

I had actually had my first taste of radical Islam in 1989, while I was working at Book-of-the-Month Club. This was long before the US invasion of Iraq. BOMC was a stodgy, unprofitable, harmless little company that was constantly being sold and bought by bigger corporations. We were always on the lookout for books that would sell, since so few did. Then, in 1989, our Editor-in-Chief, a prim and proper British lady who idolized Jane Austen, decided to offer Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. I had never heard of Salman Rushdie and the book sounded like a literary bore.

The next thing we knew, the FBI contacted our Editor-in-Chief. They told her that the Ayatollah Khomeini had declared a fatwa on BOMC because we had dared to print the book - which had the effrontery to fictionalize an incident in the (probably already fictional) life of the Prophet Mohammed. We could all be killed. None of us had ever heard of fatwa before. But the idea of shrouded, machete-wielding crazies coming up in the elevators to slaughter all the book editors was bizarre and more than a little terrifying. The company name was removed from the lobby directory, and an armed guard was hired to stand in reception, right next to the Oxford English Dictionary. Guns had come to BOMC – and not because we wanted them. Meanwhile, much to the surprise of ordinary citizens like me, the FBI was quietly taking these threats very seriously.

Today, everyone in America knows what a fatwa is – there’s one declared on all of us, still. And nearly twenty years later, the publishing industry is still being bullied – only now, editors in New York actually cancel publication dates to avoid the very real possibility of certain people (again, not us) acting on their violent feelings with arson… or worse.

I was still working at Book-of-the-Month Club in 1993, when the WTC got bombed the first time. Although the news was shocking, it didn’t seem that serious – even to those of us just a few miles uptown in the same city. (In fact, about 1000 people were injured, and a few died.) I’m not sure I even read a single newspaper article about it – I didn’t read the paper then. But I did watch TV news, the lazy way out, and I remember Bill Clinton, who I liked very much, getting on camera and saying something to the effect of “Let’s not overreact” – which stayed with me - and mentioning the crusades, which made me feel vaguely guilty as if, again, somehow we had brought this on ourselves. (Last time I checked, the United States did not exist in 1096.)

If we have brought this violence on ourselves, then we’ve also certainly bent over backwards to whitewash that same violence during the past eight years. And yet nothing has changed.

I remember shortly after 9/11, when NYC lit two huge beams of light into the sky where the WTC used to be. Being a people pleaser, mentally cowering in fear of further assaults, I at first thought the lights were just more proof of our arrogance – sure to provoke further violence. I no longer feel that way. Now I see those lights as a symbol of America’s verve and defiance in the face of brutality. Defiance is good. So is being able to identify right and wrong.

Since 2001, I have done plenty of soul-searching. I toyed with registering as a Republican – but settled on registering as an Independent, to give myself more leeway. I started reading books about the Middle East and Israel to try to understand that basic conflict, which I knew next to nothing about.

See, I had been raised rather anti-Semitic. Many times, my mother, being an old-time WASP worshipper, would make disparaging remarks about Israel and the Jews while Walter Cronkite described some terrible battle on TV. “Israel is so small,” she would say, “it’s like nothing. Why do we have to get involved with that little piece of spit on the map?” I was told that Jews were pushy and arrogant. We had a Jewish-sounding last name that was a constant source of embarrassment.

I thoughtlessly figured that Israel, which I still envisioned as an island near England, should probably relocate and spare us all the pain. Israel must be very selfish. I didn’t even know that Israel is a democracy, a pluralistic society like we are, and I had no concept of how rare that is in the world, particularly in the Middle East. I took democracy completely for granted. Like many Americans, I assumed the whole world was coming from the same place, wanted the same things – with a few bad apples here and there. Now, I see the Israeli-Arab conflict quite differently, and I can understand the disappointment and fury that Bill Clinton is reported to have felt when Yasser Arafat rejected the 2000 Oslo Accords, even after Israel agreed to every concession.

