Picture: Time Magazine
On 9/11, 2001 I was at home – ill. I was watching television when the first plane crashed into the Twin Towers. It surely must have been a terrible accident, I thought. When the second plane flew into the building, minutes later, it was clear that it was not a tragic human failure but a deliberate act of terrorism.
I remember people jumping out of windows into certain death, desperately trying to escape the raging fire. I recall people covered in blood, dust and tears. It was almost as if I could feel their pain, physically, behind my television screen. It felt as if the terrorists had raped the very meaning of humanity, compassion and love.
I was only 14 years old; too young and too innocent to fully grasp the consequences of the atrocity. I could not see what possibly could have provoked so much hatred, bitterness and violence. But I nevertheless sensed that things would never be the same again and that, whatever it was, this had profoundly changed our world forever.
Ten years on, I have fully absorbed the impact 9/11 had on our way of life and things have indeed never been the same ever since. This was not an attack on America. It was an attack on us – the free world – on everything we stand for.
On balance, the West has responded accurately and effectively. Some more than others have restlessly tried to ensure that our values are not being compromised by death-worshipping Islamic fascists.
In particular, our armed forces and, above all, those fine young men and women who have given the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq – preserving our freedom, our democracy, our liberty – deserve praise more than anyone else.
We must stop apologising for our own position. We did not cause 9/11 and we did not give rise to the ideology and narrative represented by Al Qaida, based on the perversion of Islam. We have to be confident and prepared for a generation-long struggle. This battle is far from over but it is too fundamental to allow a defeat.
Osama Bin Laden once said that the West’s problem is to find people willing to die for our values, while his problem is to hold back people willing to die for his.
We must prove him wrong – let this be the memorial for all those innocents who died on 9/11, 2001.
It was an attack on the very soul of Democracy.
Truth be told, it seems that Ussama is laughing from his grave. America has never been weaker. On the one hand, the west failed to westernize the Muslim world by force (Bush. Iraq, Afghanistan) or by promises and friendship (Obama, Cahiro, Lebanon). On the other hand, radical Islam was never been stronger: it has took over Lebanon & Turkey; Egypt, Libya and other Arab countries are well along the same route. And the entire western civilization is mired in an economic crisis that makes it too weak to respond. If nothing drastic changes in the meaning of being a westerner, I anticipate the demise of the western civilization within 50 years, if not earlier. Of course, I can see many ways in which the west can re-create itself, many of which are not pleasant (for example, fanatic nationalism may rise again in Europe, and the US may become ultra religious again).
I was in New York on holiday with my husband when the attacks happened. Just been looking at the photo album. Have kept in there the tickets we purchased to visit the Twin Towers (tourists could go up one of them) and we were stood on the roof of the World Trade Centre the day before they were hit. We were one of the last tourists up there because a storm came across the city and we had to go inside.
The US is a scary, beautiful, inspiring, complex country and my thoughts are with its people today.
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“Osama Bin Laden once said that the West’s problem is to find people willing to die for our values … We must prove him wrong”
These are weird words from Julie: they suggest that we should cultivate a propensity for suicide bombing amongst our soldiers.
“It was an attack on us – the free world – on everything we stand for.”
Hardly anything has been reported about the motivations and rationale of the 9/11 terrorists and bin Laden.
But wasn’t bin Laden’s motivation quite simple and specific, rather than the vague amorphous “everything we stand for”?: he hated the American regime for occupying holy land with their troops, and he hated the Saudi regime for prostituting themselves to America in allowing that (and a great deal more).