September 10, 2001

Never Forget, Never Forgive

The Lessons of 9/11

They Destroyed My Towers!

By Alan Caruba

Whenever I drove into New York via the Lincoln Tunnel, I would join the other cars on the long, graceful curve leading to its entrance and, looking to my left, I could see across the Hudson River. At the tip of Manhattan, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood as symbols of our economic power.

On occasion, I had dined in Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower and marveled at the panorama of New Jersey on one side, the outer boroughs on the other, and the dazzling view of Manhattan.

Whenever I think about September 11, 2001, I have only one emotion and that is a deep, unrelenting anger that a group of murderous, suicidal Islamists destroyed “my towers.”

They killed some 3,000 people when you factor in the attack on the Pentagon along with the passengers of the four commercial airliners used to perpetrate the destruction.

It is a wonder to me that Americans then and since exercised such restraint, such tolerance that the nation’s small population of Muslims not only did not suffer attacks, but today continue to build mosques for worship.

The effort to build one so close to Ground Zero demonstrates how obtuse and out of touch the political leadership is with mainstream Americans. The odious behavior of New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is beyond comprehension. The President tipped his hand at a White House dinner held to celebrate Ramadan, backing away slightly the following day enough to deflect criticism.

Those proposing the Ground Zero mosque demonstrate the arrogance and contempt for Americans and for all “unbelievers” that lies at the core of Islam, but American leaders of varying religions have fallen over one another to excuse this exercise in triumphalism.

The Crusades from 1095 to 1291 were an effort to recapture the Judeo-Christian holy land from Muslim conquest. Having invaded Spain in 711, Muslims would rule for seven centuries until driven out of their last stronghold, Grenada, in 1492. In 1683, Muslims were decisively defeated near Vienna. How different Europe would have otherwise been.

Islam is a religion of the sword despite its widespread acceptance. Its barbarity is on display on a daily basis whether killing Christian missionaries in Afghanistan or Israeli civilians, a pregnant mother, her husband and their two children a week ago.

A sane society would have cleared away the rubble of 9/11 and rebuilt the Twin Towers, but Ground Zero, in terms of new structures nine years after the attack, remains barely begun

Al Qaeda and all those who subscribe to its intent to destroy the West, the civilization developed in the West, and the freedoms championed by the West, remain to be defeated, while they continue to threaten India and even Europe once again.

The further we get from 9/11, the dimmer the embers of anger become for those with short memories or no grasp of history.

The irony is that 9/11 reflects the long memories of many Islamists whose religion demands that all lands formerly conquered in the name of Islam be regained and that all people who follow a faith other than Islam be reduced to dhimmi, second-class citizens ruled by Muslims.

The World Trade Center belonged to the world. They were my towers and your towers. They represented a world bound together in trade, a world that set a value on all manner of goods and commodities, a world in which jobs and wealth were being created.

The World Trade Center represented a rational world.

Today, nine years later, the dispatches from the Middle East, from Afghanistan, the Palestinian enclaves, from Pakistan, from Yemen, and from an Iran bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, are filled with news of an irrational, dysfunctional society; an Islamist rat’s nest, still seeking to destroy Israel, and still testing our borders and defenses in order to destroy America.

It is a good day to get angry once more, to resolve that we and the West shall not be defeated.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Protest the Media Ignored

On June 16th in downtown New York, close to "Ground Zero" where the Twin Towers once stood, a protest attended by an estimated 5,000 people went virtually unreported by the New York and national media.

Here are just two photos from the event.

The proposal to build a huge mosque within walking distance of Ground Zero is an insult to all Americans.

Some things cannot and should not be tolerated.

-- Alan Caruba

Why Are We Still Asking Why?

By Alan Caruba

We are now nearly nine years passed the attack on September 11, 2001 that killed some 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and seventeen years since the first attack, a car bomb, failed to bring down the Twin Towers.

Jihadists have been killing Americans for a long time; from the 1983 attack on the Beirut Marine barracks to the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, the recent Fort Hood attack, and now the abortive car bomb attack in Times Square.

Why are we still asking why?

