Reflections on 9/11, Then and Now
At the national memorial service on September 14, 2001, the Bush administration showcased Muzammil Siddiqi to represent Islam in the ecumenical service. The administration was quick to show that this was not a war between America and Islam. But just who is Muzammil Siddiqi? A formidable and recognized Islamic scholar, Siddiqi has called for the transformation of America into an Islamic, sharia-observant community. And while he personally does not accept punishing homosexuals by death, he condones that punishment when applied in Muslim countries that embrace sharia. In 2000, he spoke of the importance of jihad to Islam. In September of 2001, he was the public face of moderate Islam.
The Bush administration used the term “Islamo-fascism” once, and found it had stirred up a hornet’s nest of outrage. And the Obama administration has created a bunch of misfit euphemisms to discuss the terrorist threat. “Man-caused disasters” and “countering violent extremism” have replaced the only slightly less nonsensical “war on terrorism,” as if it were possible to wage war on a mode of conflict. Every euphemism confirms what everyone knows: we are engaged in a battle with radical Islam. Every euphemism confirms that we are pandering to those who would destroy us.
This administration has militated against the harsh methods used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but had no trouble basking in the spotlight when information derived from those methods led directly to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. Suddenly, all the rhetoric about terrorism being a criminal justice issue and not a military issue was forgotten, as was closing Gitmo. There were political points to be scored from the elimination of bin Laden, and in America almost everything ultimately boils down to politics. When the election campaign fires up, there will be time enough to mobilize the Democratic base with recommitments to guarding civil liberties for those who would murder thousands in the blink of an eye.
Two needless wars are still ongoing ten years later. The war in Iraq that shifted the balance of power in the Persian Gulf toward Iran, and the unending war in Afghanistan that continues without resolution. Neither of these makes us more secure, as our treasure and blood are spilled.
Ten years after 9/11, we are a society less together than we were with the ephemeral burst of patriotism that ensued in the wake of disaster. But even then, news organizations saw the wearing of a flag pin as a violation of journalistic objectivity and asked news personnel to continue to obey the pre-9/11 standard. No such standard was promulgated for participation in various types of politically related events that news organizations typically sponsor. Mayor Bloomberg, most likely for fear of a Muslim cleric present at a religious service for the tenth anniversary, has ruled out all religious participation. We are consumed with what our enemies think of us. We have put in power a party whose base is more concerned with the rights of terrorists than the lives of their victims. We continually hear the refrain that terrorism is a criminal justice problem, ignoring that the criminal justice system is incapable of dealing with a military threat.
We have returned to the mentality before 9/11, only to await the disaster next time.
The rational reality is this-
Muslim extremists have been responsible for 1/50th of 1 percent of the homicides committed in the United States since 9/11.
We are wasting vast amounts of money on insignificant probability events.
In the US in the last 10 years about 5 million Americans have died painful and premature horrible deaths from smoking related illnesses—–5 million.
Aah Victor, I heard such compelling statistics when non-Islamic terrorism was the dominant theme in the world of violence. The probability of being killed by a terrorist really is less than being struck by lightening. So, what is the logic here, ignore terrorism and create better lightening rods? Terrorism is designed to create a climate of fear, to prevent us from experiencing the basic freedom of going about our business without looking over our shoulder. Terrorism is the greatest threat to our way of life because a successful terrorist operation causes the public to demand security. In democracy, there is always a balance between freedom and order. A society under siege will begin to extinguish liberty to achieve order. Whether the terrorists are Muslims or non-Muslims– and as you know today most terrorist operations are carried out by Muslims–it is our obligation to stop them. Saying that more people die of smoking is really irrelevant. What is relevant is preserving our basic freedoms by giving our fellow citizens a sense of security by keeping terrorists at bay.
Yes, Victor, and the Klan killed a mere 2200 blacks in its 140 year history. Think of it: *fewer* than 2996 deaths on 9/11 that you carefully note are only the 1/50th of 1% of the homicides that have been committed since 9/11! (And don’t get me started on how few Klan-related deaths there have been compared to smoking.) And we wasted all those FBI and criminal justice resources trying to stamp out such a marginal problem — what were we thinking?!
Any rational and moral society considers the deliberate murder of one human being as more heinous than the deaths of several more due to illness or accident. Because murder is also a deliberate blow struck against the social order.
One of The Ten Commandments is: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Just like getting robbed of your wristwatch is more heinous than you losing both your wristwatch and your wallet accidentally.
PJM generally publishes articles proposing a coherent thesis. This posting does not seem to meet that standard. Even children have been changed by what happened on 9/11.
