INLSA

Staff Writer

ARCHBISHOP Emeritus Desmond Tutu has described the attack on Muslims in the wake of 9/11 as the “computer age equivalent of Nazis daubing yellow Stars of David on the doors of Jewish homes”.

Saying that one of the biggest failures after the 9/11 bombings in the US was the damage done to global relations between the “so-called Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds”, he wrote: “In our anger and dismay, we failed to recognise our common humanity.”

Writing on the Washington Post’s On Faith online section under the headline “Our post-9/11 failures” to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks,Tutu said everyone united to condemn the perpetrators after the attacks. But this moment was lost when the attackers were labelled “Muslim terrorists and evil personified was given a Muslim face”.

“We were told that these Muslim terrorists were aided and abetted by Muslim countries. Clearly, this logic went, Muslims were not to be trusted … Adherents of the Muslim faith were harassed and humiliated across the world.

”When we (looked) at the terrorists, we did not see ourselves, we did not consider how our actions … may have contributed to the crime. No. We saw ‘others’ and we demonised them,” Tutu wrote.