Why is the mainstream press publishing headlines such as the Associated Press gem, “NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery” or USA Today’s “Motive of NYC car bomb suspect remains a mystery.”

Why does the press continue to speculate or to publish the now standard “explanations” that the terrorist, whether it be Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 Fort Hood soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar” or the latest manifestation, Faisal Shahzad, who tried to kill countless Americans in Times Square on Saturday evening is motivated by anything other than Islam?

Every other reason than Islam is offered and this opinion-shaping process is getting old. Since 2002 the U.S. has tried dozens of Muslims involved in various plots.

It’s not some odd mental derangement. It is Islam.

It is not all Muslims, many of whom have ample reason to fear the jihadists in their midst, but there have been enough jihadists and more than enough terrorist events worldwide to recommend a united front against them.

It can be argued that more Muslims have died at the hands of the jihadists than “infidels”. A website, www.thereligionofpeace.com, has recorded 15,247 Muslim terrorist incidents since 9/11 and yet all manner of U.S. officialdom keeps saying there must be some other reason than Islam.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first response was that the car bomb might have been put in Times Square by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.” How detached from reality is the Mayor? Having asked, it’s worth noting that he also once proposed putting windmills on top of all the city’s buildings to generate electricity.

No one is more skilled at denying reality than Muslims themselves. Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, followed the breaking Times Square bomber story. “We are shocked, why did he do this?” asked one man in the street in Peshawar.

Did it have anything to do, as Dawn reported, with the fact that “In the 1980s, when Shahzad was a child, Peshawar was a staging post for the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a place frequented by Osama bin Laden and swollen by a morass of two million Afghan refugees”?

Dawn interviewed Advocate Kifayatullah Khan, a former member of the provincial bar council. “He said the family believed that Shahzad had been framed. ‘The entire family is highly educated and enlightened. The villagers don’t believe that Shahzad could act in such a manner.’”

As any observer will tell you, an advanced education is often a component of the jihadist’s decision to use terror against America. Major Hasan and even 9/11 pilot, Mohammed Atta, were college graduates and Shahzad was a 2000 graduate of the University of Bridgeport (CT) with a degree in computer science who is a naturalized American.

Islam is in confrontation with every other religion worldwide and has been since the seventh century. It lacks any theological impetus toward tolerance. Its holy book, the Koran, heaps calumnies on Jews, Christians, and “those without a book”, Buddhists and Hindus. Any criticism is justification for threats and worse. It sanctions the killing of infidels and apostates,

It is the state religion and the highest legal authority of Middle Eastern nations that have proven resistant to any true modernization beyond the adoption of Western technology. All, with the exception of Turkey, are dictatorships or monarchies though Iraq, liberated by U.S. intervention, is moving slowly toward democracy.

Despite a long history of terrorist acts in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai, and in the nations of Israel, Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia, Iraq, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sudan, some people and elements of the nation’s media keep asking why!

For now and into the immediate future, it would be a good idea if the U.S. State Department stopped giving out visas like lollypops to Middle Easterners and others from predominantly Muslim nations.

It would be a good idea if the Department of Homeland Security would begin paying more attention to Arab visitors as well as native-born and naturalized Arabs in America instead of members of the Tea Party.

It would be a good idea of the U.S. military would take off the politically correct blinders and stop blathering about “diversity.”

It would be a good idea if we stopped listening to the eyewash of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and other apologists for Islamic terrorism.

At some point Americans have to stop asking why we are targeted.

We know why the car bomb was set to kill Americans in Times Square. We know why the Christmas Day bomber came close to killing those on the airliner. And we know that militant Muslims will try again.

For seven of the last nine years the Bush administration kept Americans safe from further attacks through vigilance and the preemptive use of power. Since the advent of the Obama administration in 2009, terrorist incidents have increased.

Worried about terrorism? We now have a president who, in his book, Audacity of Hope, wrote: “The stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their [Arab-Americans'] sense of security and belonging.... I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Surrender is Not an Option

By Alan Caruba

As one drove into New York from New Jersey in the years before 9/11, there was an ellipse of roadway that gently curved into the waiting entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel. From there you could see the Twin Towers in the distance, across the river, dominating the lower end of Manhattan.