I was also shocked to learn of Islam’s direct connection to Nazism. In his excellent book, The Case for Israel, Democrat Alan Dershowitz, who worked closely with Bill Clinton on the Oslo Accords, recounts matter-of-factly the allegiance between Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (an Islamic nut put into power by the British - big mistake, but who knew?) during WW2. Apparently, the Grand Mufti was tickled pink by the extermination goals and techniques of the Third Reich. Likewise, Hitler recognized a useful pal. Together, they planned to build their own version of EuroDisney: a brand new death camp, modeled on Auschwitz, right in Egypt. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the US intervened, their plans got scrapped, and the War ended.

The point is: that old, perverted German ideology known as Nazism, which we all agree is a bad thing, has never gone out of style – it just moved mid-east. I’m not sure many Americans realize how big a part Swastikas and Nazi salutations play in the radical Islamic world.

In 2006, I had to update my own book, Split Image, for a new, 10th anniversary edition. I very much wanted to add an epilogue about Berry Berenson’s death on 9/11, which was always on my mind. When Split Image first came out in 1996, many people had remarked on the book’s snide tone. I thought they were just angry over the gay content, and I was hurt. But re-reading it after several years, I was shocked at my own snideness. Peppered throughout the entire book were snotty asides and insinuations about American hypocrisy, aspersions about how conformist and rigid our society was, how evil Republicans were, the whole shebang. And I realized something awful: I had just been parroting what I was taught all my life from watching television – which was where I got most of my notions about the world while I was growing up. So I performed major surgery, made the text more neutral – like Switzerland – except, of course, where it directly applied to the story of Anthony Perkins.

But really, what did I have to complain about? Who had forced me to conform to any harsh societal standard? No one. As a boy, I hated sports - so what? I had managed to do a lot of different things in my mindless life. I had tried different jobs, different boyfriends, different living situations, different cities, different drugs and alcohol – who was holding me back and telling me how to live? No one. I had written about things I knew nothing about and had never bothered to investigate.

What have I learned since then? I have learned that the word “conservative” isn’t, in fact, a dirty word; sometimes, it simply refers to peoples’ belief about finances and government spending. A lot of that makes sense to me. But growing up, I always thought it meant something much more sinister and backward and evil, perpetuated by what I saw on television and in movies. Republicans were American Nazis, working to put black people back in chains, force women to have illegal back alley abortions, and force gay people to turn straight and convert to Christianity.

I have since met real people who identify as Republicans and even Christians – the religion we are constantly warned (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) is the worst, most dangerous in the world. I have been in the dreary Catholic church of my partner’s parents. And guess what. I’ve never felt more welcome, even as an openly gay man there with my partner. I have no interest in Catholicism or going to church. And I’m sure underneath, the church folk do not fully approve of how we live. Maybe some do. But newsflash: I don’t have to approve of how they live either. And none of us is killing the other. They are not the enemy.

I have over the past eight years also observed – and experienced the lash of –
an increasing unwillingness by otherwise decent, intelligent people to tolerate points of view that do not adhere to “politically correct” guidelines. In other words, the “talking stick” schtick no longer asks that you merely listen, it demands that you shut up. And you must conform. Just days after Sarah Palin’s powerhouse speech at the Republican National Convention – before Tina Fey had even unleashed her incredible spoof – I attended a business lunch where withering remarks about the newbie candidate went down around the table like well-lined-up dominoes. Palin was already being labeled a “self-parody”; it wasn’t Tina Fey’s fault. When it came my turn to pipe in, I decided to try chivalry, and simply said I liked the lady.

Silence. Whoops. Party over. Lesson learned: don’t defend the white trash.

Everyone in LA – or NY or SF - should try saying something un-PC in “polite” company. Just to experience the sting. Talk about change: in an instant, you begin to understand how single women in Salem must have felt. Suddenly, you feel naked, exposed, wishing you had Tourette syndrome instead of common sense. After a few such experiences - and they usually involve some degree of verbal abuse - you start thinking twice about speaking your mind. Funny, I thought that was what we were all supposed to be fighting for.

Diversity and freedom of thought and expression are supposed to be what makes us different from most other societies. Sadly, I am only just beginning to understand this concept now, the hard way, in middle age, having never known anything else and taken it for granted most of my life.

The freedom to be individuals as opposed to just followers is what still brings so many people here from other lands and cultures, often because they can’t find refuge anywhere else. Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the beautiful memoir Infidel, has ended up in the US, her last hope for safety – as did Oriana Fallaci and Brigitte Gabriel, all of whom have been up-close and personal with Islamic jihad. And all of whom have - or in Fallaci’s case, had - a death sentence on their heads.

