A Decade of Hope (44 page)

Mosques in America are not part of a higher church order like the Vatican. They are privately owned; there's no oversight, either religious or governmental. The mosque in Washington, D.C., was taken over in 2004 by the Wahhabis. Wahhabism is the more extreme school of Islam. It's a big mosque and Islamic center, and when they had money problems the Wahhabis swooped in and took care of all monetary issues, and now they own the mosque. This is the danger for the moderates, to be forced out by the fundamentalist radicals. They build a mosque and everyone is happy, for these are peaceful Muslims, but then they can be taken over.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt as the Society of the Muslim Brothers. It was revitalized in the 1950s, and then came to the United States. Since 1962 the Muslim Brotherhood has determined to bring down the house of the infidels from within, with what they call “settlements.” The settlement process is embedding within all our institutions: education, military, government, culture, and media. They're big on educating youth. Many of the Mideast studies departments in our universities are funded by the Wahhabis.

I do not believe I could have gotten through any of this without my own faith. I know that there are people who have no faith, and I think they must suffer from it. My parents gave me that gift. They made sure that I had a good education, but they also made sure I was clear on the power and importance of faith. I actually have had enough time to get myself together, and have really come to learn that I am a strong person. You learn who you are through an experience like 9/11: You sink or you swim. And I was touched by faith. There was a lot of anguish over losing Chic.

I was furious, so full of rage. I'm still angry, and not just about what happened to Chic. I've sort of reconciled what happened to him, and the shock of that has over time been absorbed. What doesn't diminish is the arrogance of those who want to continue killing to advance their determined idea of world supremacy. It's such an outrage, and I can't walk away from it as long as it's still out there. If people say, Oh, are you doing this for your brother? I say no. I'm never going to get my brother back. I'm doing it for your brother and all the other brothers and sisters who are still alive. And the husbands and wives, the sons and daughters.

One of the things we have an obligation to do in the next decade is to put a pin in the balloon of this whole idea of multiculturalism. This has gone so far off the rails, taking the country in a direction that is unfortunate and dangerous. How do we bring people back to basics, back to how this country was founded, and to why we must remember our founding documents ? If you study those documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—their language is so specific, and every word is so powerful. To me, it's heartening to see that people are going back, and they are actually reading the Constitution—it takes only seconds to find it on the Web. The more you read the Constitution, the more alarming it is to see what our government's been doing.

I started out as a grieving sister, and I then underwent an extreme education. I've got a room in my house which has a big wall that is filled with nothing but primary source material. I stay up late at night doing this research. Since 9/11, thousands of innocent civilians have been killed or maimed in terrorist attacks—Madrid, London, Bali, Amman, Moscow, Istanbul, Beslan, Jerusalem, Fort Hood, Mumbai. The Department of Homeland Security says that there have been forty-three homegrown terrorist plots to attack America since 9/11. When I think about walking away from this, I remember that the enemy is still plotting. They never sleep.

To expand, Muslims are using our values of freedom of religion and freedom of speech—freedoms that do not exist in Arab countries—as both their sword and their shield. We have to blast away at the educational and political elites in our country and remind them they were willing to tear Marxism apart [and] analyze what it was and its evil social destructiveness. We've had the benefit of scholarship analyzing every -ism, every political ideology under the sun, but not Islamism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous activist who fled Islam, does this analysis with great moral drive, but to her detriment. She must now live with bodyguards, the price she pays for being a truth teller.

We have to persist in saying a nonreformist Islam is a way of life aimed at destroying all of the Western principles we live with—our very way of life. When they call us Islamophobes, it just rolls right off my back, because I know that it's aimed at shutting us up, but also because I know enough secular or reformist Muslims now who are standing with us and saying, We support you, because if you fail we will have no place left to go.

There is a collision down at Ground Zero about this mosque—a direct collision between two competing First Amendment rights: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Politicians have been citing the principle of the separation of church and state to usher in an imam who is promoting Sharia, a legal system which demands the absolute
absence
of separation of church and state, and which has zero tolerance for other religions.

Magazines like
Newsweek
and
Time
publish cover issues that call America Islamophobic and then wonder why Americans are not buying their magazines. They lecture us with moral vanity about multiculturalism and scold us about how we're a bunch of narrow rednecks.

Where is our future bringing us? It's not just the implications surrounding shifting populations of huge numbers of Muslims in the world. It is the threat of the most sought after weapon of choice. What happens when Iran gets a nuclear bomb? I remember when I worked at Court TV, one of my colleagues covered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, but I was not very interested in that case. So while I understand not being interested in all of the scare about terrorism, after 9/11 I think we cannot afford to ignore the reality in front of us.

In the cold war we had something called “mutually assured destruction.” We do not have that deterrent today. Islamists don't identify with nationstates ; countries are either a part of the nation of Islam or not. The mullahs rule. People wrongly believe that Ahmadinejad controls Iran, when it is definitely the ayatollahs. I believe that Iran would detonate a bomb in Israel in a heartbeat, knowing that they could lose a million of their own people. That is a culture totally alien to our Western society, which cherishes life and individual conscience.

The whole point of radical Islam is to supplant Western law with Sharia, to turn the United States into a part of the worldwide caliphate. They are working to institute accommodations to Islam, and that is occurring in many countries without anyone's truly realizing it. If we object to this, we're cast as bigots and racists.