It bespoke the nation’s economic strength, its international outreach, its capacity to build two such impressive skyscrapers, made more so by their architectural simplicity. They gleamed in the rays of the Sun. They mirrored the silver Moon.

I had occasion to dine in Windows on the World restaurant several times, high atop one of the towers. A wall of windows ringed the restaurant and one could look at New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other. A walk around that restaurant took in all the boroughs from that great height and there, down in the vast harbor, one could see the Statue of Liberty. So high up were you that it seemed a small thing from that distance.

If I wanted to strike at America’s confidence, America’s bravado, America’s dominance, I would have destroyed the Twin Towers and, of course, that is exactly what Osama bin Laden did.

Our response at the time was to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and, in the process, try to kill bin Laden. Neither objective has been achieved. That is because the Middle East is an ancient place enthralled by an ancient religion that roots all present actions in the Arab culture of the seventh century A.D. when it was invented by Mohammed.

They have made little progress in modernizing thought or action. They were and they are the barbarians at the gates.

The Twin Towers were all about modernity and the future. Islam is all about the past and about the demand that it be imposed on the present and the future. These are people who journey to Mecca in order to circle a structure housing a stone!

Every year when September 11th comes around, we must remind ourselves of the triumph of our Constitution, our dedication to freedom and liberty, and our capacity to defeat the enemies of these inalienable rights.

Our grandparents defeated the Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. Then they and our parents held steadfast against the Soviets for nearly five decades. We fought in Korea and we fought in Vietnam. The current generation’s bravest and best have been fighting our enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We must draw on the reservoir of courage they bequeathed us and, for my part, we must never let lose of the anger we felt eight years ago when a handful of evil men attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, with yet another intended target.

Al Qaeda? Hunt them! Find them! Kill them!

Do not listen to the appeasers, the Blame America crowd. Surrender is not an option.

9/11 Eight Years Later and No Safer

By Alan Caruba

Has it been eight years?

What I learned from 9/11 was that a lot of Americans have concluded that it was America’s fault we were attacked. That may sound screwy to people who correctly believe that al Qaeda planned, funded and provided the men who carried out the attacks, but why deal with the facts when conspiracies are so much more fun? Why not just blame the victims?

9/11 was not the first attack on the Twin Towers. For those with any attention span, the first attack came in 1993 and was treated as a criminal act by a “gang who couldn’t shoot straight” Muslims, one of whom actually returned to the rental agency to get his money back because the truck used in the attack was destroyed.

Here’s where we are eight years later. As far as the government is concerned, it has learned NOTHING from the event and the subsequent efforts to kill the Taliban and al Qaeda lunatics who were operating in Afghanistan and badlands of Pakistan.

Not only are we still in Afghanistan, not only have we blandished billions on “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well on Pakistan, but the Obama Justice Department thinks the CIA interrogators are the bad guys and wants to extend Miranda rights, the full protection of the U.S. Constitution, to terrorists.

Astonishingly, your government has returned to pre-9/11 status wherein the FBI is now responsible for preventing terrorist attacks and the CIA is largely irrelevant, if not suspect.

Recall that, at the time of 9/11, the CIA was forbidden to provide information about terrorism to the FBI and vice-versa. Welcome to the bad old days!

And Obama is still intent on closing Guantanamo although he gave zero thought as to what we should do with the terrorists detained there. Those that were returned to their homelands promptly headed for new battlefields against American forces.

Eight years on, Osama bin Laden is presumably still alive. How is it that a nation with our enormous resources, spy satellites, drones to over-fly where we believe he is hiding, special operations military personnel, and yet this very tall Arab eludes us?

Here, too, is something worth considering. Al Qaeda waited eight years after the February 26, 1993 Twin Towers attack to strike again on September 11, 2001. And 2009 is eight years since the last attack. These people are patient. The next attack has been planned that will greatly exceed the casualties of 9/11.

Had the machinery that the Bush administration put in place and which kept the nation safe been respected and augmented, I would feel more confident, but who can feel confident with Janet Napolitano heading the Department of Homeland Security?

