Monday, September 11, 2006
The anniversary of September 11
[Note: This post will stay on top until the evening of September 11, 2006. It will include links as I see them and thoughts as they occur to me. Keep the page open and refresh it from time to time.]
If you didn't see it last year, please read my post on Welles Crowther, a genuine hero of September 11, 2001.
Power Line linked to a video -- narrated by Ron Silver -- produced by MEMRI that examines the reaction to the attacks in much of the Muslim world. John Hinderaker puts it well:
This isn't just a trip down memory lane, either; it is an important corrective to the revisionist narrative that holds that it was President Bush's policies that caused America to be disliked in many Arab and Muslim precincts.
So is the ABC miniseries "The Path To 9/11." In fact, the destruction of the revisionist narrative is perhaps the aspect of that film that most threatens Democrats. Which might explain their reaction to it.
Joe Katzman of Winds of Change has his annual post up. In the Winds tradition, it is a huge repository of useful, interesting and moving links, and it contains the text of an email that I sent him last year about Welles.
Yahoo! has a slideshow up of "then and now" photos of lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. Also, if you've never clicked the "never forget" link on my sidebar, today would be the day to do that. It is remarkable.
"2996" is a collective blog memorial to the innocent people who died on that day. The organizers rounded up thousands of bloggers to write about each of the dead, hero and victim alike.
Wretchard wrote yesterday on the meaning of it all:
Whatever the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have signified, they did not, as some on the Left might think, represent experiences which foreshadow a return to the 1990s. What they have proved is that the cracks in the world run too deep for anyone to predict where they may lead.
Michael Ledeen's anger yet burns hot:
That morning I was in the barber shop, watching it all unfold on a small tv set, and by the time I was finished I had seen the pictures of mobs of people walking out of downtown Washington, headed for safety. I was so furious I drove down to AEI, against that sad exodus, and I was glad I had, because many European friends called, most of them saying “you must be terribly frightened.” I told them no, we were not frightened, we were angry, and we were going to be angry for a long time.
There are many who are saying that we have lost that anger, that we have reverted to a 9/10 state of mind. I have my doubts.
Certainly nobody in my house has reverted, and my sense of the American people is that they have not either. But many of our opposition leaders, journalists, broadcasters, and editors, and, apparently, the overwhelming majority of the professoriate, clearly have.
Do not miss Christopher Hitchens in this morning's Wall Street Journal:
On the "first duty":
Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.
On the "anti-war" movement, which I have long argued isn't at all opposed to war:
The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.
You're a fool if you don't read it all.
Glenn Reynolds has collected various "round-up" posts here. See particularly this symposium at National Review Online. In this, James Lileks is particularly good:
If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.
FrontPage magazine also has a symposium, including Andy McCarthy (who prosecuted the "blind sheikh" following WTC '93) and Ralph Peters. Their debate over how we should characterize and consider the Muslim world defines the argument as well as I have seen anywhere.
Wizbang has tons o' links.
Zombie has a startling deck of high-resolution photos of the WTC site, most of which I do not remember seeing before. Do not click the link if you do not have broadband.
Steven Den Beste considers the things that we all agree on, the things that we don't.
Pajamas Media's round-up page is here.
Gates of Vienna: "The other September 11".
Little Green Footballs has an open thread, "Where were you on 9/11?" I was in Austin, Texas, cleaning out my mother-in-law's house -- she had died in June -- and disconnected from all mass media. I heard about the attacks because of a phone call from my office, which was rushing products into Manhattan to deal with the expected flood of trauma cases. Those patients never materialized, at least not in large numbers. The truth is, most people either survived with fairly minor injuries, or died. Would our memories and political culture be different today if there had been thousands of trauma cases lingering for months and years after the attack?
1 Comments:
By 
Jason Pappas, at
Mon Sep 11, 10:08:00 AM:
Thanks for that link to Ledeen. I knew someone else felt the way I did.
