Do You Remember How You Felt on 9/11? And the Moral Clarity of the Days Thereafter?

Post-9/11 Era Forum

In Defense of Certainty
It's trendy to be suspicious of people with "deeply held views." And it's wrong.
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER


"And in [William] Pryor's case, his beliefs are so well known, so deeply held, that it's very hard to believe, very hard to believe that they're not going to deeply influence the way he comes about saying, 'I will follow the law.' And that would be true of anybody who had very, very deeply held views."

—Senator Charles Schumer, during a hearing on the nomination of William Pryor for U.S. appeals-court judge, June 2003


These things come in waves, of course, but waves need to be resisted, even if the exercise leaves you feeling like King Canute. The new wave is fashionable doubt. Doubt is in. Certainty is out.

The New Republic devotes a cover article to hailing the "conservatism of doubt." For the less bookish, Hollywood spends $130 million on a Crusader epic in which the heroes are 12th century multiculturalists, Christian and Muslim, who want nothing more than love, peace and interfaith understanding. (Such people inhabit 21st century Hollywood, but as columnist John Podhoretz points out, they were nowhere to be seen in 12th century Jerusalem.)

And dare you have any "deeply held views"--a transparent euphemism for religiously grounded views--especially regarding abortion, watch out for Schumer and other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. They might well declare you disqualified for the bench.

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe. It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

Why this panic about certainty and people who display it? It is not just, as conventional wisdom has it, that liberals think the last election was lost because of a bloc of benighted Evangelicals. It is because we are almost four years from 9/11 and four years of moral certainty, and firm belief is about all that secular liberalism can tolerate.

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Enough. A new day, a new wave. Time again for nuance, doubt and the comforts of relativism. It is not just the restless search for novelty, the artist's Holy Grail. It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity--and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.

Nothing has more aroused and infuriated the sophisticates than the foreign policy of a religiously inclined President, based on the notion of a universal aspiration to freedom and of America's need and duty to advance it around the world. Such liberationism, confident and unapologetic, is portrayed as arrogant crusading, a deep violation of the tradition of American pluralism, ecumenism, modesty and skeptical restraint.

That widespread portrayal is invention masquerading as history. You want certainty? You want religiosity? How about a people who overthrow the political order of the ages, go to war and occasion thousands of deaths in the name of self-evident truths and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator? That was 1776. The universality, the sacredness and the divine origin of freedom are enshrined in our founding document. The Founders, believers all, signed it. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. And not even Jefferson, the most skeptical of the lot, had the slightest doubt about it.

I remember how I felt on 9/11 when they first announced the news over the intercom at my high school.

"Jesus Christ, how many more planes are gonna come down?"

After it seemed that the 4 planes that crashed was it, people were crying, some people who had parents that worked at the Pentagon were hysterical, everyone's cell phone was ringing.

"Well, that's that. We're gonna be at war for a long time aren't we? Decades from now everyone's gonna be telling how they knew exactly where they were when they heard the news on 9/11, just like Kennedy's assassination, just like Pearl Harbor. And I'm gonna be describing this right here."

Later that day, I was driving home and people were in the streets waving the flag.

Then me and my friends spent the afternoon skateboarding. Terror struck most of America, but not us. We would not allow fear to become part of our thinking.

We were truly Patriotic Americans.

The outcome was too inconceivable for anyone to prevent it.
BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

A few men with knives. Why didn't the passengers, numbering in the dozens, just overpower them? Of the four hijacked planes, only one failed to reach its terror destination. Why just one? The question seems unfair, even disrespectful. But its answer illuminates the deepest problem in facing terrorism: failure of the imagination. The passengers' seeming passivity is reminiscent of the Holocaust. We ask, with trepidation: How could Jews have allowed themselves to be herded into gas chambers by just a few people carrying machine guns? Because it was inconceivable — six decades later it remains inconceivable — that the men carrying the weapons would do what they, in fact, did do. The victims were told these were showers. Who could imagine herding children into gas chambers? In all of human history, no people had ever done that. The victims could not plumb the depths of their enemy's evil.

I suspect the same happened to the doomed passengers on the hijacked planes. After all, hijackings have been going on for 40 years. Almost invariably, everybody ends up O.K. The hijacker wants to go to Cuba, or make a political point, or get the world's attention. Never in history had hijackers intentionally turned a passenger plane into a flying bomb, killing everyone aboard, including themselves. Decades of experience teach us that if you simply do what the hijackers say, they'll eventually get tired and give up. That's the rule.

