We Learned Nothing From September 11

Although September 11 happened many years ago, I remember what happened then as if it were yesterday.  I was a high school student, studying in the Greater Washington, DC area, when Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes, downing all of them. Two of them struck the World Trade Center in New York.  One of them hit the Pentagon.  Still another crashed in Pennsylvania, after the passengers on board decided to sacrifice themselves so that more innocent lives would not be lost.

I studied with a girl, whose father only survived due to his addiction to cigarettes.  He was out on a cigarette break at his job at the Pentagon, when the Al Qaeda terrorists murdered everyone in his office.  He was the sole survivor. A cigarette saved his life. In total, around 3,000 people were massacred on that horrific day. 

Mendi Safadi, who heads the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights, stated in a recent interview: “20 years after that horrific day that shook the world, it appears that we are still groping with the global struggle against terrorism and what is the best way to obliterate it.” According to him, this is to our chagrin. 

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings,” the prolific writer Salmon Rashdie once explained.

“Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.”