Foreward From the Curator


"On September 11, 2001, we were sound asleep when the phone rang abruptly before seven a.m. An artist friend who is a native of Iran urged us to turn on the TV. 'You won't believe what's happening.'"


My own reaction, after the inital shock, was "the chickens are coming home to roost."

I spent the 1980s based in Paris and Madrid, where occasional terrorist bombings were not uncommon. In fact, during a six-month period in 1985 and 1986, in Paris, I recall narrowly missing one bombing at the FNAC in Les Halles by just five minutes; a young man precisely my age lost his leg, in the same music department where I had been not five minutes earlier. Terrorists were blowing up cafés, Tati department stores, cars, bars...So life in Europe wasn't much safer than life in Beirut during the Civil War or in Jerusalem today.

As I watched the images of the World Trade Towers collapsing and the repeated shots of the two jet liners crashing into them, I remembered all the countries the U.S. has bombed since World War II; I remembered that the U.S. and Britain have been bombing Iraq regularly for the past decade, insisting on the "no-fly zone" over what is supposed to be a sovereign nation. I recall George Bush senior going after "Pineapple Face" in Panana— so anxious to capture his former CIA protégé that U.S. forces bombed some of Panama City's poorest neighborhoods, killing hundreds of people. I remembered that the U.S. had supported the Shah of Iran and that brought about the Iranian revolution in '79; I remembered Pinochet and how the CIA had helped eliminate the democratically-elected Chilean president, Salvador Allende to install this unrepentant dictator. I remembered that we supported Iraq in its war against Iran in which thousands of children were massacred. I remembered that when it is convenient, expedient, the U.S. Government supports democracy around the world; but when it serves the interests of big business and elected politicians working in a completely corrupt system, the U.S. supports all manner of dictators, demagogues and despots—Saddam Hussein being just one in our national funhouse, or is it haunted house of sordid foreign policy and covert history? Naturally, we support the latter far more often than the former.

So while I was horrified by the destruction and death of 9/11, I had to ask myself "how has it taken so long, so many decades, after we have done so much to punish so many millions of Third World peoples in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South and Central America, for terrorism to hit the U.S.?" Like many American expatriates (I lived abroad for a decade and even though I've been in Los Angeles now for longer than that, I still feel like an active expat), I had removed my rose-colored glasses; you have to when you live abroad, because others do not view America quite the way we do. They have their own experiences. And in Europe, anyway, they actually get real news!

When the debate began after 9/11, it was hushed. There was little dissent. Whenever anyone in public life dared to ask aloud, "Why did they do it? What is our responsibility?" they were called anti-American, unpatriotic. People were silenced mostly by self-censorship; others like Bill Maher of "Politically Incorrect" lost advertisers and were told by the hand that feeds them: "back off."

A 9/11 Gallery is my own small contribution toward beginning a conversation, at first with artists and writers, about who we are, what happened, where we should go next in the "debate." If you have commentary, we'd love to share it with other visitors to Levantine Cultural Center's web site. Email us with your responses to the artists, poets, and writers who have generously donated their work to Levantine Center.

Jordan Elgrably, curator, editor, designer