It’s been nine years now since that bright September morning which changed the course of history. All of us remember it vividly.

Anna Quindlen, the former Newsweek columnist, had an insightful comment on remembering 9/11. She wrote in 2003, “September 11 should be formally made a day of nation-wide remembrance by Congress. But it should become a day unlike any other so recognized, not a holiday, but a holyday. Not an excuse for white sales or four-day weekends, but a day of national service in the spirit of the [same] spirit that animated so many after this monumental tragedy.”

9/11 is indeed a holy day. The tragedy is this year it has become a day of hate. No doubt, November’s congressional elections and the controversy over a Muslin center a few blocks from ground zero has fomented that hate – not to mention that fanatical Florida Pastor with his crazy threats to burn the Quran.

Fanatical religion, ironically, was responsible for 9/11: a group of Muslim Jihadist terrorists perverted a major faith that morning, but history also gives us many similar examples. The Christian Inquisition with its burning of heretics at the stake comes to mind. So do Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Northern Ireland and Orthodox Christians killing Muslims in Kosovo. Fanatical religion, moreover, continues as Sunni and Shiites Muslims still kill each other in Iraq.

We forget, however, that 9/11 also killed American Muslims. In fact, the Twin Towers had its own Muslim prayer room. It was on the 17th floor of the south tower. Muslim Americans died that day just as they continue to serve and die in Afghanistan and Iraq in the United States military

Fifty years ago Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, addressed the Houston Ministerial Association. He said something then eerily prophetic. “For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been – and may someday be again – a Jew, or a Quaker, a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson’s statute of religion freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you – until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.” Has that day of national peril arrived? The victims today are no longer the American Jew, the American Quaker, or the American Unitarian – but the American Muslim. Isn’t our harmonious tradition of tolerance being ripped part?

The Talmud tells us: “A person should always pray in a house where there are windows.” Commentators differ in interpreting this admonition. Some cite Daniel (Daniel 6:11) who when praying had the windows open toward Jerusalem. Other commentators speak of the calming presence of light, or the ability to look toward the heavens. I like to think that it means openness to life outside, an acknowledgment that the God to whom we pray is bigger than any church, mosque or synagogue, that there are other ways to think, to pray and to worship. I suspect that Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor in the Twin Towers also had windows.

It’s not just religion, however, that shuns and ostracizes the outsider. Secular society has done it too. Atheistic Communism under Joseph Stalin did it to the Ukrainians by famine and their eventual death. More “humanely” Americans ostracized American Japanese by shipping them off to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. The Know Nothings ostracized American Catholics in the 1840s and 1850s. The Know Nothings fed on popular fears that the country was being engulfed by German and Irish immigrants whom they saw as hostile to true American, Anglo-Saxon values. It was fear of foreigners, i.e. xenophobia, in 1850; it is still xenophobia in 2010.

Both religion and secular society can foment hate. 9/11 destroyed and damaged some national landmarks. Let us pray that it does not destroy the much more important American values of tolerance and acceptance of religious diversity.

Retired from the administration at SUNY Fredonia, Daniel O’Rourke lives in Cassadaga, NY. His column appears in the Observer, Dunkirk, NY on the second and fourth Thursday each month. A grandfather, Dan is a married Catholic priest. He has published “The Spirit at Your Back,” a book of his previous columns. You may purchase it here or send comments online using the contact form.