Posts Tagged → twin towers
MIssing Charlie, Missing America
Today is the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, on a college campus supposedly devoted to learning, education, ideas, free speech, debate, and so on. Because you were a kind person with a big heart, I miss you, Charlie, and so do a lot of other people. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 Islamic jihadi attacks on America.
Since the day Charlie was shot by a political leftist incapable of free thought or debate or learning or free speech, America has been subjected to an increasing onslaught of anti-free thought, anti free speech, anti debate, anti ideas by the political Left, especially on college campuses.
Incapable of standing and debating, the political Left and its Islamic jihadi allies always use violence, coercion, suppression, and censorship. Claiming victim status until they have sufficient power to firmly control their political opposition, political Leftists, and their political and cultural allies, demand equal footing in every venue, in every institution. Then, when they have enough votes, they take away everyone else’s vote.
And now, at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where 25 years ago the Twin Towers were hit by two jet airplanes hijacked by Islamic jihadis, and where over 3,000 Americans subsequently lost their lives in horrible deaths, the political Left is once again demanding shared space. Yes indeed, there are demands for a mosque (!) at the Twin Towers site. Because the murderous Islamic hijackers deserve to be remembered as victims, too. As though the murderers are the same as their victims.
Charlie Kirk stood for reasonable debate, but he also stood up firmly for Western culture, Western ideals, Western values. We must carry on this legacy, most importantly through voting for strong pro America, pro freedom candidates.
Charlie’s vision for America (and Europe) challenged people especially on college campuses, because his message was incompatible with the Left’s destructive moral relativism that has taken hold everywhere.
The same moral relativism that demands the 9-11 Islamic hijackers be treated the same as their victims has also infected the minds of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, who are now openly saying in front of cameras in public interviews that Lindsay Clancy was the real victim, not her three little children that she strangled with her bare hands, in her home, in their bedrooms, surrounded by all their teddy bears, toys, and other symbols of safe, happy, hearth and home. These women jurors are talking about “compassion” for the murderer, to the point where they would have her be found not guilty of brutally murdering three innocent children.
In other words, a year after Charlie was shot in the neck by a Leftist, America is still suffering from the Left’s attack on basic human morality and essential civilizational values held the world over, except in materially successful capitalist countries, like America, where citizens have so much stuff that they can afford to invent their own problems. Like so-called “compassion” for brutal child murderers.
Charlie, we miss you, we need you now more than ever, and I know I speak for many when I say that your legacy of freedom, core Western values, and open debate as fundamental to our American culture is not forgotten. Today we remember your martyrdom, and tomorrow we remember the martyrdom of the 3,000 innocent Americans burned alive, crushed alive, thrown into a fifty story fall to pavement alive, by Islamic jihadi murderers.
Hopefully, the lesson we Americans take from all this remembering is that we do not allow yet more Leftists to take elected office and perpetuate, nay, increase, all of this mayhem.
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The day after 9/11: First impressions are the most accurate
I remember the moment of 9/11, because I was giving testimony to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Environmental Resources Committee about the importance of conserving land for future generations of people that morning.
I had just gotten started, the committee chairman made some quip about the length of my presentation being measured by the inches thickness of my prepared notes, and then the room was cleared because of potential threats to public buildings. My mile-long testimony was entered into the record and I didn’t even have to say more than a few jokes and introduce myself (Also in the record, I used an old Jim Seif ice breaker that goes like this: “My name is Josh First, and it is tough to follow so many august and impressive speakers today. I feel a little bit like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I just don’t know if I can make it exciting.”)
What I remember most about 9/11 is the day after the terror attack on the twin towers. Within 24 hours, a great deal of information about the attacks, the attackers, and the losses had been gathered. And yes, I am aware that some people believe 9/11 was an inside job committed by the CIA or some group of American security agencies. And I remain unpersuaded of that allegation.
Within 24 hours, literally the day after, the world discovered the cost of open American borders and of tolerating people who hate us living amongst us. Our first impressions were the most accurate understanding of the situation, the cause and the effect of the terror attack. Open borders and providing a safe home to people who want to murder us carries a very high cost. Only a nation that believes either it is bullet and bomb proof, and too big to fail, or that is asleep at the wheel, will permit these conditions to persist.
