WE’LL NEVER GET OVER IT, NOR SHOULD WE
Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011
People are discussing the geopolitical implications of 9/11 and how the tragedy changed our country, and most of what’s been said has been worthy and serious. But my thoughts, as we hit the 10th anniversary, are more local and particular. I’m in a New York state of mind.
There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.
But New York saw a world end. New York saw the buildings come down.
That was the thing. It’s not that the towers were hit—we could have taken that. It’s not the fire, we could have taken that too. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and took out five floors, and the next day we were back in business.
It’s that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren’t there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.
And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between “safe” and “not safe.” It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability. It marked the end of “we are protected” and the beginning of something else.…
At first we didn’t know what to call it, so we called it what happened. “Do you believe what happened?” “They think he died in what happened.” It was weeks before we called it 9/11. Sometimes tragedy takes time to find a name.
We were half crazy those days. We were half nuts and didn’t know it. The trauma on Tuesday was followed in the middle of Thursday night by a storm, a howling banshee that shook buildings—thunder like a cannonade, lightning tearing through the sky. And then there were the stories. We kept hearing about guys who dug themselves out of the rubble. We’d hear a guy came out of the rubble and said, “There’s 20 firemen down there in an air pocket,” and we’d all put on the news and it was never true. I will never forget this one: As the first tower went down some guy on the 50th floor grabbed a steel girder that was flying by, and he held on for dear life and it landed on a pile of rubble 30 floors below and he got up, brushed himself off, and walked away. That wasn’t true either. The stories whipped through the town like the wind, and people grabbed onto them.
And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into.… The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they’d call out, “Good luck, son,” and, “Thank you, boys.”
They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That’s the last time he was seen. Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.
Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there’s no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial. But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.
They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can’t bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: “America You Are Not Alone.” To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.
You’ve got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.
TEN YEARS LATER, 9/11 REVEALS DEPTH OF AMERICAN DECLINE
Michael Filozof
American Thinker, September 11, 2011
On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack took place on a remote U.S. territory 2,500 miles from the American mainland. The targets were entirely military; of the 2,400 killed, virtually all were active duty military personnel.
In response to the attack, Congress officially declared war. The U.S. conscripted 12 million into the armed forces out of a population of 140 million. With unprecedented unity, Americans—rich and poor, Republican and Democrat—answered the call. President Franklin Roosevelt, serving an unheard-of third term, put the economy on a total war footing. Ford and GM ceased producing cars and made B-24 Liberators and M1 Carbines instead. Citizens of Japanese descent were interned for the duration of the war, an action fully sanctioned by Article 1, Sec. 9 of the U.S. Constitution.
No one called Roosevelt a dictator or likened him to Adolf Hitler.
America fought not just Japan, but fascism everywhere. American ground forces first engaged the Vichy French, who never attacked us, in North Africa. They subsequently invaded Italy, which also never attacked us. And they defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which likewise never attacked us, nearly four months before dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, which had fought the war utilizing religion-inspired suicide attacks and fanatical banzai charges.
All of this was accomplished in less than four years.
On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. were attacked with aircraft hijacked by suicidal terrorists inspired by Islamic zeal. Nearly three thousand were killed. The vast majority were civilians. A fourth aircraft, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., is thought to have been headed for the White House. The targets were the economic, political, and military nerve centers in the heart of the United States. In terms of the number of casualties, number of civilians killed, and the importance of the targets, 9/11 was far worse than Pearl Harbor Day.
And what was our response?
President George W. Bush went to an Islamic center and announced that “Islam is [a religion of] peace.” The president told us to carry on as normal and “get down to Disney World in Florida.” He created a massive new federal bureaucracy named the “Department of Homeland Security,” a name that sounds like it could have come straight from the pages of a dystopian novel like Brave New World or 1984.
Instead of conscripting millions of troops into the military from our 300-million-plus population, we sent a few thousand volunteers to topple the government of Afghanistan—without a congressional declaration of war. Ten years later, over 100,000 American troops are still there. We then sent 150,000 volunteers to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who was known to have had a nuclear weapons program, anthrax, nerve gas, and chemical gas, the last of which he had actually used. We didn’t want these weapons to fall into terrorist hands. After all, on Dec. 16, 1998 (just when the House was considering articles of impeachment), hadn’t Democratic President Bill Clinton ordered a bombing campaign against Iraq, justifying it on the fact that Saddam had never surrendered his weapons of mass destruction? Republicans stood with him.