I was fascinated by the preacher down south who wanted to burn the Koran. He was demonized for exercising free speech, but after all, a book—even a Bible or a Koran—is cardboard and paper, not the actual living, breathing Prophet. It is an insult to Muslims, yes, but the insult isn't as deeply wounding as putting a fifteen-story mosque up in the air where all those bodies fell as dust. More than eleven hundred people were never found in that place, not even the smallest body part, and so they were in that dust. Burning a book does not compare. Somehow burning the Koran was viewed as a despicable thing, and
people were going to die because of it.
The press just accepted that insane equivalency as some new moral norm. No one questioned whether people would actually kill over that.

While Mayor Bloomberg was defending Imam Rauf's freedom of religion, where was the liberal media pointing out that the mayor created a phony spin? No one, absolutely no one, suggested that this imam did not have a legal right to build a mosque. The mayor, I think, does not understand the grave insult to so many good and decent families.

This is the kind of battleground that we're going to be seeing in the next ten years, based on the speech issue. Our Founders complained about newspapers too—the press was the bane of their existence. But they defended it and fought for it, because they understood that if you don't have freedom of speech, the republic crumbles. It is the first and last bulwark against tyranny. If we can't preserve our country, if we can't name and say what's wrong . . . Think of it: The
New York Times
will publish classified national security measures aimed at protecting us but won't print the Danish cartoons that mock a religious figure. This is a form of cultural suicide. Freedom of speech is the battleground now. As it is said, not to speak is to speak, and not to act is to act. Let Muslims speak, but with transparency of motive, history, and religious belief. And let Americans speak as well in this way. Americans know who they are, and they know what this country stands for. They know what they want to leave for their children, and they will fight for it. This is the thought that gives me hope, that I rely on, to honor all the good my brother Chic gave to the world.

George Siller is the second oldest brother in the family that created the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Run, a nationally known and annually televised race that now attracts more than seventeen thousand runners each year. The event was created to memorialize the heroic run of firefighter Stephen Siller, who ran through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel with full gear to join in the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center on 9/11, where he lost his life. The foundation the family created, online at
www.tunneltotowersrun.org
, is a not-for-profit charity that supports injured firefighters, burn centers, disabled veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the children of those veterans in need.

 

 

 

W
e're a very close family. My father was adamant about us being close all our lives. There were seven of us: Stephen was the youngest; Frank, who was about six years older, was the second youngest; then my three sisters—Regina (we call her Gina), Mary, and Janis—and then my brother Russell. Stephen was sort of a gift to us all. After so many children my father used to say that if another one came along, it would have to be an immaculate conception. We, the older ones, were packed together, a bunch of kids, and we couldn't appreciate one another. We were like puppies fighting for the milk or the bone or whatever. And now we had a child that we all appreciated. It was like having a toy in the family. He was such a joy. He had a great personality. I think part of that was he had a great audience, for we all thought he was so funny and smart.

My mother and father were both very religious. My father belonged to the Third Order, which is like [being] a lay Franciscan priest or brother. He loved everybody, and he was a very generous man. Both my mother and father would go to mass every day during Lent and Advent, and we actually read the Bible at suppertime, until everybody in the family was laughing so much that my father would get madder and madder, and finally he gave up on it. He wasn't a religious fanatic, but he lived a religious kindness. To make a living he sold religious articles: first communion and confirmation sets; little prayer books; rosary beads. His business would go south because he was often ill, and the people who worked for him would help us out. But in our family we have never cared about money. We never had it growing up, and we don't feel like it's the important thing in life.

We all grew up with a sense of service. My brother Russ went in the VISTA service, where he met his wife, Jackie. All my sisters became nurses. My sister Mary was a nun initially, but she left [the order], married, and now has three kids. My mother and Mary actually went to nursing school together. My mother was fifty years old at the time, and they became nurses together at St. Vincent's Hospital in Staten Island. I became a registered nurse as well, later on, with the GI Bill. My parents were also very generous, and they taught the same generosity to all of their kids. When we made a bet for a dollar or something—maybe on the World Series, since we were massive baseball fans—if we won, my parents would tell us, You can't take that money. But if we lost, they would say, You have to honor that bet and pay it. Why we ever bet, I don't know.

Our parents passed away a year apart, my father from a blood clot after surgery—he had bad circulation in his legs, and diabetes—and then my mother, from cancer. My mother was sick the whole last year, and Stephen used to come home from school and find her balled up almost in the fetal position, because with stomach cancer it was the only position she felt comfortable [in]. She didn't want the lights on in the room, and so he lived a sad and depressing life during that period. Even before my mother passed away, all the brothers and sisters had been dedicated to keeping Stephen occupied and happy. But it was a terrible way for a child to live—he'd just lost his dad, and now he had to deal with a mother who was dying.

Most of us were in our early twenties to early thirties when our parents passed away, but Stephen was still a child: eight and a half when my father died and ten when my mother died. And so, besides losing our parents, we had to deal with bringing Stephen up. We felt that Russell and his wife, Jackie, were the best to raise Stephen. They had no children, and also Russell was the oldest. We all had families already. Russell could give Stephen all-around attention and dedicate himself to bringing him up.

Russ and Jackie live in Long Island, so after our mother died, Stephen was moved from Staten Island to Rockville Centre.

When our parents died, we didn't feel sorry for ourselves. We felt sorry for Stephen. I cried a little at the funerals, obviously, but I never really wallowed in my own self-pity. It was poor Stephen. That's what we all did, and that's how we handled 9/11. We felt sorry for Stephen's children and his wife, Sally; not for ourselves. Over time, though, we have come to feel sorrow for ourselves, but I guess we hide it by feeling sorry for the other people. Put others first.