Pat Dollard | Young Americans

by Diana West - (townhall.com)

A high school sophomore asked me this week whether Sept. 11 would always be remembered. Would it always be, as she put it, “somber”?

Lacking a crystal ball, I have no answer. And, frankly, looking back seven years to that cataclysmic jihadist atrocity, I realize I’m probably not the most dependable prognosticator because never would I have imagined back in 2001 how successful that heinous strike would be in utterly changing us and our world.

Blame ignorance, blame cowardice: The strangest effect of 9/11 has been, on balance, an accelerated campaign of accommodation of Islam’s law in the West, a campaign boosted across the globe by the jihadist attacks of 3/11 (Madrid 2004) and 7/7 (London 2005) and many, many others. Paradoxically, such fast-track accommodation has occurred even as any and all connection between jihadist acts and Islam — specifically Islamic war doctrine — have been emphatically ruled out by our leaders, both civilian and military. It’s not that they have disproven the connection. Worse, they have chosen to ignore it.

With this in mind, it becomes possible to understand how President Bush could this week vaguely invoke the spirit of 9/11, as it were, to spur Americans to “volunteer” more. Similar statements came out of the presidential campaigns with Barack Obama also talking up the “spirit of service,” while he and John McCain jointly called on Americans to “renew” the unity of 9/11 (while honoring the dead, and grieving with those who lost loved ones). It’s not that we shouldn’t do such things — but to what end? I mean, was 9/11 a catastrophic hurricane, or a jihadist act of war?

Meanwhile, the undermining reach of Islamic law stretches across American society, from the hilltop farm in rural Vermont, where goats are now raised to be slaughtered according to Islamic law, to Wall Street, where once-mighty financial institutions, some of them having become trinkets of Islamic potentates, now adapt themselves to Sharia banking practices, to Washington, D.C., where stately government buildings have been ringed in quasi-medieval, high tech anti-jihad defenses. It may be politically incorrect to notice this expansion of Islamic influence in the West, but it is also extremely difficult not to notice it. Then again, perhaps due to a 9/11 numbing effect, too few of us do.

Just last month, for example, publishing heavyweight Random House pulled a romance novel about Muhammad from its fall line-up out of fear of Islamic violence in New York City — yawn. Also last month, Mazen Asbahi, Obama’s director of Muslim outreach, resigned over ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — snore. (According to Investor’s Business Daily, Asbahi continues to work in some capacity for the campaign.) Last spring, the U.S. government issued guidelines for the Department of Homeland Security and others that “suggest” such terms as “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism” not be used; snooze. Earlier this year, revelations that the No. 2 man at the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, was closely assisted by Hesham Islam, “an Islamist with a pro-Muslim Brotherhood bent who has brought in groups to the Pentagon who have been unindicted co-conspirators,” according to terror expert Steven Emerson, drew a big yawn, snores and a snooze.

Who could have imagined any of this, back when there was still a massive hole of burning ash at the bottom of Manhattan?

Today, of course, there is in downtown Manhattan a lavish memorial in the works, while at the Pentagon, what the Washington Post called “a memorial to loss” was unveiled this week. These and other such markers will note a day that will probably live on in somberness, to use the sophomore’s word, rather than in what an earlier generation might have described as infamy. As a society, we appear to have decided to remember 9/11 as something akin to a natural disaster that came and went rather than as a part of a diffuse but discernable push to advance the law of Islam.

I am struck by the sharp contrast between this perspective and a very different kind of 9/11 commemoration, this one planned for this year’s anniversary in Brussels.

According to initial press accounts, it was a small affair — just 50 people led by Flemish separatist leader Filip Dewinter of the Vlaams Belang party. Like last year, when this same group was brutally dispersed by Belgian police, they gathered in front of the World Trade Center in Brussels not only to mark the attacks on America but to protest the Islamization of Europe. Some number of them were arrested by the order of the mayor, who had earlier denied the group a permit for the demonstration, citing the possibility of violence over the “sensitivity” of the event, the proximity of “sensitive” neighborhoods (i.e., Muslim), and the season of Ramadan.

A somber day, indeed.

