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Jamie
Weinstein
Read Jamie's bio and previous columns
September 12, 2008
Remembering 9/11, and
the Reality of Good and Evil
The more time passes
the more we tend to forget.
But 9/11/01 we can't
forget. It is a day we must always remember. It is a day, to quote a
previous war-time president, that will live infamy.
Seven years ago
yesterday on an ordinary fall morning two jumbo jets packed with
passengers were hijacked by Islamic terrorists and used as missiles to
knock down two towers so tall they almost touched the heavens in a city
that I love. Just several hundred miles away, another jumbo jet acting
like a missile wreaked carnage at the Pentagon outside of our capital.
And in a remote
Pennsylvania field, we saw heroic destruction. The fourth jumbo jet,
surely headed like a missile for another Washington D.C. target,
mysteriously crashed into a field. As things became clearer, it turned
out to be no mystery at all. Having discovered what happened earlier,
Americans acted like Americans do. Knowing they were doomed, they took a
breath, said a prayer, and then charged their captors. Instead of
passively allowing their plane to assault other victims, these heroes
changed history, and because of their courageous deed, more daughters
still have a father and more sons a mother.
If the purpose of the
attacks were to scare us, to frighten us into submission, well, they
failed. If only Osama Bin Laden and his compatriots had studied American
history, they would have known that Americans don't frighten easily.
Their sucker punch may have taken us down for an instant in time. But as
swiftly as a blink of the eye we rose from our knees and directed our
gaze toward justice.
While the overwhelming
majority of Americans understood that what hit us on 9/11 was spawned by
an incalculable evil, some suggested that it was our actions that
had caused the attacks. The chickens had come home to roost, they said
in Ivory towers. We had bullied Muslims all over the world and now we
were getting the blowback.
If that were so, how do they explain away American efforts to save the
Muslims of Kuwait during the first Gulf War? Or American soldiers
risking life and limb to help feed poor Somali Muslims in a humanitarian
effort that had no real strategic value? Or American action to save
Kosovar Muslims from genocide?
Despite America's
record of putting our boys and girls at risk for innocent Muslims time
and time again, these members of what the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick once
labeled the “Blame America First” crowd seem to believe that Bin Laden
was enacting some sort of righteous justice by deliberately targeting
innocents. But I ask, upon what moral authority did Bin Laden and his
Taliban hosts sway their sword? How can one look at their backward,
sadistic, medieval moral code and see righteousness of any kind? Someone
please explain to me what type of person sides with, or at the very
least, gives the benefit of the doubt to such cretins?
No, America did not
deserve what happened to it that day. Right and wrong do exist. Good and
evil can be found. No person or country is perfect. But in the war in
which we are currently engaged there is simply no comparison between the
combatants. The good guys and the bad guys are clearly represented. On
one side, you have America, which is a free and open society, tolerant
of others, prosperous and modern. On the other side, our enemies, who
are straight out the 9th Century and are governed by an
ideology that glorifies death, hatred and totalitarianism.
Looking ahead, the next
administration faces many foreign policy challenges. This anniversary
should help remind us all that the enemy who inflicted our wound seven
years ago and murdered nearly 3,000 civilians on our streets still
threatens. This is not to say that there have been no successes in the
war against Islamic terrorists. There have been many. Yet all it takes
is one catastrophic attack with a weapon of mass destruction to change
our lives and our country.
So on this 9/11
anniversary, we must remain vigilant. We must also remember the fallen.
We must not only remember those who died in those gruesome attacks, but
also those men and women of our military who gave the ultimate sacrifice
for our protection and our freedom. It is a debt we will never be able
to fully repay, but it is a debt we can never, ever forget.
© 2008
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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