The following is adapted from my forthcoming book, Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It, out in June and available for pre-order now.
Words on Fire
Sometimes leaders overreach. They do not intend to put people or groups in danger, but their language has that effect. Trump seems not to care when this happens. But many leaders do. And all leaders should.
Often journalists, civic leaders, and commentators raise concerns when such language goes too far. Responsible leaders take those concerns seriously. Sometimes they do so right away. Sometimes they live in a state of denial, continuing to use such language, until some event forces them to snap out of denial and to take the concerns seriously.
Very often, once made aware, responsible leaders work to neutralize whatever damage they may have done, and to correct the impression their followers may have had about the leader’s intention. Most important, they stop using such language.
Consider President George W. Bush.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the two towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. A fourth was apparently heading for the White House, but passengers prevented the flight from reaching its target. It crashed instead into a field in Pennsylvania. This was the largest assault against the United States since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And like Pearl Harbor it put the US on a war footing. But not against a nation state. Unlike a nation, with a standing government and uniformed military, the amorphous nature of this enemy made defining the fight difficult.
As the nation’s national security apparatus struggled initially to define what was happening, President George W. Bush was flown from Florida, where he was at a public event at the time of the attack, to a safe location in the middle of the country.
That night, back in the White House, he addressed the nation,
“Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America, with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could.”
After offering comfort and contrasting the terrorists’ character with those of the first responders, Bush committed to find the plotters and bring them to justice,
“The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
The nation was scared, and the President was acting in his role both as commander-in-chief and comforter-in-chief.
People Perceived to be Muslim or Arab At Risk
But in the days after the attack some people in the United States who were perceived to be Muslim or Arab found themselves being menaced in ways that ranged from insults to death threats.
Two days following the attack President Bush tried to tamp down citizens’ desire to blame all Muslims and Arabs for the attack. In an Oval Office phone call with New York State Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, broadcast live on TV, President Bush said,
“I know I don’t need to tell you all this, but our nation must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab-Americans who live in New York City who love their flag just as much as the three of us do. And we must be mindful that as we seek to win the war that we treat Arab-Americans and Muslims with the respect they deserve. I know that is your attitudes, as well; it’s certainly the attitude of this Government, that we should not hold one who is a Muslim responsible for an act of terror. We will hold those who are responsible for the terrorist acts accountable and those who harbor them.”
Many saw this as a positive development, including members of at-risk communities. But two days later a Sikh man, who had received several death threats since the attack, was murdered. NPR reported,
“On Sept. 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was outside of the Chevron gas station he owned in Mesa, Ariz., when he was shot and killed. Balbir was Sikh and wore a turban. In one of the first hate crime murders following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a man, assuming Balbir was Muslim, shot and killed him as retaliation. Balbir and his brothers…emigrated from India in the 1980s, and they owned the Chevron together.”
The shooter was forty-eight-year-old Frank Roque, who shot Sodhi from the window of his moving pickup truck. He didn’t stop, but continued driving, opening fire on a Lebanese-American who was wounded but not killed. He also shot at the home of a family of Afghan descent. He then entered a local bar and said loudly,
“They’re investigating the murder of a turban-head down the street.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported,
“Arrested later that afternoon at his home, Roque allegedly told officers he was seeking to revenge the terrorist assaults. ‘I stand for America all the way,’ he bellowed, complaining that he was being taken in while ‘those terrorists run wild.’”
Of course, Bodhi, the shooting victim, was not a terrorist. Nor was he a Muslim. But he wore a turban, as did Osama bin Laden, and some Americans could not differentiate among different religions or ethnicities.
On the day following Bodhi’s shooting CNN reported that hate crimes against Muslims and South Asians had risen exponentially in the days following the 9/11 attack.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations received more than three hundred reports of harassment and abuse in the forty-eight hours after the attack, nearly half the number it received the entire year prior. It also noted that Sikhs were a particular target. A New York man was shot in the head with a BB gun as he left worship in a Sikh temple in Queens. A Virginia man was almost driven off the road by two vans while he drove to a site to give blood. The official US Sikh website reported more than three hundred incidents of hate crimes and harassment in the month following 9/11.