In 2004, Ali and her friend, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, made a 10-minute art film called Submission, about the brutal treatment of women under Islam. Both of them received death threats - in peaceful, progressive Holland – and before the year was out, Van Gogh, the Michael Moore of Europe, was shot by a Muslim man in broad daylight. As he lay in the busy street, Van Gogh asked his attacker, “Can’t we talk about this?” Then the attacker stabbed him repeatedly, furiously, nearly decapitating him.

Not much was written about this in the US, but “over there” it was big news – and indicative of a growing problem. Islamic extremism is directly affecting American tourists as well, particularly gay ones. Washington Blade editor Chris Cain was viciously gay-bashed by Morroccan youths in Amsterdam, once known as the gay capital of the world, but no longer. Cain had made the mistake of holding his boyfriend’s hand in public. In While Europe Slept, Bruce Bawer details how he left the “redneck” US to live with his male lover on the continent, but gradually came to see the growing problem there as well – especially when his partner was nearly knifed in that same city, by young men of the same ethnic group. Gay events in The Netherlands are regularly disrupted by violence from Islamic minorities, as the number of rapes also continues to rise. The liberal lifestyle once enjoyed in so many Dutch-speaking countries has been curbed by a rapidly growing - and rabidly anti-gay - immigrant population.

There is a lot of literature, written by people overseas, about the demographic shift taking place in Europe. Naturally, I have wondered if these accounts were exaggerated, for publication. But a few months ago, a gay friend came to dinner at our house. I had forgotten that he was Dutch – and he told us how his brother, who is also gay and still in The Netherlands, is trying desperately to get out and join him here in the US. Our friend stated emphatically that both he and his brother no longer feel safe in that once safe haven. Doesn’t this go against everything the gay rights movement has fought for the past three decades?

Over the past eight years, I have been dismayed at the increasing lack of concern among friends and colleagues over this issue – even after the reality of 9/11. Particularly disturbing is the attitude of the young people I work with, who seem to view the attack as part of a video game or a Bruce Willis movie. For a variety of reasons, 9/11 has become a joke to a lot of people.

Most people seem quite complacent, happy not to think about it anymore – or just dismiss the global jihad as one more thing that George Bush bungled, so as soon as he’s gone we won’t have to worry about it anymore. Most people I know believe Bush made the problem worse than it would have been if the US had done nothing but send flowers in response to 9/11. That’s certainly debatable. But saying that doesn’t make the reality of the problem go away.

There have surely been plenty of mistakes made on our part, but the problem began decades ago. Even the very rational and eloquent Aayan Hirsi Ali states at the end of her book, as have the other writers I mentioned, that we in the West need to stop kidding ourselves. As rational people, we want answers and reasons. But the sad fact is that Islam – which is unique among religions in that it’s also a political system (and one in desperate need of an update) – commands believers to destroy all non-believers in order to pave the way for world domination. Islamists have a global agenda, beyond Europe, and they are not shy about shouting it from the rooftops. So back to the talking stick: Why aren’t we listening?

Recently, a news anchor on TV said out loud that she was shocked the Mumbai terrorists had targeted Westerners – like the Jewish couple that was sexually mutilated before being murdered - because there had been such an incredible outpouring of love towards us after the election of Obama. She didn’t understand how it could still be. This just illustrates in the worst way the American myopia, the narcissistic view that everything revolves around us and emanates from our goodness. We seem to be getting softer by the minute. Meanwhile, Islamic fanatics in Tehran are already burning flags of Obama’s smiling face – blood-dripping fangs added, of course. The cry of Death to America is as shrill as ever.

Our well-intended guilt doesn’t impress anyone but ourselves. For all the hand-wringers out there, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes an important point: we need to be clear about what we are fighting. The enemy is not Muslims, who are just people like you and me, most of whom are sane. The enemy is Islam, the ideology – the ancient, backward doctrine that exhorts a growing minority to kill. Just like white supremacy, Communism, Nazism. So we need to stop feeling shame – because the people who want to kill us sure don’t feel any. If the men who flew the planes into the WTC had been able to detonate atomic bombs instead that day, does anyone really doubt that they would have?

