Remembering 9-11
Ten years ago today, it was the morning after an all-nighter. I was taking out the garbage outside my apartment in Little Egg Harbor, NJ. The skies were clear. Thunder rolled out of a cloudless sky. I looked around, but could see neither a stormcloud nor a supersonic airplane. And the sound was strangely protracted. I shrugged, went back inside, and went back to sleep.
At 3 in the afternoon I woke up and turned on my TV and computer. The TV was showing something from some new action thriller I'd never heard of before. There was a scene, obviously done with Hollywood special effects, showing the Twin Towers. Smoke was pouring out of one of them and as I watched, a jetliner crashed into the other one.
Realistic-looking, I thought. They didn't go for the big closeup or the spectacular explosion. This ought to be a good movie -- wonder if I'll ever get to see it?.
Then my eyes focused on the online news report. What I was seeing was no movie. It was reality, over a quarter of a day ago. And based on the distance from New York City (around 90 miles, mostly over the open water off the Jersey Shore) and the speed of sound, the thunder I had heard was the thunder of one of the immense sksycrapers crashing to the ground.
At that moment, the 12-year holiday America had taken from feeling we should fear foreign threats, which had begun with the fall of the Warsaw Pact, ended, and we faced up to the reality that there was a force abroad that hated us far more than the Soviet Union ever had, a force too fanatical to be deterred by what we could do to them in reprisal: a force that could be killled but could never be lived with.
Today, America has been trying for a while to convince herself that the threat is unreal; that we can go back to sleep; that if we just leave the Muslim world be they will leave us be. Our President has even attempted to open negotiations with the Taliban: fortunately, they were too fanatical to take advantage of the opportunity to gain a breathing space, and the war goes on.
Today, we are reminded of the barbarity and horror of 9-11, of the thousands of innocent people killed -- not because they were "little Eichmanns," as the Left would have it, but simply because they were there, and lived in a country which does not bend the knee to aggressors. The enemy started this war with a slaughter of prisoners and civilians: let them end this war with the end of their own lives, whether swiftly by bomb or bullet, or slowly, their lives spent rotting in our prison camps.
Today, we are reminded of why there must never be any negotiation with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but only a killing of them, and a killing of them, and more killing of them, until they are all either dead or fled from the field. Rather than mourning their deaths, we should joy in them, for each one dead is one who loses the power to do further evil; each one dead means that the lives of his future victims have been spared.
Remorse is for killing men. Those who fight for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or for any Power on Earth which gives them aid or comfort, are not "men," they are beasts to be slain, vermin to be cleared out that our own may live safely and freely. Let these vermin live in fear, and let the manner of their deaths say unto the world "Ten times never kill American." Let them know the same mercy they gave their prisoners in the airplanes and the civilians in the Towers.
No truce with Evil, and 9-11 Quarter to the Foe!
At 3 in the afternoon I woke up and turned on my TV and computer. The TV was showing something from some new action thriller I'd never heard of before. There was a scene, obviously done with Hollywood special effects, showing the Twin Towers. Smoke was pouring out of one of them and as I watched, a jetliner crashed into the other one.
Realistic-looking, I thought. They didn't go for the big closeup or the spectacular explosion. This ought to be a good movie -- wonder if I'll ever get to see it?.
Then my eyes focused on the online news report. What I was seeing was no movie. It was reality, over a quarter of a day ago. And based on the distance from New York City (around 90 miles, mostly over the open water off the Jersey Shore) and the speed of sound, the thunder I had heard was the thunder of one of the immense sksycrapers crashing to the ground.
At that moment, the 12-year holiday America had taken from feeling we should fear foreign threats, which had begun with the fall of the Warsaw Pact, ended, and we faced up to the reality that there was a force abroad that hated us far more than the Soviet Union ever had, a force too fanatical to be deterred by what we could do to them in reprisal: a force that could be killled but could never be lived with.
Today, America has been trying for a while to convince herself that the threat is unreal; that we can go back to sleep; that if we just leave the Muslim world be they will leave us be. Our President has even attempted to open negotiations with the Taliban: fortunately, they were too fanatical to take advantage of the opportunity to gain a breathing space, and the war goes on.
Today, we are reminded of the barbarity and horror of 9-11, of the thousands of innocent people killed -- not because they were "little Eichmanns," as the Left would have it, but simply because they were there, and lived in a country which does not bend the knee to aggressors. The enemy started this war with a slaughter of prisoners and civilians: let them end this war with the end of their own lives, whether swiftly by bomb or bullet, or slowly, their lives spent rotting in our prison camps.
Today, we are reminded of why there must never be any negotiation with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but only a killing of them, and a killing of them, and more killing of them, until they are all either dead or fled from the field. Rather than mourning their deaths, we should joy in them, for each one dead is one who loses the power to do further evil; each one dead means that the lives of his future victims have been spared.
Remorse is for killing men. Those who fight for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or for any Power on Earth which gives them aid or comfort, are not "men," they are beasts to be slain, vermin to be cleared out that our own may live safely and freely. Let these vermin live in fear, and let the manner of their deaths say unto the world "Ten times never kill American." Let them know the same mercy they gave their prisoners in the airplanes and the civilians in the Towers.
No truce with Evil, and 9-11 Quarter to the Foe!