Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘9/11’

A few things that have been on my mind lately:

1. Idiots are their own worst PR nightmare. Let ‘em talk long enough, they’ll shoot themselves in the foot. No need to do it for them.

2. Laziness is an addition, just like alcoholism. And it has enablers. Don’t be one. Next time someone asks you a question instead of looking it up themselves, send them this link: http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com.

3. It seems to me that people are much less shutter-happy than they were a few years ago, and are more likely to put away the camera. Has the novelty of digital allowing us to take thousands of photos worn off? Do we have photo fatigue?

4. Food really does taste better on pretty new dishes.

5. I used to think that writers were just being hyperbolic when they talked about sirens “screaming”. Now I know better. They mean it literally.

6. Summer’s not over yet. There’s still almost a month to go until NHL Preseason begins.

The all-powerful “Jewish lobby” we keep hearing about (but that has thus far failed to get me a centrally-located indoor parking spot or a good discount on shoes, among other things) has struck again… at least, according to these folks:

Black youth activists in Toronto are blaming the “Jewish lobby” for the decision yesterday morning by border guards to deny entry into Canada to Malik Zulu Shabazz, a controversial black American lawyer and activist, who had been scheduled to address an afternoon protest rally at the Ontario legislature.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panthers, is a notorious figure in black activism in America. Based in Washington, he is a criminal defence lawyer, and helped to organize the Million Man March with Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

He is also reported to have claimed Jews stayed home en masse from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and to have said, on the topic of police aggression, that “The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community is a funeral in the police community.”

Ms. Anizor defended her choice of speaker yesterday.

“What’s to blame is the power of the Jewish lobby to influence politicians, to influence media, to influence whatever it took. Because it took one letter, one press release from B’nai Brith [a Jewish human rights group], and the firestorm began,” she said. “You guys [media] are all here because of what B’nai Brith told you… They’ve injected themselves, trying to dictate who the black community can and cannot hear.”

I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech, and uncomfortable with technicalities being used to shut it down in any form – whether or not I agree with it. But it is my sincere hope and belief that the vast majority of the black community in Toronto has better taste and judgment than Ms. Anizor gives them credit for.

I’ve long maintained that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. Wingnuts have been doing it for years… and apparently, it’s paying off.

A new poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid found that now, five years after 9/11, over one in five Canadians believe that the whole thing was a US-concocted conspiracy:

One in five Canadians believes the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden and were actually a plot by influential Americans, according to a poll released on Monday.

The Ipsos-Reid poll found that 22 percent of Canadians, and 26 percent of young Canadians, agree with the conspiracy theory. The number was the highest, at 32 percent, in Quebec, which has shown the least support for the U.S. war on terror.

The poll asked if the events of Sept. 11, “including the thousands of American citizens who lost their lives on that day, were actually orchestrated by a group of highly influential Americans and others as part of a wider global conspiracy to profit from and gain power and who are actually protecting Osama Bin Laden from being captured.”

Objection, Your Honour, leading the witness? Er, not exactly. Though another one of my favourite sayings is that “figures don’t lie but liars figure”, if anything, I’d expect that the blatant nuttiness of this question would, if anything, underestimate the number of people who believe in some sort of 9/11-related conspiracy theory. In all likelihood, there are even more people who would’ve answered “yes” to a question with softer wording. Scary thought.

And here in La Belle Province, next time you’re out for drinks with a few friends, look to the left and look to the right; one of you has been taken in by the conspiracy theorists.

Has it really been five years? It seems like just yesterday when I was waking up to the news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

How could any of us have known, at that moment, that life would forever be defined as “before” and “after” that moment? How could we have realized the impact that this event would have?

Now, five years later, the world certainly isn’t any safer. Maybe we’ve opened our eyes to what we were willfully ignoring before. Maybe things have really gotten a whole lot worse. Maybe it’s both. In any case, terrorism has become part of our collective language, part of the daily discourse, an almost-expected part of the news cycle. And I look around and see a war that has no end in sight and no marked progress being made.

This is the world we live in now. A world that is much less innocent, much less naive. A world filled with scary things. Will Iran get nuclear weapons and launch them at Israel or the West? Will North Korea go renegade? Where in the world will Al-Qua’eda strike next? What major disaster will befall us next?

But I also see a world with so much potential, a world where extraordinary people are accomplishing amazing things every day. A world worth fighting for.

After five years, maybe it is finally appropriate to put aside this chapter of mourning and focus on our collective potential?

To all the people complaining about the new carry-on restrictions on airplanes: shut up!

What do you think the friends and family members of the victims of 9/11 would say if we asked them whether they would have put up with the inconvenience of extra security regulations on 9/10?

Amazing how, now that one of the worst terror plots in history seems to have been foiled, all anyone can focus on is how they’re being inconvenienced. Instead of blaming the airlines, the security personnel, and the government officials, maybe people could try directing their anger and frustration at the terrorists for a change?

Today is November 9… but my blogging software writes that as 9.11. The French way, in other words. Yes, I know that’s random, but staring at the date on the top of my screen threw me for a minute there.

Will September 11th ever be just a day again?

It’s hard to believe that four years have gone by. In many ways, it feels like just yesterday when I woke up to the radio and took a few minutes to process that it was saying something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I don’t think anyone realized, at that moment, just how much was about to change.

The images are what persist the most strongly, after this time. The plane flying into the second tower. The collapse of the towers. The people running from the rubble.

September 11th changed the world. But fundamentally I don’t think it changed people. As with other catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina, people have a tendency to spin and interpret events in a way that best suits their preconceived notions anyway. But while I don’t think people truly changed, I think they did become more polarized.

Anyway, I don’t really have that much to say that hasn’t already been said by a zillion people already. It feels strange to think that only five years ago today, September 11th went by on the calendar without so much as a blink.

Back in 2003, a stir was caused by this New York Times op-ed that, seemingly flying in the face of logic, argued that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism:

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society’s elites, not the dispossessed.

Impossible, people said. That can’t be right. It just doesn’t seem logical that people would strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up unless they were driven to it by total, utter hopelessness. Despite the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were far from poor, people simply didn’t want to believe it.

Now, two years later and the debate has been reignited with the London terror attacks and the realization that the bombers were British. Meryl points to an article in the Washington Post that discusses how the 7/7 terrorists were not products of poverty or despair, but middle-class, educated and privileged:

What will stop this revolt of privileged Muslims? One possibility is that it will be checked by the same process that derailed the revolt of the rich kids in America after the 1960s — namely, the counter-revolt of the poor kids. Poor Muslims simply can’t afford the rebellion of their wealthy brethren, and the havoc it has brought to the House of Islam. For make no mistake: The people suffering from jihadism are mostly Muslims.

This follows a discussion I was having on a web forum – yet another variation on the tired, endless debate on the “root causes” of terrorism and the people who argue that if we could just solve world poverty, we’d get rid of the recruits for all the jihad training camps in one fell swoop.

Now, I’m all for solving world poverty. It’s a nice dream, and it’s great that beauty queens get up and promise to attain it – along with world peace – in pageants around the world. But it’s time for us to realize once and for all that the notion that terror comes from poverty is utter hogwash.

Increasingly, terrorists aren’t poor people with nothing to lose, blowing themselves up because their lives are so miserable. The 9/11 bombers were engineers and scientists with American educations and jobs. The 7/7 bombers were also educated middle-class Britons. These weren’t people at the end of their ropes. They weren’t motivated by desperation. No, these are people born or educated in our cultures who are, for some reason, turning against it and deciding instead to attack it.

So if the terrorist aren’t being motivated by poverty, then perhaps they’re motivated by lack of freedom? That’s a fine theory as it goes, suits the Bush agenda of spreading democracy nicely, and works well when we look at terrorists in autocratic regimes. But how can you explain the British bombers, who lived in a very free society and chose to attack it? How do you explain the fact that the most extremist wings of Islamist political groups are emerging in Western countries?

This CBC column starts off well enough in doing just that, before taking the typical CBC turn and arguing that the world should capitulate to the terrorists’ demands to make them less angry. But let’s ignore that for a moment and focus on the actual valid points being made here (and yes, there are a few):

Go to any university campus in Canada’s larger cities and you’ll see the first seeds of a conservatism being born in young Muslims. For example, at the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association, male members won’t make eye contact with the females, they won’t address them, won’t sit next to them, and, worst of all, the female students pray behind the male students, even though in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, men and women pray side by side.

This separation between the genders is not happening at the universities in Karachi, Cairo or Dhaka, but for some reason, it is happening among Muslims in the West. While these “social regressions” may not seem like a big deal, they are emblematic of a larger trend towards rejecting everything that is western.

Like I said, from there the article isn’t much help, because it goes off into its appeasement arguments quite predictably for something published by the CBC.

So then what’s the solution? If they are blowing stuff up not because they’re poor, desperate or oppressed but because they’re comfortable, educated and free, then what’s the next step in the war on terror? How can we fight people who know our culture, understand it, are born and raised in it even, and then turn on it so vehemently? If we want to identify and fight the true “root causes” of terror, where do we go from here?

There is an interesting small point in the CBC article that perhaps wasn’t focused on enough:

Ali says that these youth just want to have a voice that opposes foreign occupation and wars in their countries but, unfortunately, moderate Muslim leadership is lacking, so they join hard-core fundamentalists groups, not necessarily because they are religious, but because it’s the only organized response out there.

I’d argue that right there is the starting point. The first and most pressing problem is a lack of a strong moderate Muslim leadership. We’ve all argued that the voices of moderation are too few and too weak to outweigh the voices of the extremists.

But this is a bit of a different spin on the issue. The argument here is that young people of any culture are just looking for a place to fit in, to get involved, to forge an identity. This is true of any culture in a multicultural society. Religious groups, community groups or social groups play very valuable roles in the lives of nearly everyone.

But if the only – or most readily available – options available to young Muslims are extremist political groups, then the indoctrination of this sort of hatred will only get worse.

Maybe that’s a place to start, then. An alternative voice. Another way for young Muslims to get involved in religious, community or political issues. Another sort of cultural identity, one that has nothing to do with hating the west or blowing stuff up. The one that everyone keeps assuring us exists, but that we see so little of. In short, “religion of peace” needs to be more than just a slogan used by Muslims to attempt to convince us on the outside; it needs to be what’s “cool” on the inside. It has to become cooler to be into peace than into militancy. After all, everyone has a need to belong somewhere. Maybe it’s time people started having better things to belong to.

I don’t know any of the the answers here. I don’t even know most of the questions. But maybe – just maybe – that’s a place to start.

Bin Laden Accuses Bush of Deceiving Americans:

Osama bin Laden accused President Bush of deceiving the American people and said the Sept. 11 attacks would not have been so severe if the president had been alert.

This is too funny to not be an elaborate spoof. Especially since I still believe Bin Laden’s been dead for two years. Some lookalike probably wondered if Reuters would be fooled and report this verbatim.

In any case, I bet in next week’s Onion, we’ll see the logical comeback:

Bush Accuses Bin Laden of Attacking Americans.

That’s what people call September 11th, 2001. Three years ago today. They say it’s the end of the innocence of the world. That, when the towers fell, three thousand people died. But what also died was our faith in the goodness of people and our sense of security. That it, too, lay in the rubble.

But it wasn’t the end of the innocence, of course. Not really. Maybe the end of the delusion, but that’s it. Human beings have never had a true age of innocence. We’ve been warring with each other, killing each other, and destroying each other’s civilizations since time immortal.

It’s the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, true. But, even considering only the latter part of the 20th century until today, it’s also:

• Thirty-two years since 11 Israeli athletes were massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.
• Twenty-one years since 241 American Marines were killed in a suicide attack in Beirut, Lebanon.
• Sixteen years since Pan Am flight 103 crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland after being hijacked by Libyan terrorists, killing 259 people aboard.
• Eleven years since the last World Trade Center bombing that killed six and injured more than 1000 people.

And let’s review what we have learned since then:

• October 12, 2002, over 200 killed in a terrorist bombing in Bali, most of them Australian tourists.
• November 2002, a bombing in a hotel in Mombassa, Kenya targeted Israeli tourists. 13 people were killed.
• May 12, 2003, bombing attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killed 34 people.
• March 11, 2004, over 190 people were killed and nearly 2000 wounded when bombs exploded on commuter trains in Madrid.
• Last week, hundreds of children and adults were killed as a school siege in Beslan, Russia came to a horrifying end.
• More than 70 major terrorist attacks in Israel have claimed 400+ innocent lives since 9/11 alone.

These are just a few examples. Here are many more. The thing is, evil has been present and trying to take over for a very long time. It’s not the end of the innocence. Maybe it’s just acknowledgement that innocence never existed in the first place.

Despite that, we have not been defeated. Despite all the attacks, all the lives lost, we continue to flourish.

Which is why, today, I propose not just sadness and remembrance, but also celebration. Celebration that we’re alive, that we’re free people living in a free country. Remembrance not only that we’re fighting, but what it is we’re fighting for.

If that’s the only lesson to come out of 9/11, maybe it’s enough.