How often can you meet someone who is totally unaware of the basic tenets of Islam, as almost all of us were so blissfully ignorant before 9/11? Would a US administration have proposed to support the overthrow of Qaddafi before 9/11? Would we even have uprisings in the “Arab Street” before we responded to 9/11? How many people were talking about developing domestic energy production before 9/11?
Even more importantly, we now have war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan whose lifes have been transformed (at the minimum!) by the experience, and who came back knowing what it’s like to make critical decisions in perilous circumstances, and who therefore return better prepared than the rest of us to assume leadership roles at all levels of society. How about their families, who had to endure the separation, even if their soldiers came back unhurt? How about the children who had to deal with a Dad or a Mom exposed to danger for extended periods of time? Can their mentality be like that of those who are 10 years or more younger?
There may be folks who wish to ignore what we went through, but who would be well advised to seek their counsel? They cannot erase the experience, and pull us back to pre-9/11 attitudes. Who can forget what it was like to board a plane without being humiliated and inspected from all angles?
Dear Professor: Long before there was 09/11 there was terrorism. There were planes blown out of the, sky and major connection points, Athens and Rome, were shot up by terrorists, usually some faction of Palestinians doing a minuet within or outside of the PLO. There was the GSG9 raid at Mogadishu and of course there was the Israeli raid in Uganda. Before that there was Dawson Field, the PFLP blew up airliners –four in number if memory serves–for the cameras. George Habash–the father of modern airplane hijacking–long ago gave us security lines and probing at the airport. And there have always been soldiers separated from families. I gather you are neither a professor of history, politics nor law, or you would know or been able to comprehend from the article that 09/11 transformed terrorism from a criminal justice problem to a military problem, and then the current guys came into office and pandered to their naive base. Terrorism under Obama and Holder is once more a criminal justice issue, except when it came to executing Osama. Forgive me, I am restating the incomprehensible thesis. I really don’t mean to appear condescending. But wasn’t that obvious?
Whoops! 10 years or more older, of course!
I respect the sincerity of your views, Victor.
All the same I cannot help but think it’s time we stopped blaming ourselves
for the savagery and evil that is on open display in the Muslim world right now-
with no viable or effective opposition.
The real problem is that the heart of all Muslims is in Shar’ia-
and Shar’ia is barbaric.
What else can you call a legal code, which, in the 21st century,
prescribes flogging, amputation, beheadings and stonings as normal
legal remedies? Which carefully specifies the conditions under which a husband
may beat his wife- but does not contest the fundamental right to do so?
What else can you call a legal tradition which is, even yet,
fixated by the philosophical problem of whether it is OK to
have sex with a girl not yet ten years old? ( It is written that the
Prophet Muhammad, upon whom all good Muslims wish peace and blessings,
married his last bride, Aisha, when she was six years old. But Guided by the
Mercy of Allah, he refrained from having sex with her until she was nine. Merciful indeed.)
What else can you call a tradition which calls for open genocide- for on the Last Day the Muslims will kill all the Jews, it is written, and every tree that has a Jew hiding behind it will call out ” Oh, Muslim, here is a Jew in hiding! Come and kill him!” ( This is a very venerable Hadith or traditional saying : look it up if you doubt.)
Enough with the solemn pronunciations that it is we of the West who must apologize and bow down! Rather it is them of Islam who must learn to rise up from living on all fours, and become human beings.
In 19th century New England, the legal age of consent for a girl to have sex was: 12. In Delaware, the legal age of consent was: 7!!!
Back then, society believed that a girl is old enough to have sex and get married whenever her parents think she’s old enough. And if the family was impoverished and the girl’s suitor was wealthy, the parents would decide that she’s old enough.
There’s a lot wrong with Islam and with Islamism. But young girls having sex at an early age isn’t one of them–unless you think that 19th century America was a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah for doing the same thing.
It is really quite simple. From the very beginning–9/11/01–our leaders have been more frightened of a vengeful overreaction by the American people to the attacks and their perpetrators and sponsors than of another attack.
Making certain that Obama’s Saudi relatives were out of the United states and safe from detention and questioning by American authorities was the first priority of the State department after 9/11. The warnings by our political leaders against Americans blaming large numbers of innocent Muslims for outrages committed by a small number of Islamists began on 9/12/01 and continue to be repeated ad nausaum to this day.
The same grotesque liberal politicians who fantasise that Sharia-promoting Islamists are a tiny minority among an overwhelmingly peace-loving Muslim majority imagine that they are the rare voices of reason holding back an overwhelmingly violent and vengeful American public.