Napolitano cannot even bring herself to say the word “terrorist” and the Obama administration has not only expunged the phrase “war on terrorism”, but the Postal Service has issued of a stamp to commemorate Eid, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan!

It was the weak response of the Clinton administration that spurred al Qaeda to stage 9/11 and the same conditions are in place again today.

In addition, in an absolutely bizarre change of focus, instead of capturing or killing terrorists, it is the former Vice President, Dick Cheney, and dedicated CIA operatives that the Obama administration would like to drag before the dock and prosecute!

It is eight years later and I do not feel one bit safer. Do you?

Twin Towers Memories

By Alan Caruba

In the years prior to 9/11, if you lived in New Jersey as I do and drove into New York there was a sweeping curve of roadway leading into the Lincoln Tunnel that provides a view across the Hudson River of downtown Manhattan. One could see the Twin Towers from that vantage point and it always bespoke the financial power of the nation, the greatness of our economic system, and our role in the world.

Little wonder it was targeted, along with the Pentagon, for destruction by al Qaeda, the evil spawn of a seventh century religion whose name translates as “submission.”

Though preceded by a number of violent attacks that included U.S. embassies and other manifestations of the Islamic mandate to make war until the entire world accepts Islam, it was 9/11 that demonstrated the demonic forces it has let loose in the world.

There are more than a billion Muslims worldwide and most desire peace no less than the vast majority of mankind. Too many, however, are driven by their worst instincts, their sense of victimization, their romanticized view of Middle Eastern culture and history.

It is instructive, therefore, to see how active leaders throughout the Middle East have become in their effort to hunt down and destroy al Qaeda. Awash in oil billions, the monarchies that control the region understand the threat to their suzerainty. In the meantime, the West continues its own largely secretive war.

It is the reason President George W. Bush sent the CIA, followed by U.S. military into Afghanistan to chase out the Taliban and al Qaeda following 9/11.

It is the reason President Bush decided to rid Iraq of its dictator and establish a U.S. military presence there. Too many other nations were too eager to do “business as usual” with Saddam Hussein and to continue likewise with Syria’s dictator and others who threaten the peace of the world.

It is the reason the U.S. military can be found in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Yemen. It is the reason we can be found in places large and small around the world. We are the guarantor of peace and the safety of the world’s sea lanes.

It is the reason the U.S. Secretary of State recently sat down with the dictator of Libya, granting him a measure of forgiveness after he abandoned the pursuit of nuclear weapons and made payments for the losses inflicted by the bombing of a Pan Am flight.

And these are the reasons, in part, why the United States of America has not been attacked by al Qaeda since 9/11.

I am mindful of these things as my mind goes back to dining at the doomed Windows on the World, a restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center from 1972 until the horror of 9/11. One could walk the perimeter of the restaurant and enjoy magnificent vistas of Manhattan, look out to New Jersey and Brooklyn, and see the Statue of Liberty, still welcoming those seeking freedom in the New World.

My mind goes back to 9/11 and the willful destruction of both buildings by men who believed they had a place waiting for them in Paradise and that Islam justified killing thousands of innocents trapped in airliners and in the great structures that stood for a new age of world trade and worldwide prosperity.

A religion that celebrates such barbarity has no place in the modern world.

It is not a religion of love and forgiveness of sin, the central theme of Christianity. It is not a religion that has produced countless scientists, artists, and others devoted to advancing knowledge and the welfare of mankind as Judaism has. It is not a religion that seeks harmony with the world as does Buddhism. It is not Hinduism devoted to a single divine principle, nor any of the other faiths that offer prayers for peace and tolerance.

9/11 occurred because of a religion that literally divides the world into Dar al Islam and Dar al harb, the world of war.

9/11 was an act of war, not just against the United States, but against the West in particular and the whole of the rest of the world that resists Islam, a religion that has been at war with the world from its inception.

We need to be mindful of that on 9/11/08. We need to stir the embers of our memory of 9/11/01 when we hear calls to withdraw from that war and to yield to its terrorism and threats of war.

We need to remember. We need to resist.