They Destroyed My Towers! ... Alan Caruba

They Destroyed My Towers!
By Alan Caruba

Whenever I drove into New York via the Lincoln Tunnel, I would join the other cars on the long, graceful curve leading to its entrance and, looking to my left, I could see across the Hudson River. At the tip of Manhattan, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood as symbols of our economic power. On occasion, I had dined in Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower and marveled at the panorama of New Jersey on one side, the outer boroughs on the other, and the dazzling view of Manhattan.

Whenever I think about September 11, 2001, I have only one emotion and that is a deep, unrelenting anger that a group of murderous, suicidal Islamists destroyed “my towers.”

They killed some 3,000 people when you factor in the attack on the Pentagon along with the passengers of the four commercial airliners used to perpetrate the destruction.

It is a wonder to me that Americans then and since exercised such restraint, such tolerance that the nation’s small population of Muslims not only did not suffer attacks, but today continue to build mosques for worship.

The effort to build one so close to Ground Zero demonstrates how obtuse and out of touch the political leadership is with mainstream Americans. The odious behavior of New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is beyond comprehension. The President tipped his hand at a White House dinner held to celebrate Ramadan, backing away slightly the following day enough to deflect criticism. Those proposing the Ground Zero mosque demonstrate the arrogance and contempt for Americans and for all “unbelievers” that lies at the core of Islam, but American leaders of varying religions have fallen over one another to excuse this exercise in triumphalism.

The Crusades from 1095 to 1291 were an effort to recapture the Judeo-Christian holy land from Muslim conquest. Having invaded Spain in 711, Muslims would rule for seven centuries until driven out of their last stronghold, Grenada, in 1492. In 1683, Muslims were decisively defeated near Vienna. How different Europe would have otherwise been.

Islam is a religion of the sword despite its widespread acceptance. Its barbarity is on display on a daily basis whether killing Christian missionaries in Afghanistan or Israeli civilians, a pregnant mother, her husband and their two children a week ago.

A sane society would have cleared away the rubble of 9/11 and rebuilt the Twin Towers, but Ground Zero, in terms of new structures nine years after the attack, remains barely begun.

Al Qaeda and all those who subscribe to its intent to destroy the West, the civilization developed in the West, and the freedoms championed by the West, remain to be defeated, while they continue to threaten India and even Europe once again.

The further we get from 9/11, the dimmer the embers of anger become for those with short memories or no grasp of history. The irony is that 9/11 reflects the long memories of many Islamists whose religion demands that all lands formerly conquered in the name of Islam be regained and that all people who follow a faith other than Islam be reduced to dhimmi, second-class citizens ruled by Muslims.

The World Trade Center belonged to the world. They were my towers and your towers. They represented a world bound together in trade, a world that set a value on all manner of goods and commodities, a world in which jobs and wealth were being created.

The World Trade Center represented a rational world. Today, nine years later, the dispatches from the Middle East, from Afghanistan, the Palestinian enclaves, from Pakistan, from Yemen, and from an Iran bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, are filled with news of an irrational, dysfunctional society; an Islamist rat’s nest, still seeking to destroy Israel, and still testing our borders and defenses in order to destroy America.

It is a good day to get angry once more, to resolve that we and the West shall not be defeated.

Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Saying No! to a Ground Zero Mosque ... Alan Caruba

Saying No! to a Ground Zero Mosque
By Alan Caruba
****************

In the August 3rd edition of The Wall Street Journal, in the Greater New York section, the lead article was “9/11 Memorial Pledged as Part of Mosque Plan.”

There already is a 9/11 memorial. It is called Ground Zero and will be incorporated into whatever structure that eventually gets built on the site.

If one continued to read the story, however, you had to jump to page A21 where side-by-side with the mosque story was one titled, “Verdict in JFK Bomb Plot”, subtitled “Jury Finds Two Guilty in Conspiracy Charges for Plan to Ignite Fuel Tanks.”
The two men found guilty were Abdul Kadir and Russell Defreitas. A third defendant, Kareem Ibrahim, was ill and didn’t go to trial with them and a fourth, Abdel Nur, took a plea deal and faces up to 15 years in prison. At no time in the body of the article is there any mention that these men are Muslims though that fact was critical to their plot.

It was noted that “the men tried to get help from al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah who was recently indicted in federal court in a plot to attack the New York City subway system with suicide bombers.”

How many Muslim plots to kill thousands of New Yorkers does it take before the plotters are identified as Muslims?

The reason why there should be no mosque built where the debris and dust of the Twin Towers showered down on the very spot is obvious to any American. It would be an obscenity.

It is obscene to wish to build a mosque within sight of where 2,700 people lost their lives in an act of Islamic terrorism, an act of war, a jihad.

How this simple fact escapes the notice of Mayor Mike Bloomberg defies understanding, but this same Mayor originally thought the failed Times Square bomb could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”

No, it could not be “anything”! Of the many plots hatched since 9/11, it is likely that 99.9% have been by Muslims, whether native born or immigrants.This is not about tolerance. In New York, every Friday in several locations through the city where there are mosques that cannot accommodate all who wish to enter for prayers, the overflow fills the surrounding streets between 2 PM and 4 PM. They block traffic in ways no other group of religionists would ever be permitted. It is surreal.

There is something especially abhorrent about Mayor Bloomberg’s dazzling ignorance because as a Jew he seems to have not absorbed the lessons of history and, in particular, the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million Christians; nuns and priests, Lutherans, gypsies, and others swept up by the Nazi death machine. Hannah Arendt attended the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi charged with rounding up and killing Europe’s Jews. Her book, “Eichmann and the Holocaust”, was published in 1963 and enshrined the phrase, “the banality of evil” in our modern lexicon.

For Arendt, Eichmann was a “new type of criminal, who commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.” Not so new because the crimes of Islam against all who are not Islamic (and some who are thanks to the Shiite-Sunni schism) are very old and fill the headlines of today’s newspapers.

The Muslims who flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did not think they were doing wrong. They were doing what the Koran and almost every imam with the breath to preach told them to do; they were killing infidels.

This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, to ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz.

Alan Caruba

***************

Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.© Alan Caruba, 2010