This insulting, upside-down and inside-out view of reality has reduced the ordinary American citizen to sputtering helplessness. We are being betrayed by a political class that sucks up to us for our votes while secretly despising us all for Barbarians, rubes and suckers.
Comes the time for torches and pitchforks. We won’t defeat Islamo-Fascism without first defeating our own blinkered, arrogant and suicidal democratic elites. First and foremost, America needs a Soviet style purge of its media, its universities and its political and cultural institutions beginning with the sclerotic, Arabist and antiSemitic Department of State.
A good first step would be to dust off Tail Gunner Joe’s handbook for blacklisting and persecuting American Communists and their fellow travellers. It is their offspring, actual and spiritual, who are the enemy.
The issue is what are American fundamental interests in these matters
Agreed with Victor, and will go one step further. To determine Fundamental American Interests, Follow the Money.
What we perceive is completely and diametrically opposed to the truth. The truth about the war on Drugs..? audit every retired DEA and CIA employee, compare holdings against recorded wages and investments. See how many own millions more than they could possible have earned.
The truth about the War on Terror? Audit the Holdings of Private Contractors working for Department of Defense, NSA and all the corrupt alphabet agencies. See how many have embezzled accounts, diverted funds, converted overseas slush funds, and worse. There is hundreds of Billions missing from Defense Budgets.
This is why the Federal Reserve and Banking system refuse to undergo any forensic auditing, and never will. There are hundreds of billions in cash laundered through NY banks and NYSE and COMEX yearly for the drug cartels and defense projects, then transferred offshore through Fed Accounts.
Fundamental American Interests are very easy to determine; Follow the money.
The rest of the world knows how corrupt American Government is, they are the ones paying bribes and overhead required to do business under “protection” of the American Government. It is the American People that continue to pull wool over their own eyes, the rest of the world knows better.
The war on terror is just another avenue to embezzle and launder money.
Incredible that it’s been ten years already… thanks Mr Miller, linked @ RR
9/11: We Will Never, EVER Forget It!
One of my thoughts is we need to stop honoring victims.
Praise what you want more of.
Yes, the police and firemen were heroes, but they were just doing their duty.
The passengers of United Flight 93 did not have a duty to try and take back the cockpit and prevent the Islamists from reaching their target. They could have died quietly in their seats, rather than risking their lives to save the lives of people on the ground. The passengers of United Flight 93 were heroes of the highest order!
I doubt there were any lawyers among them, because there were no reports of anyone arguing that their actions would violate FAA regulations and subject them to criminal and civil lawsuits.
9/11 was the fruit of religion. It makes sense to me to keep clergy out of any memorial of the event. It will not be mentioned, but should be front and center at the memorial that it was the result of religion. You need religion to convince a fool to fly a plane into a building.
And if Osama bin Laden ever had a coherent reason, forget justification, for his actions…
I don’t know that his reasons can be called coherent, but from the 1998 bin laden fatwa forward, he and fellow radicals specifically and repeatedly stated their reasons, #1 being their interpretation of Koranic passages relative to a necessity to kill or enslave the infidel.
Every euphemism confirms that we are pandering to those who would destroy us.
Yes, and radical Islamists everywhere love that pandering and our weak, wimpy paeans to multiculturalism and political correctness. We’re doing a better job destroying ourselves than they are.
This administration has militated against the harsh methods used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed…
And who militated against the “harsh methods” (there’s a euphemism) KSM used on Daniel Pearl and scores of others ?
4 or 5 years ago, KSM and the five or six other head AQ guys at Guantanamo asked for martyrdom.
But Holder and others have seen fit to keep them alive and, in so doing, keep the circus alive, what with the idiotic brouhaha over civilian trials and the like.
Mayor Bloomberg seems right on track for the hype with his plans at Ground Zero.
Color me as disgusted at Mark Steyn
“And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.”
FWIW (and it ain’t worth much) I meant to write…Color me as disgusted AS Mark Steyn.
The only correct response to 9/11 was given by the lady journalist Oriana Fallaci in two books. She observed all events at the towers of television. What she describes has never been relesed to the public. She describes the people leaping to their deaths. I’m sure that the tv studios have those pictures but they never released them to the public. All they show is smoke. If you want to know what really happened buy her two books if you can find them. Sorry but the titles have escaped me.
Excellent, Abe – as always. As for myself, I know that the Religion of Peace is anything BUT! The burning bodies falling from the Twin Towers proved that once and for all. That realization has only been enforced since then by the beheadings and car bombs, etc. Islam is a militant, hate-filled ideology on the exact same footing as Nazism and Communism. They all leave the world a far worse place than they found it.
Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaqGGyBBQOE&feature=related