September 11, 2003
A Day to Remember- A Day to Fight Back
This is a day to remember those who lost their lives to the warped view of maniacs who are hell bent on destroying all peace in this world. It is also a day to fight back against all terrorist groups.
You might think I'm changing subjects here, but when you think about it, I'm really not. The plight of Israel is one of my favorite causes, and I happened upon this link will reading some stuff earlier, so I want to speak about terrorism in the middle east. This might not affect Americans directly today (at least not most of us), but it's this terrorism...this mindset in these killers that is what caused 9/11. It is what has caused most international terrorism from the past 30 years. This is a cause for all people, not just the people of Israel.
I bring your attention to this short article from Jewish World Review. There are some graphic pictures of the May 18 suicide bombing in Israel (by, you guessed it, Palestinians!), so if you've got a weak stomach. Don't click the link.
I ask myself...WHY DON'T newspapers show this stuff? We can no longer let terrorist groups win. I mean, we have a president who is committed to helping these murderers (the Palestinians) get their own state! The White House actually took the road map serious. The road map to peace...the Palestinian side represented by a puppet (Abbas) who in the end answered straight to Arafat (a terrorist!!!) It's not only a joke that anyone took this serious, it's also a big fat knife in the back to my Jewish brothers and sisters who can't even ride a bus home without being murdered by some of the world's biggest cowards.
You can claim that the Palestinians are not all bad all you want, but from my research on the subject, it is clear that there is a pattern in the entire society in that region. There's a mentality of terrorism, of evil that is as big a part of that antire group of people as baseball and apple pie is a part of America.
I just have to wonder...how much longer will our government allow these terrorists to control Israel? How long until we help our Israeli partners in peace fight terrorism? When will we stop demanding that Israel do what we would never dare ask of any other nation on earth?
The Palestinians do not deserve a nation of their own. They have proven themselves terrorists, unwilling to embrace peace, time and time again. Their homicidal mindset it obvious to anyone with half a brain, and I am tired of seeing our government push the idea that these people deserve land that was never rightfully theirs to begin with. Israel exists, it will continue to exist...and one day, when we get our priorities straight, those people will be able to live in peace.
Like the article says...if such bombings can take place in Israel...they can take place in the U.S. Then, they can spread around the globe. I'd like to see how much you support these terrorists then.
Remember, the Palestinians cheered in the streets when they found out the news about September 11. They also (from numerous reports) threatened the lives of reporters who shot footage of the celebrations. I have read polls that say 70% of Palestinians support suicide bombings. Anyone want to defend these people?
You can check out the truth about the Palestinan people here. It has a number of various articles on the subject. Very insightful reading thus far (I have only read a couple of things on the site so far.)
Here is a Fox News article on the possibility of Israel expelling Arafat, an idea I wholly support, and reoccupying the west bank, another plan that I fully support.
More on the Palestinian hatred of Israel AND the U.S.
More on the celebrations in the middle east after attacks.
A list of the victims of Palestinian terror.
Victims of terrorism. People...just like you. Someone's mother, brother, sister, father, cousin, uncle, etc.
The Israeli Government official website. You'll notice that there is a banner at top about Israel remembering the Sept. 11 attacks.
Here is Jeff Jacoby's latest article, discussing terrorism and 9/11.
THE WAR DIDN'T BEGIN ON 9/11
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
September 11, 2003
LINK TO ARTICLE HERE
The war we are in didn't begin on Sept. 11, 2001. It began 22 years earlier.
On Nov. 4, 1979, Islamist radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran and, with the support of the Ayatollah Khomeini, proceeded to hold 52 Americans hostage for the next 15 months. The Carter administration's response -- an embargo on Iranian oil, a break in diplomatic relations, and a botched rescue attempt the following April -- was feeble and inept. It was also the start of a pattern that would be repeated time and again in the years and administrations that followed.
When a string of American citizens living in Lebanon were abducted -- and some of them tortured and killed -- by Iranian- and Syrian-backed terrorists between 1982 and 1991, the United States reacted not with a terrible swift sword, but with a pathetic arms-for-hostages ransom scheme. When a massive car bomb at the US embassy in Beirut murdered 63 people in April 1983, and another attack in October killed 241 Marines in their barracks, the Reagan administration promised vengeance, but in the end merely withdrew US troops from Lebanon.
And so it went when TWA Flight 847 was hijacked and Navy diver Robert Stethem murdered in 1985. When the cruise liner Achille Lauro was seized and Leon Klinghoffer shot dead in his wheelchair. When Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland, killing all 259 people on board. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. When dozens of Americans were murdered by Arab terrorists in Israel. When two US military compounds in Saudi Arabia were destroyed in 1996, leaving 26 dead and more than 500 wounded. When Al Qaeda blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. When the USS Cole was attacked, and 17 sailors killed, in 2000.
Atrocity followed atrocity, but the fury of the United States was never aroused. The terrorists and the Middle East dictatorships that sponsor them attacked us again and again, but Washington retaliated -- when it bothered to retaliate -- with only half-hearted gestures and empty rhetoric.
No, the terror war didn't start on the 11th of September. What happened on 9/11 is that America began fighting back. And the counterattack was launched not from Washington but from the skies over southeastern Pennsylvania, when the heroic passengers of United Flight 93 rose against the terrorists, and aborted the fourth attack.
In the two years since they went down fighting, much has changed in the terror war. The Taliban regime that harbored Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is no more, and thousands of terrorists have been captured or killed. Osama bin Laden is on the run, his ability to wreak terror crippled. Saddam Hussein, one of the world's most dangerous tyrants and a key terrorist ally, has been brought down, and the United States is rebuilding Iraq into a stable democracy.
Most important of all, American eyes have opened to the threat from Islamofascism, the totalitarian ideology that has succeeded Nazism and Communism as the foremost menace to the norms of civilization and the liberty of the West. President Bush understands, as he put it earlier this week, "that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness." And that "the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans."
But if much has been accomplished in the war on terrorism, the worst sponsors of terror nonetheless remain untouched. We have taken the fight to the terrorists, but we have not yet taken on the terror-states that are their mainstay and refuge: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. The governments of those three countries, more than any other, were responsible for Sept. 11 and the 22 years of terrorism that preceded it. Until they are toppled or transformed, the war against us will go on.
Bush grasps a critical point: The root of international terrorism is the lack of freedom in the Muslim Middle East. Iraq is the central theater in the war against terrorism because the terror mafia is determined to prevent the emergence of a stable and democratic Arab country. The president rightly said in his speech on Sunday that as liberty puts down Iraqi roots, the terrorists will retreat. But retreat to where? To oblivion? No -- back across the border to the terror strongholds they are coming from: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
For years, the State Department has identified the theocratic dictatorship in Iran as the world's foremost sponsor of terrorism. For almost as long, it has charged the Ba'athist regime in Syria with providing safe haven to notorious terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia spawned not only Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 9/11 hijackers, but the petrodollars and Wahhabi fanaticism that have long sustained the terror mills. Regime change in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh is essential to the eradication of Middle East terrorism. It is time the administration began saying so explicitly.
How best to effect that change is a question for the experts. It need not necessarily involve military force. Diplomatic and financial support for Iran's pro-American democratic resistance, for example, might well be enough to topple the hated mullahs who rule the country.
What is critical is to recognize that we are in a fight to the death. Either America will destroy the terror masters or the terror masters will keep destroying Americans. Two years after 9/11, let us strive to be like the heroes of Flight 93 -- to have the moral clarity to see what must be done, and the strength of will to do it.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)