No nation is too big to fail. No nation is bomb proof. And any nation that is asleep at the wheel by allowing failed policies to persist is going to crash and burn and fail disastrously. And so we never learned the harsh lessons of 9/11, and we ignored our accurate first impressions to make way for ridiculous multiculturalism nonsense that continues to shape our national policies even now.
So today it is the day after 9/11, and a lot of Americans will understand when I ask: Have we Americans learned anything since the day after 9/11? Given that right now we have a wide-open southern border and millions of unknown people pouring over it, including lots of Middle Eastern terrorists, we all can say No. No, we have not learned that lesson we were so painfully taught on 9/11.
Because our biggest enemies are again living under our roof, it is just a matter of time before America experiences another 9/11-type attack. Only this time, the mass destruction mass -casualty attack will most certainly be a direct result of federal government bureaucrats and elected “leaders.” Of that purposeful culpability, there will be zero denial. They know exactly what they are doing.
Which makes us ask another question on this impression we get: Who are these American “leaders” and federal bureaucrats actually working for, if not us American citizens? They clearly don’t have our interests at heart, and they punish us when we try to put America and Americans first.
9-11, still happening in slow motion
“Nine Eleven” evokes images of smoky towers in lower Manhattan, and still photos of planes rocketing toward the towers, and people throwing themselves from the windows to escape the flames, heat, and toxic black smoke.
Finally, the twin towers fell, or rather collapsed, not long after the Muslim hijackers from Saudi Arabia had sacrificed themselves and the passengers on the planes.
Their goal was to attack America, as did their fellow hijackers on other planes that day. Flight 93 went down here in Pennsylvania, and it was my role to try to purchase or protect with conservation easements that landscape around the crash site. Working with staff from the National Park Service was mostly fun, sometimes frustrating, but in the end, the site was secured and the area set aside as a memorial.
Other memorials have been established at the Pentagon and in Manhattan.
But what is a memorial worth if the lesson it memorializes is lost?
After 9-11, our mainstream media did everything it could to cast Muslims as the actual victims of 9-11, not the perpetrators. Certainly not all Muslims can be painted with that hijacker’s brush that day, but it is a fact that throughout the Muslim world the day’s fiery images were greeted with shouts of joy and celebration. Including here in America.
Jihad groups like CAIR quickly went on offense, playing to defensive notions. CAIR and other groups played upon big-hearted Americans’ sense of fairness and justice. And so they demanded that we not only forget that 9-11 was by and for Muslims, but that we actually embrace Islam so that we could come to understand that it is actually a great belief system. Anti-Christian groups like CAIR actually used 9-11 to achieve greater inroads against Christians in America and against Christianity globally.
So far their approach has kind of worked. For example, the mainstream media refuses to report how the Muslim Students Association at a major university is actually holding a big celebratory bake sale today. You have to go one or two layers down into media sources to find this infuriating fact. Another example is that key Trump administration appointees are still cozying up with CAIR and other jihadist groups, in the hopes of makey-nicey public appearances translating into a protection scam on the ground, like the mafia used to do.
“Nice country you got here. Shame it’s so…Islamophobic. We’d hate for some Muslims to take all this Islamophobia stuff the wrong way and start cutting off American heads here…” goes the CAIR sales pitch. And so the State Department and Homeland Security Department are continuing the failed Obama policies, which allowed civilizational jihad to continue.
A new report shows that the government of Saudi Arabia funded a dry-run of the 9-11 events, helping its jihadists perfect their hijacking methods. Why we have not occupied Saudi Arabia and confiscated their oil reserves as punishment and reparations for the damage they caused America is a mystery. Any other self-respecting nation would do that. Like it or not, Russia does that kind of response. And it works.
So here we are, 16 years after 9-11, and the net result is that we are still under attack, just as we were that day. Except this attack is slower, quieter, and playing on our silly notions of fairness and justice, which are being bent and used back against us.
To millions of Americans, the 9-11 memorials are a huge red flag. They are a “WAKE THE HELL UP, AMERICA, YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK” sign, neon on a dark night. As any national memorial should be.
But do Americans have elected leaders who understand what it takes to remember 9-11 in a meaningful way, learn the lesson from that day, and apply that lesson to our laws and policies; that is the question.
Until that question is affirmatively answered in a way that protects and supports America, the answer is that 9-11 continues in slow motion.