9/11 Plus Twelve Years

(Rerun, with an important update at the end)

Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”

A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships

An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from  Mark Steyn

Claire Berlinski  was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote  this piece for City Journal

Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney  were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney  here

Joseph Fouché  writes about how the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and the murder of Ahmed Shah Masood on September 9 of that year, prefigured the 9/11 attacks.

On September 11, 2005,  Rare Kate  didn’t go to church. Follow the link to find out why. In my original post linking this, I said “What if American and British religious leaders had responded the depradations of  Naziism  in the spirit of this liturgy?  Actually, some of them did. The impact on preparedness was certainly malign, and the people who took such positions certainly bear a share of moral resposibility for the deaths and devastation that took place. Ditto for those who are behaving in a similar way today.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany (executed in 1945), wrote the following:

Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

I was reminded of the above passage by something  Cara Ellison  said in a 2009 post about 9/11:

I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.

The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat to out civilization stems in significant part, I feel certain, from a desire to avoid the uncomfortable and even dangerous kind of clarity that Bonhoeffer was talking about.

In previous posts I’ve introduced the metaphor of the  attrition milla machine in which two steel disks, rotating at high speed in opposite directions, crush between them the grain or other substance to be milled. Our society is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one disk being the Islamic terrorist enemy and the other being the “progressive” Left within our own societiessome of whom are wishful thinkers who deny uncomfortable realities, an alarming number of whom forthrightly despise their own societies and the majority of fellow citizens. Without the existence of the second disk, the terrorist threat would be serious, inconvenient, and dangerous, but would not be an existential threat to Western civilization. But it is the interaction of the two disks, despite the differences in their stated philosophies of life, that increases the societal threat by orders of magnitude.

Many more links at my  9/11/2010 post

Update 9/11/2013

This year, we must remember not only the atrocity that took place on 9/11/01–and the many acts of heroism that followed in its wake–but also the murders that took place in Benghazi on 9/11/13, and the actions of weakness, incompetence, dishonesty, and malice that have surrounded them. Specifically, we should remember that the responsible executive, Hillary Clinton, failed to provide adequate security for the embassy, and then denied responsibility on grounds that she had not personally seen the cables that had been sent by embassy staff and the responses that had been sent out in her name. We should remember that the Obama administration–including, specifically, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice–systematically denied that the attack had anything to do with pre-planned terrorism and instead to blame it on an American citizen who had been exercising–however tackily–his free speech rights. We should remember that the Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, failed to provide effective leadership in sending assistance to the embassy staff under attack. We should be aware that the Obama administration continues to stonewall on providing comprehensive information to Congress about the events of that day, and that it has attempted to intimidate officials who have shown a willingness to share information with the people’s elected representatives. And we should be highly aware that the perpetrators of this crime are still at large, that they have not been either killed or arrested–even though members of the news media have, without too much difficulty, been able to locate and to interview the apparent leader of the attack.

The Benghazi debacle reminds me of something in the memoirs of General Edward Spears,  who was Churchill’s emissary to France in 1940. There was a disturbing amount of defeatism, and in some cases actual sympathy with the Nazi enemy, among certain government officials and other French elites. Weygand’s friend Henri de Kerillis, a Deputy and newpaper editor, had been consistently pressing Prime Minister Daladier to investigate some sinister behavior by members of the extreme Right.