Just like how the Vietnam War defined the ’60s and the Cold War defined the ’70s, terrorism defines our generation.
On October 31, 2017, there was a terror attack in downtown Manhattan, on the West Side Highway bike path. On November 1, 2017, The New York Times published a front-page article by Benjamin Mueller, William K. Rashbaum, and Al Baker, with the subhead “‘Cowardly Act of Terror,’ Mayor Declares.” Mayor de Blasio classified it as an act of terror because of the supposed affiliation that attacker Sayfullo Saipov had with ISIS and, most important, because of the words he yelled out (“Allahu Akbar”) as he carried out the attack.
I was there when this tragedy occurred, in art class at Stuyvesant High School. When a lockdown was first declared at 3:05 p.m., my classmates and I shrugged it off. We thought it was just a drill, so we continued with class. We were on the tenth floor, the farthest from the chaos occurring below us. We didn’t even realize there was anything wrong until, through the window in front of my desk, we saw the stretch of the West Side Highway covered with bright red and blue lights. My classmates and I immediately took out our phones, frantically surfing the Web to find out what had occurred right under our noses.
For the next couple of hours, as we were stuck in our classrooms until the lockdown was lifted, my classmates and I looked up article after article and shared them among ourselves. There was a constant stream of new information. We read about how the attacker had slammed into a school bus and then pulled out two guns; later, those guns were found to be fake. The story kept changing and we kept researching, terrified, as the body count increased.
At 5:00 p.m., the mayor and other city officials held a press conference concerning what had occurred two hours beforehand, and my class silently watched it, still unable to leave the building. I was passively listening, not entirely focused on the screen in front of me. Then a reporter asked, “Do we know if the attacker yelled out ‘Allahu Akbar’ or anything of the sort?” After the mayor confirmed he had, everything—the conversation and its tone, the way people viewed the situation and the perpetrator—shifted. The headlines of every article changed “shooter” or “deranged driver” to “terrorist,” and experts on CNN began exclaiming that this was a confirmed terrorist attack because of the phrase that had passed through the lips of the criminal.
As I watched CNN after the press conference, the feeling of wanting to go home hit me hard. But I couldn’t. Instead I sat at my desk, silently crying, the Eid salwar kameez that I had worn as a princess costume for Halloween suddenly unbearably heavy. For me, this was a terrorist attack when I first found out about the atrocity. This was a terrorist attack as the death toll kept rising. This was a terrorist attack before I knew about Saipov’s affiliation with ISIS. For the media and the rest of the world, however, this wasn’t a terrorist attack until they knew that he yelled “Allahu Akbar.”
Nowadays, while most people don’t believe every Muslim is a terrorist, it’s generally accepted that every terrorist is Muslim. That’s why the Las Vegas shooter who killed dozens of people was not called a terrorist and was instead called a “gunman”; he was a white Christian, not a brown Muslim. While both events were atrocities, calling one a “shooting” and the other a “terrorist attack” changes the dynamic of how we see the events. A shooting is tragic, but a terror attack is seen as something more personal—it is seen as an attack on your country.
When people equate terrorists with Muslims, it allows them to discriminate against Muslims. This is why despicable policies such as the travel ban exist and why people support them. Our belief of who a “terrorist” is needs to change; when we resort to such terrible stereotypes, it separates us from one another.
The lockdown was finally lifted around 7:00 p.m. Each floor was cleared and dismissed one by one; I was one of the last students to leave the building. I met up with Fariya, a sophomore and a family friend who lives near me, and her two friends, and we all went home together. When we were two-thirds of the way to the City Hall R/W train station, my mother called me back, having missed my three phone calls to her. I explained to her that I was out of the building with Fariya and her friends, and I was on my way to the train station. She asked me if the attacker was Muslim; I hesitated before answering affirmatively. “You three girls stick close and keep your heads down, okay? Be careful,” my mother instructed. This wasn’t the first time my mother had told me to do this, but it was one of the first times I agreed with her.