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September 11
It sometimes feels as if the existential threats come in waves, each in its own season. Fundamentalist Islam is one such threat, though it feels — at the moment, and at least until Iran gets the bomb — that we are not in the season of Islamic terrorism.
The threat of the moment seems to be homegrown, in the progressive assault on our institutions. From the Supreme Court to the electoral college to law enforcement to education to the military to fair elections to the nation’s borders, the things that we once assumed were secure are, increasingly, positioned in the cross-hairs of a progressive movement that will gut anything that stands in the way of its various unhinged projects.
The island fortress of America has always been in greater danger of enemies within than enemies without (though the Wuhan virus should give us occasion to pause in that assessment), and I think that is very much true at the moment. But, as you said, we must not forget that there are real enemies of our western traditions both at home and abroad. And they rarely make their presence known as clearly as did the terrorists of 9/11.
I think that you are completely right about Progressives being a threat to America.
Unfortunately, I think most of America has forgotten, and wants to forget.
I am saddened to report that I also think that, as evidenced by a search I did for any September 11 Memorial Events we might be able to attend tomorrow in our area; there was a Taylor Swift event, there was an annual craft beer day and one tiny mention of a memorial with hardly any details about where it was going to be, etc. My Flag, however, is at Half-Staff and will remain there until tomorrow evening. Never forget.
Well said.
In the summer of 2001 the Naudet brothers had been following Ladder 1, Engine 7 company of the NYFD, making a documentary about firemen. Which as ‘luck’ would have it, were the first firemen to respond the world trade center on Sept 11.
These cameramen followed the firemen into the World Trade Center – and they got the only video to be shot inside the tower that morning. … Warning — this documentary is a real tear jerker — but is not graphic:
I’ve watched this documentary every September since 2003.
Our church service this morning spent quite a bit of time reflecting on the event and how it has changed us, and praying for those affected by it. Which is all of us.
I teach junior high English, and every year, I teach Billy Collins’ poem “The Names”. Thankfully, there’s video of Collins reading it because I have a hard time getting through the whole thing smoothly. For those who haven’t heard the poem, I’ve linked to it below. It’s an accessible poem, so non-lit-nerds shouldn’t be dissuaded from giving it a shot.
Every year I teach this poem, students always ask about what I was doing on that day. I tell them the story (I was in the USAF at the time). Most of them “get” what a horrible day it was. They “get” that it was and is a big deal. But I don’t know how that “getting it” will play out as they get older. Still, it’s better that they have a sense of it.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4470122/user-clip-us-poet-laureate-billy-collins-the-names
Thank you for teaching the event to kids who didn’t experience it.
I’ve found, when I’m asked for personal reminiscences, that rather than tell stories (which I can), it’s more powerful to just say, “There were two people I knew in the Towers. We’re pretty sure one of them jumped.”
I’ll never forget.
Sadly, in contrast to what I felt at the time, what I hope to never forget today is how this attack was used by the Neocons to stir up war hysteria, to assert that a vaguely defined “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” was an existential threat to our country, which it was not, and to launch wars of conquest against two countries that did not perpetrate the 9/11 attack.
If any country perpetrated the 9/11 attack, it was the Saudis. I don’t think that there was significant Saudi official support for the tiny number of Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the attack. As I recall, the 9/11 Commission Report identified Wahhabism as the Islamic sect behind the attack, and identified the Saudi state as the source and supporter of this particular type of Islam.
Whipped into a frenzy, Americans simply demanded a pound of flesh, so we made an unreasonable demand that the Afghans turn over Bin Laden, in an ultimatum with a tight timeline, and invaded when they did not immediately roll over. But they were the Taliban, you see, horrible agents of evil.
You know, the horrible agents of evil who we called the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation, when we armed and trained them. Heck, we even made a Rambo movie about how great they were. Well, not as great as Rambo, of course, but they were the good guys back then.
But hey, the Afghans harbored Bin Laden, so they merited invasion and a 20-year occupation. Just like Pakistan, who we invaded and occupied after the Pakistanis harbored Bin Laden. No, wait, my bad. The Pakistanis did harbor Bin Laden — for a lot longer than the Afghans, apparently — but the Pakistanis are the good guys. They’re friends and allies. So when we found out that Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, we made a friendly extradition request on our Pakistani allies, and brought him to the US for trial.
No, wait, my bad. We sent a military strike team, without permission, into sovereign Pakistani territory, killed Bin Laden, and dumped his body in the Indian Ocean on the way back.
Because, you see, we are the champions of the Rules-Based-International-Order!
And that’s just Afghanistan. Let’s talk about Iraq, shall we? Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attack.
But Iraq had a Weapons Of Mass Destruction program! WMD are bad. We should know, as we have the biggest arsenal of WMD on the planet, but we’re against proliferation. Only we can have them, and the Russians, and the British, and the French, and the Chinese. Oh, and the Indians and the Pakistanis. And the Israelis, though unlike the others, the Israelis don’t admit that they have WMD.
They do, of course. The Israelis have nukes, and apparently have had them since the 1960s, but they’re the good guys. Many details of the Israeli nuclear program were revealed to the British press in 1986 by an Israeli former nuclear technician named Mordechai Vanunu.
Vanunu was lured to Rome by the Mossad, where he was drugged and kidnapped from Italian sovereign territory, taken to Israel for a secret trial, and imprisoned for 18 years. But the Israelis are the good guys, you see, and had to protect their WMD program. Plus, they’re on the side of the Rules-Based-International-Order.
Apparently, being on the side of the Rules-Based-International-Order means that you can have WMD, and you can launch invasions of other countries, and you can send your military and paramilitary strike teams into other countries to seize people and either kill or kidnap them — and you’re the good guy. Convenient, isn’t it?
So we toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, and unleased chaos in the Middle East for about 20 years, and eliminated one of the strongest checks on any expansionary ambitions that Iran might have.
And I haven’t even gotten started on Bin Laden’s perceived justification for the 9/11 attack. You see, Bin Laden thought that the US had been intervening in the Middle East for decades — launching wars, propping up tyrannical regimes from the Shah in Iran to the House of Saud, funding Israel’s overwhelmingly powerful military machine, bribing Egypt into maintaining the peace with Israel. Which is all true, it turns out.
The attack on 9/11 was horrible. My heart goes out to those who lost their lives, and those who lost loved ones. I will not forget that.
But I will also not forget that this attack was the consequence of an unwise, Neocon and Liberal Internationalist foreign policy, for decades, in the Middle East. And I will not forget that this attack was used as a justification for more of the same.
I did not think any of this at the time. I was a strong supporter of the War on Terror, through about 2016. It was actually President Trump’s contrary views that led me to reconsider.
WoW! I had no idea this had happened on Sept 13, 2001: