Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.

In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them “freedom fighters.” These people, by the way, don’t represent Islam in any formal sense. They’re not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.

To say that we’re going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it’s a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren’t prepared.

But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.

Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

It’s very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It’s very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.

The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it’s probably too late because the United States has never done that; it’s always gone it alone.

The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.