Bottom line: I have had to work very, very hard my whole life to accept myself as a gay man, and to be able to introduce myself freely as such and be proud of my relationship. No one did that for me. But a big plus was living in this crazy, over-the-top country that has changed so much just in my lifetime – and done such an incredible about-face after eight years of an unpopular President. What other country on earth is that flexible? What other country is that trusting?

Now, however, I often feel as if I’ve been shoved right back into the closet by the very people who go around espousing diversity and equal rights and compassion – fellow gay people and “sophisticated” urban friends who in fact can’t tolerate an idea that’s not out of the playbook. When a Muslim leader in Nigeria – or even scarier, in Canada – declares that gay people should be killed and their heads cut off, I’m sorry, but that offends me. And it also worries me because we have all seen these believers act on their hate.

Meanwhile, the affluent gay community in LA never makes a peep about hate speech if it comes from non-caucasians with funny Arabic names. The buff, mostly-white queers just continue doing what they do best: identify as victims and pretend it’s 1977 – protesting the harmless Mormon church, which never fights back, and boycotting campy Mexican restaurants to put other tax-paying minorities (including some gays) out of work. Meanwhile, a threat much bigger than Prop. 8 is growing fast.

My point is: I don’t think American gays fully comprehend that in many countries, such as Iran, gay people really don’t have any rights – not even to live. Just last September, a brave, 27-year-old student and gay rights activist, who helped organize safe houses for gay men in Baghdad and coordinated the Iraqi LGBT group, was gunned down at point blank range by Islamic militants – not by Christians or US soldiers. But by literal neo-Nazis.

Almost everyone I know goes to a therapist. It occurred to me that if someone were in an abusive relationship or their life was threatened by a lover or family member, no therapist in LA would ever advise them to stay in that situation or to try to please the person making the threats. The therapist would tell the client to take action, get out of the situation, file charges – to stand up for him or herself. Why then, on a mass level, are we told to behave the opposite way? To try to be “nice” in the face of threats - or actual violence? Not to empower ourselves and be proud? Why are we urged to take on guilt for the whole world? It’s a very sick dichotomy.

Every day I see people being lazy and turning against themselves when we should all be uniting against something that literally wants to kill us, and that has a specific deadline (yes, it’s true – according to the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-Year Plan, the Islamic caliphate should be up and running the entire world again by about 2082 – so have fun! Equal rights for all won’t be on the agenda.)

Supporting Western values means letting people be who they are as individuals, being able to disagree or get along with each other in a civilized manner, being able to progress. Yet more and more Americans seem so quick to doubt themselves and the very meaning of democracy. Maybe that’s something people need to reconnect with. I was born here. It was not my choice, but it has generally been an easy and good life. Would I like to live in Europe, while it’s still there, if I had the chance? You bet. But I have to work for a living to take care of elderly family members and my own, nontraditional family. I’m free to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with paying attention and allowing people to have a voice. If MoveOn.org can send out mass emails and action alerts, warning us how not to think and suppressing self-respect – because that is the underlying message for all the cool young folk out there: that if you hate yourself, hostile people will like you – then why can’t someone send out emails and action alerts to slow down the spread of an ideology that actively treats women like barnyard animals, condones slavery, and punishes gays like criminals? (All permissible under Sharia law, which radical Islamists believe should, and will, replace our Constitutional law.)

So that’s why I made the donations. I was thrilled to see that there was an antidote – for people, by people – who want an alternative to “talking sticks” and self-hatred. I thought, just maybe, I might not be alone after all.

I wonder when people will wake up. I hope they do soon. History shows plenty of civilizations have come and gone. We will not last forever either. But if we don’t start paying attention, our time may come a lot quicker and more horribly than we thought. People weren’t being baked in ovens at Auschwitz – or blown up in their office buildings – all that long ago. We need to be able to say out loud that this sort of thing is not acceptable. All cultures are not equal – nothing in nature is. But there is hope as long as we like ourselves enough to recognize danger and do something about it.

We are the only ones who can make a difference and keep an eye on the ball. The politicians will let us down. They always do - you can bet what’s left of your 401K on that.

Thanks for reading.