Crusade
The day after the Sikh gas station attendant was killed, President Bush did not address the growing violence against innocents. He did address the 9/11 attack. But in so doing, he made the situation less safe for those perceived to be Arab or Muslim. Speaking on the White House lawn as he was about to board Marine One, he said,
“This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while, and the American people must be patient.”
The word “crusade” got people’s attention, especially Muslims, Arabs, and those with a sense of history. The Crusades were a series of European invasions of the Holy Land over a four-hundred-year period, specifically cast as a holy war between Christians and Muslims, nominally over control of holy sites in the areas around Jerusalem.
President Bush clearly intended the word as metaphor, to describe a righteous struggle. Indeed, in 1944 General Dwight Eisenhower had used the word in his exhortation to those about to storm the beaches at Normandy. The first sentence of Eisenhower’s remarks to the troops read,
“You are about to embark on a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.”
But in Eisenhower’s case, the metaphor was clear. The allies consisted of nominally or majority Christian nations at war with the axis powers, who were also nominally or majority Christian. But in President Bush’s formulation, juxtaposing the word crusade with the idea of war against those who organized the 9/11 attack suggested to many that the war on terror was a war on Islam.
The Christian Science Monitor reported,
“President Bush’s reference to a ‘crusade’ against terrorism, which passed almost unnoticed by Americans, rang alarm bells in Europe. It raised fears that the terrorist attacks could spark a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Christians and Muslims, sowing fresh winds of hatred and mistrust.”
The newspaper quoted several prominent European leaders on the dangers of such language:
“’If this ‘war’ takes a form that affronts moderate Arab opinion, if it has the air of a clash of civilizations, there is a strong risk that it will contribute to Osama bin Laden’s goal: a conflict between the Arab-Muslim world and the West,” warned the Paris daily Le Monde on Tuesday in an editorial. ‘Bush is walking a fine line,’ suggested Dominique Moisi, a political analyst with the French Institute for International Relations, the country’s top foreign policy think tank. ‘The same black and white language he uses to rally Americans behind him is just the sort of language that risks splitting the international coalition he is trying to build. This confusion between politics and religion…risks encouraging a clash of civilizations in a religious sense, which is very dangerous,’ he added.”
The newspaper also quoted British prime minister Tony Blair, who said the war is not between Christians and Muslims but between civilized values and fanaticism. He also noted that the majority of law-abiding Muslims oppose fanaticism.
President Bush Walks It Back
President Bush heard the message and acted on it. He went out of his way to correct any misperception that the enemy was Islam. The following day he visited Washington’s Islamic Center. Flanked by Muslim leaders, he said,
“Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans, our Muslim friends and citizens, taxpaying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens.”
President Bush then sought to differentiate the attackers from Islam and other Muslims:
“These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran itself: ‘In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.’ The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam, we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.”
He noted that millions of Muslims were American citizens, and valuable contributors to the success of America, and President Bush encouraged Americans to treat one another with respect:
“Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value. I’ve been told that some fear to leave; some don’t want to go shopping for their families; some don’t want to go about their ordinary daily routines because, by wearing cover, they’re afraid they’ll be intimidated. That should not and that will not stand in America. Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. They represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior. This is a great country. It’s a great country because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth.”
He closed by showing common cause with the Islamic leaders who were hosting his visit.
“And it is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They’re outraged; they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.”
Two days following his visit to the Washington Islamic Center, President Bush hosted the President of Indonesia in the White House. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world, home to more than 12 percent of all Muslims. In public remarks President Bush said,
“I’ve made it clear, Madam President, that the war against terrorism is not a war against Muslims, nor is it a war against Arabs. It’s a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people.”
Eight days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, televised nationally in prime time:
“We have seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers—in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.…The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.…
I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.…
We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled or for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith.”
On being put on notice of the unintended consequences of his language of crusade, President Bush responded responsibly. In several settings, including with religious and political leaders who were Muslim and in a joint session of Congress, he made clear to the American people that the enemy was a specific group of individuals, not an entire religion or ethnic group.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations noted that the President’s comments at the Islamic Center “played a key role in defusing anti-Muslim backlash following the 9/11 terror attacks.” The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, also found that hate crimes against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim fell dramatically following President Bush’s remarks at the Islamic Center.
Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It, from which this column is adapted, is due in June and available for pre-order now.
