Today is 9/11 and instead of writing a new post, I’m going to direct you to what I’ve written in years past and what others are writing today. There’s a reason for this.
I could write a brand new post about the killers of that day or their victims or the selfish, wicked people who could not even let the dust settle in Manhattan before they started scolding us for wearing that short skirt and sashaying about like a strumpet, but it would be pretty much like what I’ve written every other year. The subject hasn’t changed, nor has the anger I still feel at the Islamists and their enablers and apologists.
The thought that won’t leave me today is a simple one: Islamists want to kill me and everyone I love. There is no escaping that for me and I freely admit that I have not tried to put it very fr from my mind. On that dreadful day in 2001, Islamists tried with all their might to kill 50,000 innocent men and women in New York City. They only failed due to the heroic efforts of a few clear-headed Americans, most of whom died as they saved tens of thousands of lives.
Remember that, though. If the Islamists could kill you today, they would. Gladly. They would dance over your corpse and chant praises to Allah as you lay in your own blood. There is no getting around that. No amount of ducking our heads under our pillows can make it different than what it is.
They are still trying. What are you doing about it?
Here are the posts I’ve written on 9/11s past:
2007: The Jumpers of 9/11
2006: 9/11 Deniers on the Rampage
2005: Did You Forget? Then Remember.
2004: 9/11’s Third Anniversary
The Anchoress has a good post on the Remembrances and Prayers for today. Michelle Malkin has a number of good links, including a very simple reminder that the Islamists are still after us, in a great number of ways. Ace has re-posted his post from last year and it’s perhaps the best post I’ve read on the subject today. Here is an excerpt.
This is the problem we face, and, unfortunately, will always face. One of Bush’s miscalculations, and mine as well, was that the unity of the country could survive very long once the immediate psyche-shattering crisis of 9/11 had faded from our memories. We are not united and never will be.
I miss that feeling I had with my neighbors, people I’d barely said hello to after three years of living among them. It was such a good feeling to feel truly connected to one’s fellow Americans, to feel as if we really were in this together, that we were a team, united and mighty.
But it was of course an illusion. As someone wrote the other day, one cannot expect one third of the country to commit psychological suicide, to kill the very core of their politico-religio-psychological identity. Their identity did not die; it simply went away for a little while to recover, to heal up in the woods.
A short while later were were more divided than ever. Not united but alone. What had been a relatively low-impact difference between us was now more central than ever, as half of us thought our worldviews were quite well corroborated by the demolition of the Towers, and a third of us, after a time of reflection, reasserted their own core belief — There is no war but that the US provokes or permits to happen through negligence or malice — as full-throatedly as ever. Though, for political purposes, always with the asterisk.
And so it is six years on. It’s not that the “lessons of 9/11″ have been forgotten by some; it’s that they never truly believed them to be lessons, or at least did not see the same lessons most of us did. What 9/11 taught most of us was that our respective political philosophies were not simply correct but more demonstrably correct than ever; what may have been incongruous or discomforting to liberals about 9/11 has since been recontextualized, retrofitted, and retconned so that for liberals too 9/11 proves they were right all along.
Read the whole thing.
National Review has reached into their archives and brought back a number of essays written shortly after 9/11/2001. I want to commend a couple of them to your attention. Jonah Goldberg wrote about being in Oregon, with all his loved ones in New York City and Washington, DC on that day.
Some people here seem upset, others fascinated. But one emotion seems to unite all: anger. I know it was my overriding response as I listened to witnesses describing how a dozen people deliberately leaped to their deaths from the World Trade Center, in order to escape the blaze. Rage was preeminent as I watched Palestinians cheer in the streets in joy, as innocent Americans died in the largest suicide-bomber attack on innocents and noncombatants in human history. And fury was all I had for Peter Jennings as he seemed to defend the anti-American revelers, even as they celebrated this attack.
Of course, our first priority must be to help those in need, be they victims or families of victims. But after that, the next priority is equally obvious: controlled rage and determined, furious anger. The Jenningses of the world will find a chorus, no doubt — in the respectable pages of the New York Times and elsewhere — agreeing that this is “not a time for anger” and that “vengeance is not the answer.” We will be told how complicated the many factors are which led to this act of war. I’ve no doubt that the complexities of the context are great, as they were before Pearl Harbor. But the answer to this event is simple, as was the answer to Pearl Harbor. Punishment: swift, severe, and public.
This was an act of war, and we must force the world to choose sides: Are you with us, or with those who did this to us? Decide now. There is no middle ground. There are no other squares on the board. What was once complicated is now simple.
Mark Steyn wrote, a year later, about “moving on”.
Being a member of an NGO (non-governmental organization, as they call them at U.N. conferences), Osama bin Laden can easily “imagine there’s no countries”: He’s been doing it for some time. By contrast, the distinguishing characteristic of people who stand around holding candles and singing John Lennon seems to be a colossal failure of imagination. When some bozo guns down his schoolyard, the day generally ends with him dead or in custody. The vast squadrons of grief counselors who descend on the joint faster than the local SWAT team and start drooling about “healing” and “closure” do have a point to this extent: The event is over, there is something to “close.” But you can’t begin “healing” until the guys have stopped firing. And in this case they haven’t. This isn’t Independence Day. It’s not a movie. It’s an old-fashioned radio serial, with cliffhanger endings week after week after week. Whoever is responsible for September 11 already has well-advanced plans for the next atrocity — probably nothing to do with planes; maybe a gas line, maybe just a shopping mall in some town you’ve never heard of. A terrorist is an opportunistic warrior. If he can kill the president, he will. But if he can’t, he’ll kill you. Imagine that.
So we need something a little more robust than the soothing drone of Lennon and Oprah. We need people willing to speak truth to evil. Saying you love everyone in general is like saying you love no one in particular. It’s like being told “Gee, that was really special” by a hooker.
Here is my worry: At one end of the national spectrum are the anti-American elite, the Edward Saids and John Lahrs secure in their redoubts. At the other end are the great full-throated “These colors don’t run” patriots. But in between is a big wobbly blurry mass trembling on the brink of making this just another wallow in victimization-the “dominant discourse” (as Said would say) of the day. Five years ago, Bob Dole wondered, “Where’s the outrage?” Three years ago, Bill Bennett wrote a book called The Death of Outrage. In Europe, the ferociously anti-American Left is plenty outraged — it is raw, visceral, passionate, and none the worse for that. If we can’t get outraged-not sad, not weepy, not candle-in-the-windy, but outraged — over thousands of people killed for no other reason than that they went to work, then we’re really in trouble. If cultural passivity — love the world, be non-judgmental, everybody does it — co-opts even this awesome event, then the sleeping giant isn’t sleeping so much as comatose.
This is war. Save the love-in for later.
It looks like Steyn was right after all.
Tags: Fighting the Islamists, Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, The Anchoress
