Today's story on the new UW physics class investigating religion, science and the arts included a cursory snapshot of the views the professor of the class, as well as those of several devout Christians and Muslims.

The sources' outlooks on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which inspired Professor Marshall Onellion's book and continue to inform his quest for the truth, never made it into print.

Onellion was shocked by the attacks and the fundamentalist ideology that motivated them. He condemns all extremists as murderers — "My opinion of assholes who celebrate killing Americans cannot be printed in your paper," he said — but was struck by what he saw as the lack of backlash in the Muslim world after 9/11.

"Where is the outrage?" he asked. "The silence is largely deafening."

Islamic scholars reacted strongly to the attacks, according to Tarek Elgindi, treasurer of the Muslim Students Association, but he said some Muslims were not outraged because they believed America "had it coming."

But comparing the Muslim world's views to American sentiment creates a misleading analogy, Elgindi said.

"If you get an outrage from 10 percent of the population in the Muslim world, it's the same as 90 percent or more from the American population," he said.

Both Islam and Christianity decry such violence, according to Elgindi and Father Eric Nielsen of St. Paul's University Catholic Center.

"These people are pursuing their goal because of anger," Nielsen said. "They always like to have in their hip pocket a moral justification."

Onellion was also disturbed no one blew the whistle on the 9/11 attackers, and noted that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was reported by his own brother.

"You can't go from Richard Reid to shoe bomber without anybody noticing the change," he said.

Nielsen said he would have no qualms about contacting the authorities if he knew of someone planning an attack, he said, as long as his suspicions were not based on an admission during confession.

"If I knew of a person who was seriously deranged and thinking of a bomb attack, I would report that person for their own safety," he said. But he also pointed to his obligation to confidence in the confession booth.

"The seal of confession is inviolable," he said. "I'm ready to go to jail to protect that."
Onellion, who voted for Bush in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, said prevention of further attacks has been "more successful than not," but denounced America's response to terrorism on the whole.

"As for dealing with the root problem, it's a flat failure," he said.