U.S. National Guard soldiers in formation outside a Dress Barn women’s clothing store on Maiden Lane in New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. - picture h/t Babalu)

We must always remember

Terror attacks were an act of war, not simply a tragedy to be mourned

By DEBRA BURLINGAME - (NYDaily News) - September 11th 2007

Six years ago, I turned on my television and saw the sickening image of an airplane flying directly into the south tower of the World Trade Center. I did not know that at precisely that moment, somewhere in the skies over the Ohio-Kentucky border, my brother was fighting for his life in the cockpit of his commercial airliner. It would be another 35 minutes before his plane crashed into the Pentagon’s west side.

Though the term “9/11 family member” had not yet become part of the Sept. 11 lexicon, my first thought upon seeing the plane turn and slam into the World Trade Center was of the pilots in the flight deck and the added sorrow that their families would have to live with for the rest of their lives, seeing this video.

Until I was notified of my brother’s fate, I was no different from everyone else that morning, horrified and overwhelmed by the shocking scene unfolding in lower Manhattan. After learning that people were jumping from the towers, I believe I began to depersonalize what I was seeing.

The human psyche can absorb only so much. Anyone who had been inside the World Trade Center towers or seen them upclose knew that jumping from that height was like leaping from the clouds. The day was only beginning.

A recent newspaper article suggested that the 9/11 commemoration “decibel level” should be “scaled back.” Mourning the dead too loud and too long impinges on the living, the article said. Life goes on. I wouldn’t disagree. But it is extremely important to distinguish between public mourning and public remembering; otherwise, the phrase that was as ubiquitous as the American flag six years ago, “Never Forget,” and invoked with tearful or angry rectitude, is rendered hollow. We all meant it, whether the cause was revenge, retribution or simple recognition of our common humanity.

None of us wants this to happen again, but as time goes by, why can’t we all agree, as we did then, about what took place that day?

There is a disturbing phenomenon creeping into the public debate about all things 9/11. Increasingly, Sept. 11 is compared to hurricanes, bridge collapses and other mechanical disasters or criminal acts that result in loss of life, with “body count” being the primary factor that keeps it in the top spot of “worst in the nation’s history.”

Misremembering is as dangerous as forgetting. If we must know one thing, it is that the Sept. 11 attacks were neither a natural disaster, nor the unfortunate result of human error. 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophic equivalent of a 3,000-car pileup.

The attacks were not a random actof violence or insanity. They were a deliberate and brutal act ofwar committed by religious fanatics engaged in Islamic jihad against the United States, all non-Muslim people and any Muslim who wishes to live in a secular society. Worse, the people who perpetrated the attacks have explicitly told us that they are not done.

Sept. 11 is a date that comes and goes once a year, but “9/11″ is with us every day. The body count keeps rising - Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, London, Amman.

We now clearly know that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was part of the holy war against America. When we previously dismissed this as a random attack by crazy men and declared ourselves lucky that “only six lives were lost,” we effectively disarmed ourselves. Eight years later, six became 3,000. While the comparison to other “tragedies” may help us cope with what has befallen us, we must resist being glib and intellectually careless.

Our fellow human beings were not “lost” in 1993 or on 9/11. They were torn to pieces. We must not give the enemy any quarter. We must confront the reality of their acts.

We must refuse to be fooled by their propaganda, which is meant to appeal to our own moral vanity - the belief that we can appease them by responding to their outrageous demands for accommodation, their open threats and their hateful rhetoric with even more forbearance.

Several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, I was asked to look through a thick, three-ring binder put together by the FBI, a catalogue of objects - photographed and numbered - that were the unclaimed personal effects of the 184 victims who perished at the Pentagon. They included things such as buttons, uniform insignia, house and car keys, wedding rings, shoes, personalized coffee mugs and, saddest of all, a miniature, hot-pink luggage tag with a flowery design meant for a little girl’s travel bag.

These mundane objects, the commonplace detritus of lives cut short, were deeply moving to see, perhaps because they were not some grand eulogy or noble tribute, but simple reminders of the fact that people like you and me went to work or boarded those planes on that lovely Tuesday morning, never dreaming that this was the last clear blue sky they would ever see.

Perhaps it is human instinct to turn away from suffering that goes on too long. We should celebrate life rather than wallow in grief. But we should vigilantly guard against self-delusion and denial as a means of coping with the terrible reality that we all lived through six years ago. There was a reason that we felt unified then.

The horror of what we experienced, individually and together, stripped away all the things that divide us today. We clung to each other, forgave each other, and were kind to each other, knowing that, in the end, we would only persevere together. Today of all days, that is something we should never forget.

Burlingame is the sister of Capt. Charles F. (Chic) Burlingame 3rd, pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.