Instead of rallying to the president as the nation had done in 1941, Democrats shamelessly politicized 9/11. Senate Democrats who had voted to authorize the war in Iraq called Bush a “liar,” and Sen. Dick Durbin likened U.S. troops to Nazis. The communist and socialist left engaged in mass demonstrations worldwide, caricaturing Bush (not Saddam, who had tortured and killed some 300,000 Iraqis during his rule) as the new Hitler. College professors openly sided with the enemy and celebrated the attack on the Pentagon. Media elites agreed to ban images of 9/11 from television broadcasts, but endlessly displayed images of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and falsely reported that U.S. troops had flushed a Koran down a toilet.
Left-wing Democrats charged that terrorist surveillance methods had “shredded the Constitution” and that the USA Patriot Act had created a “fascist state.” But the Democrats used those very same methods to track and kill Osama bin Laden after they took power in 2008, and they never bothered to repeal the USA Patriot Act they had so vociferously railed against. They brayed against an intolerance and “Islamophobia” that did not exist, and the Department of Homeland Security profiled white male war veterans—like Timothy McVeigh, who killed less than one-fifteenth the number of people killed by Islamists on 9/11—as the most likely terrorists.
Seven years after 9/11, the U.S. elected a president whose middle name is “Hussein,” whose father and stepfather were Muslim, who spent the formative years of his youth in Muslim nations, and who stated that “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth is the Muslim call to prayer.” Barack Obama promptly went to Cairo to tell Muslims that “the U.S. is not at war with Islam” and that “the U.S. is not a Christian nation.”
Imagine, if you can, that in 1948 we were still at war with Japan; Pearl Harbor had not yet been rebuilt; and that we elected someone named Harry Yamamoto Truman, who had spent his youth in Japan, said “the U.S. is not a Christian nation” and “one of the prettiest sights in the world is Mt. Fuji” and put open gays in the Marine Corps and women on submarines. Imagine that a Japanese-American soldier massacred 13 fellow troops at Ft. Hood, and that Gen. MacArthur responded by saying, “It would be an even greater tragedy if this caused diversity to suffer.…”
After 9/11, the left (which had undertaken a largely-successful 40-year campaign to undermine American values and American patriotism) was terrified to see Americans rally to the flag, to the military, and to patriotic values. The lesson of 9/11 is this: the American left fears the American right more than it fears Islamic terrorism. It fears patriotism and nationalism more than Sharia law. The left would rather appease Islamic militants than rally to a conservative American president from the Republican Party who believes in the U.S. Constitution and in Jesus Christ. September 11 revealed that the U.S. is a disunited society riven by factionalism and narcissism. Consequently, it cannot—and ultimately will not—survive.
On 9/11, actual terrorists hijacked airliners filled with hundreds of civilian men, women, and children and murdered those innocents by smashing them into the World Trade Center. As the Twin Towers erupted in flames, office workers trapped on the upper floors faced a horrifying choice: would they rather burn to death, or jump a hundred stories to the pavement?
Hundreds jumped. Some held hands on the way down.
Ten years later, the vice president of the United States said that congressional Republicans who balked at raising the national debt ceiling to an obscene $16 trillion were “acting like terrorists.”
There is no better proof of American decline than that.
HOW HARVARD REMEMBERED 9/11
Hillel Stavis
Pajamas Media, September 10, 2011
While most of the nation was commemorating the fallen of 9/11 with sadness and resolve to understand the ongoing threat of Islamic extremism, arguably the nation’s foremost institution of higher learning approached the tenth anniversary from a very different perspective.
At Harvard, the theme was—you guessed it—“Islamophobia.” From Harvard’s introductory declaration for its “campus-wide panel”:
Today marks the anniversary of the horrific attacks of September 11th, 2001. As Americans reflect and mourn the loss of nearly 3000 people, Muslim Americans not only share their grief, but also express their own challenges amidst stereotyping, discrimination, racial profiling and hate crimes.
Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the event’s producer, declined to invite a single representative from any victims’ groups. There were no speakers from the September 11th Families Association, 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, Uniformed Firefighters of Greater New York, or Tuesday’s Children (a support group for those who lost relatives on that day).
Thanks in great measure to Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s Islamic Studies Program, there were—in abundance—plenty of academics obviously recruited to remind students of their take on the real tragedy surrounding 9/11: the racism, bigotry, and, of course, Islamophobia inherent in American society.
It was the deep-pocketed prince whose $10 million “donation” to the Twin Towers Fund was summarily refused by then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Having been rebuffed, the prince quickly dropped $20 million into the laps of Harvard and Georgetown shortly thereafter—no refusals there.
