I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.—Cara Ellison (blog no longer available), in a 2007 post about 9/11/01.
Bookworm: “My life is divided into two parts: Before September 11, 2001 and after September 11, 2001.”
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”
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.
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.
The Diplomad posts a speech he gave on 9/14/01, when he was charge d’affaires at a U.S. embassy. You did not hear speeches like that being given by diplomats under the administration of Barack Obama.
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.
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 mill–a 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 societies–some of whom are wishful thinkers who deny uncomfortable realities, an alarming number of whom forthrightly despise their own societies and the majority of their 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.
Monica Crowley digs up an article written on September 19, 2001, by an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama…and analyzes what it tells us about this man’s worldview and lack of intellectual depth.
Enid and Geraint…a poem written by Grim on 9/11/2001
Three Days in September, by Sarah Hoyt
A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships.
Thanks, David.
From that Hitchens article,
Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!).
The ‘End of History’ really meant the end of the United States defending itself and turning its resources over to a universalist international regime of political correctness.
Instead of disbanding NATO when the Berlin Wall fell, we stayed in Europe to serve as the military guarantee and backstop for the emerging European Union and its new world order. A fat lot of good it did us. With all that military might concentrated in Germany, the 9-11 attacks were still planned and executed right under our noses in Hamburg. Not in spite of our military presence in Germany, but BECAUSE OF IT.
A lot of things must never be forgotten- the victims, the sacrifices, the steadfastness. But also the mistakes. The tragic mistakes must never be repeated.
Remember that Mohammed Atta’s visa renewal arrived three months after the attack.
The visa system is still broken after 17 years.
And now we have way more Muslims living in the US than we ever did, and the rate of immigration is accelerating. The Somalis appear to be particularly beloved of the Catholic and Lutheran NGO’s, and there are colonia of the cl*t-cutting throat-slitting skinnies all over the country from Maine to Portland to Amarillo. In Minneapolis they are a power to be dealt with, and the Democrat governor is on record as telling people that hey, if you don’t like it, you can leave.
The last time I drove through Boise, I saw in the local paper that they were building a megamosque to house all the Muslims that had moved in — whole communities of death cultists that did not even exist when the Twin Towers came down. They come as conquerers, not as citizens. This is what the evil buggers are taught since early childhood. If you doubt this, read the user’s guide.
I have a screencap of an entire New York street clogged with kneeling Muslims this last year, while Jews and liberals proudly ‘stand guard’ over them. Iftar In The Streets, it was called. Some kind of local event. This in the town that suffered the evil weight of 9/11, that saw friends and neighbors leap to their deaths while our enemies preened and laughed and pointed and clapped. I had an old IT friend in Houston who told me how excited and proud the local Arab contingent was. They were passing out glasses of champagne. They were quite open about it.
We lost. Our enemies were and are right to laugh at us and mock us and sneer at us. They have been raiding and raping and wearing down other civilizations to death for centuries, and now it is happening to the West. All we can do now is triage… until the Dems get the White House back (which they eventually will) and throw open the floodgates again.
Today is a day for sharpening knives and loading ammunition and pondering vengeance. Nothing else is fit.
My life is divided into two parts.
Before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
And after.
Phil Ossiferz Stone Says:
September 11th, 2018 at 2:38 pm
Did you consider how the wars started after 9/11 aided that effort?
MSimon, the flaw in your blame-the-victim argument is that Islamic terrorism was around before the Iraq War/GWOT. When we were attacked on 9-11 we were not fighting any war. Did you consider how the mere existence of the United States aided that effort?
Grurray, the 1979 Iran Revolution was the declaration of war by Islam.
It coincided with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but the year was the occasion.
Of course, Islam was aggressive from the start but the experience of the Ottomans cooled the ardor for a few hundred years.