But when the rules don't apply, when inconceivably cold-blooded evil is in command, the victims are truly helpless. In the face of unfathomable evil, decent people are psychologically disarmed. What is so striking — and so alien to civilized sensibilities — about the terrorists of radical Islam is their cult of death. Their rhetoric is soaked in the glory of immolation: immolation of the infidel and self-immolation of the avenger. Not since the Nazi rallies of the 1930s has the world witnessed such celebration of blood and soil, of killing and dying. What Western TV would feature, as does Palestinian TV, a children's song with the lyric "How pleasant is the smell of martyrs Š the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body"?

The most chilling detail of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut is that in his last seconds the suicide bomber was smiling. Bassamat al-farah, it is called. The smile of joy. Suicide bombers are taught that they are guaranteed immediate admission to paradise, where 72 black-eyed virgins await their pleasure.

The West has not known such widespread, murderous perversion of religion since the religious wars of the 17th century. Who could have imagined deliberately flying into a building? The FBI didn't. The FAA didn't. [Did you?] We could hardly believe it as we saw it happening. What hijacked passenger could possibly imagine such a scenario? Why then did the passengers on the plane that went down near Pittsburgh decide to resist the hijackers and prevent them from completing their mission? Because they knew: their relatives had told them by cell phone that the World Trade Center had already been attacked by hijacked planes. They were armed with final awareness of the nature of the evil they faced.

So armed, they could act. So armed, they did.

[Now, WE ALL know.]

I saw an intresting television documentry last night called what happend to Flight11. It was put together by using information about who was sitting where, views of pilots and counter terror officials, members of the victims families, FAA record of waht the plane did, records and ocumnets that were found in the houses oif the terrorists and most intrestingly ( becuase I did not know this happend) phone calls the flight attendants made to AA headqaurters.
What it established was that these guys used mace and that prevented anybody from entering the first class area and trying to stop them. It also said that the sad fact is that there was one man on the plane an Israeli counter terror expert but infortuntly he was the first victim in the war on terror as he was killed minutes into the attack.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/me...ion/page93.html

What I thought would happen, didn't. I thought the whole world would rise up against this, but I was wrong. Countries are still cowering in fear of retaliation.

I remember the anger I felt, not fear. I wanted to pull the trigger myself and given the opportunity, I would still do it today. To this day I remain vigilant and keep my eyes open. It's still not fear, it's anger.

do you honestly believe it's fear of retaliation?

it's plain and simple apathy. Let's stay down to earth here.

Yes, it is fear, Spain, France, Germany, Canada.
Terrorists can truly say, "Mission Accomplished".

*sigh*

drunk drivers kill approximately 16,000 people per year.

it's been about 4 years since 9/11/2001.

so that means about 64,000 people have died since 9/11 from drunk driving.

the 9/11 terrorist attacks killed about 3000 people.

64,000 from drunk driving.
3000 from terrorism.



is your vision clear yet?

http://www.sun-inet.or.jp/~mlbddf/bush.jpg

well, we've got a War on Terrorism...

and we've got a War on Drugs...


might as well start a War on Booze too, huh?




let's declare War on Fast Food Workers Spitting In Your Drink while we're at it!

Yes, but then they wimped out over Al Queda and cower in fear right now.
What's their commitment now? 0%, 1%, 2%. Whoop de do!

Can you say, fair-weather allies?

More like NO allies.

Well considering that these troops are still in Afghanistan fighting with the warlords, Taliban and Al Queda and any other group determined to cause a civil war I would say that they have wimped out at all, they jusy disagree with the war in Iraq and that pisses you off plain and simple.

Remember what the lefty hero John Kerry said about those troops?
“The Coalition of the Bribed”
Wasn't this the guy who you wanted to win?

What pisses me off is when the left can't stand behind anything. It's mainly because ther is nothing to stand behind except critisizm.
It just gets irritating to listen to nonsense.

Well I don't satnd on the left and I didn't give a toss who won the election.

but the coalition of the bribed thats a bit weird condiering that this NATO coaliotn was asked for by the US and is led by the US so that would be a case of the bribed leading the bribed.

anyway I am not criticising just stating the fact that these countries are still in action and fighting in afghanistan. So they must be allies and they cant be cowards because there is some pretty dangerous figithing going on up in those mountains and far flung towns everyday in afghanistan.

Yeah I agree. If they still have troops there that are still fighting I think it is unfair to call them cowards at all. Situations still are dangerous, whether the war is "over" or not officially.

lodgebo, please start using your spellcheck.

Well I don't stand on the left and I don't give a toss who won the election.

But the coalition of the bribed that's a bit weird considering that this NATO coalition was asked for by the US and led by the US so could this be a case of the bribed leading the bribed?

Anyway I am just stating the fact that these countries are still in action in Afghanistan. So they must be allies and they can't be cowards because there is some pretty dangerous fighting going on in those mountains and far flung towns every day in Afghanistan.

does that suit you now Joe?