And what a bounty those riyals have yielded. The prince knew precisely where to monetize Saudi influence at the two most prestigious academic factories supplying the State Department. At Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), the prince’s suggestion that the United States “re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinians” has produced results. For a decade, Harvard has presented a wildly skewed lineup of jihadist apologists and anti-Israel academics, from discredited charlatans like Ilan Pappe to spokesmen like Mustafa Abu Sway—who likes to remind us that “terror is the weapon of the weak.…”
Overseeing the apologist gala was Professor Jocelyne Cesari, the French Algerian-born political scientist, recently of—where else?—Columbia University, and director of Harvard’s “Islam in the West” and “Islamopedia” programs. Among other brilliant observations, Professor Cesari has dubbed the misogynistic, Jew-hating, homophobic (to the point of extermination) Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi “not a radical.…”
The historical reality of the theory and practice of jihad was not a welcome concept at this event. The word was virtually unutterable. In a brief glossary, however—apparently provided by another happy recipient of Prince bin Talal’s largesse, John Esposito of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding—jihad is described this way: “Jihad may refer to a defensive military action undertaken to protect a Muslim community from an armed aggressor, generally understood to be non-Muslim.”
Aggressive jihad, it would seem, does not exist and has never existed. Were the 19 terrorists performing a “defensive military action” on 9/11?…
Another “primary source” omitted from the CMES presentation was the last will and testament of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the attack, whose traditional Islamic burial instructions included this gem:
“I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good bye to me because I don’t approve it.” That one might have been a bit problematic for the feminists in the audience.
There was even a whiff of “trutherism” about the event. One of the slides slipped this in: “September 11th as History and Imagery: How Do We Determine Truth and Reality?”
Indeed. Truth and reality, two elements apparently in short supply at Harvard these days.
Harvard is certainly not alone in operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Islamist thinking; virtually every Middle East Studies department at American universities does the same. Considering the indoctrinations they supply to impressionable students, it is no surprise that even an event so solemn as a 9/11 anniversary would not stray far from their apologetics.
9/11—THEN AND NOW, HERE AND THERE
Liat Collins
Jerusalem Post, September 10, 2011
It is a date so monumental that it doesn’t need a year to qualify it.
9/11. It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed.…
I was tending my newborn. So much for my promise never to watch news programs while feeding him. I sat in a rocking chair in my Jerusalem living-room and watched the New York skyline—and the geo-political map—being forever brutally redrawn.
My mother’s reaction is etched in my memory. As she saw the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing on the TV screen, she announced—partly to me and partly to determine a course of action: “I think I’ll go and collect the baby’s gas mask tomorrow.”
She had instinctively realized something that many experts had yet to take in: This was war.
It was a very Israeli response, but by September 2001, we were ourselves involved in a war of terror.
It was the height of the second intifada. Gilo, a Jerusalem neighborhood just up the road to mine, was under missile fire from Bethlehem and Beit Jala—places Israel had handed over to the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords. There were terror ambushes. Above all, there were suicide bombers.
These homicidal terrorists have provided the soundtrack to the decade that passed.… How do you fight an enemy whose aim is to die a martyr along with as many people as possible? It’s a question even more pertinent these days in the unpredictable aftermath of the Arab Spring. We have seen the devastation and tragedy wrought by individual bombers.
What happens if unconventional weapons end up in the hands of terrorists for whom the cult of martyrdom is, perversely, a way of life? What will deter a country like Iran from using nuclear weapons if its leaders believe that those of its own citizens killed in a second strike will go straight to shahid heaven to be served by an apparently never-ending supply of celestial virgins? If nuclear weapons are obtained by Islamist fanatics—be they in Libya, Pakistan, or even one of the Muslim states bordering on Russia—what’s left of the world will witness the biggest terror attack of all time.
I doubt many people in Israel will be around to watch the news broadcasts.
The world barely noticed the 100-or so missiles that sent a million Israelis into shelters one particularly hot weekend last month, but they should be a warning to all. Those who provided the weapons to the terrorists in Gaza do not harbor any sympathy for other Western nations. This is not about the Jews of Beersheba, a “settlement” put on the map by Abraham 4,000 years ago. It is about what Bernard Lewis famously called “the clash of civilizations.”
September 11, 2001, was not the start of World War III; it was a Pearl Harbor—an event that changed the course of history and a wake-up call for the United States.
When Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs four months ago, my first reaction was “Good riddance.” My second? “Thank heavens Israel didn’t do it.” I could only imagine what the moral chorus would have said had Israeli commandos carried out a targeted killing in the sovereign territory of an ostensible ally.…
The Durban Conference is getting ready to mark its 10th anniversary. It’s still, apparently, OK to hate Jews, as long as you call them Israelis or Zionists.
In fact in some circles, ranging from the left-wing Reds in Europe to the Islamist Greens in the Muslim world, it is de rigueur. These strange bedfellows are willing to overlook each other’s faults as long as they can agree on Israel’s perceived evils.…
The world changed on September 11, 2001. It has yet to understand exactly what hit it. Bin Laden is dead. The forces of evil, however, are not.
