Chris Crawford - 02 December 2008 11:10 AM

Yes, certainly there are plenty of people whom 9/11 hit hard, and I can understand whatever their feelings may be: anger, sorrow, a desire for revenge, forgiveness—that’s entirely human and genuine. What I’m criticizing are the people whose experience of 9/11 was limited to news stories and who have politicized this tragedy.

Agreed. I think we’re on the same page here.

Taken from one of our members’ icons: “I’m just sayin’”

danlhinz - 02 December 2008 12:45 AM

They posed no real threat to our freedom they only pose the threat of further innocents being killed, just like starvation, and malaria.

Starvation and malaria are far less likely to suggest (for example) that they will not kill X number of people in return for surrendering the government to the control of a new caliphate.

I know it’s easy to laugh off that type of threat.  However, it’s time people begin to realize that modern technology right now permits that type of threat to be plausibly wielded by anyone with the will to do it.  Even if all high-tech toys were taken out of the game, the combination of ricin with urban population centers creates the potential for a horrible planned humanitarian disaster.

We are not talking about an advanced military super power threatening us, we are talking about a network of fundamentalists with limited resources carrying out cowardly attacks on soft targets.

Soft targets are everywhere, and as I already pointed out the lack of advanced military capability is not a significant obstacle to an effective severe terrorist threat.  You can make plenty of ricin without so much as one F-16.

You can turn Iraq and Afghanistan into democracies and the fundamentalists will just be living in a democracy planning ways to kill innocent people.

True, but hopefully without the assistance of the government (and preferably operating despite government interference).

If we are going to invade every country that is not a democracy it’s a long list but they are all a threat to freedom, and my freedom is just as important as anyone else no matter where they are born.

I don’t get the point of the mention of your freedom.  There’s no need to invade every country that is not a democracy.  The need is to vigorously oppose nations who either support or shelter terrorist groups.  You can let a totalitarian regime slide if that regime eschews terrorism.  There’s no immediate need to invade China at present, from what I can tell (for example).  Sometimes an invasion will present the best option, as was the case with Iraq and Afghanistan.  Other cases may call for different means.

Going back to it being a greater tragedy though, many people cried and said it changed their life etc. How can people be so callous as to ignore all the other world suffering but be so moved by those 3,000?

I don’t think people ignore all other world suffering.  That isn’t my experience, anyway.

Chris Crawford - 02 December 2008 09:04 AM

How can people be so callous as to ignore all the other world suffering but be so moved by those 3,000?

It is my belief that the people who make such a big deal about 9/11 are not primarily concerned over the deaths, but instead are motivated primarily by wounded pride. These nincompoops see geopolitical interaction as a big football game between The Good Guys (us) and anybody who’s not on our side (them). They toss in lots of noble talk about protecting the lives of innocents, liberty, patriotism, etc, but this is all a smokescreen. They’re mad because The Bad Guys scored a touchdown against us and now they want to score a lot of touchdowns against The Bad Guys. This explains the real motivation for invading Afghanistan and Iraq: the dimwits wanted to score some touchdowns. Torture? Just another way of scoring points. It’s not just that we get to wreak personal revenge, it’s that The Bad Guys know that we’re torturing their people, and that constitutes another touchdown in the sick minds of these folks.

What’s really disturbing is that they will never appreciate the realities.

That’s a fascinating statement, coming as it does on the heels of an opinion of yours completely (AFAICT) bereft of supporting evidence.

No matter how Iraq comes out, they’ll call it a victory because we scored a touchdown.

I’ll agree if by “touchdown” we can agree to refer to a (potentially) desirable goal:  Taking out a regime that defied the world community and supported terrorism (through Palestine and its own networks, if not through al Qaeda as well).  Yes, I said from the beginning that taking out Hussein was worth the risk of a broken Iraq (three irreconcilable chunks).  As it happens, we may get the best case scenario respecting the eventual outcome, and that reality may escape some as well.

And if The Bad Guys manage to score another touchdown, no matter how inconsequential, these maniacs will scream for blood.

Can a touchdown be worth less than six points?  Seems to me that it’s about the outcome of the overall game. If the other side can only score touchdowns worth 0 points then it’s not going to bother me much at all.

Why the Jews? Debate Erupts Over How to Explain the Mumbai Terror

By J.J. Goldberg
Thu. Dec 18, 2008
http://www.forward.com/articles/14755/

On December 5, just one week after terrorist atrocities left at least 180 dead in Mumbai, The Jewish Week of New York published a blistering editorial, consecrating the event as one more milestone in antisemitism.

[...]

Sitting in his home, Larry Yudelson, a veteran journalist and observant Jew, was incensed as he read the piece. In a December 11 posting on his popular blog, Yudeline, Yudelson lambasted it as “an editorial that will live in infamy.”

Quoting its opening, Yudelson wrote: “You wouldn’t know from this paragraph — or the eight that follow — that nearly 200 non-Jews were killed in the coordinated terror attacks, whose primary targets were foreigners in Mumbai. The official paper of the UJA-Federation of Greater New York treats them as unpersons.”

It was, he wrote, “a particularly egregious example of the particularistic Jewish response.”

[...]

In fact, however, it is not clear whether the Chabad victims were hit simply for being Jews or—in a city of 5,000 native Indian Jews whose nine synagogues were left unscathed—they were targeted as symbols of Western Jewry, Zionism and Israel or – as many observers believe – modernity, globalization, Western civilization or some combination of all of them.

Survivors of the hotel attacks report that the terrorists also specifically sought out Americans and British citizens and, of course, the mostly upper-class Indian patrons at these sites. The attackers prioritized them for murder, often passing over other non-Indians. Moreover, while under siege, one of the terrorists at the Chabad center called a popular Indian TV channel. On the air, he ranted specifically against the recent visit of an Israeli general to the Indian-ruled section of Kashmir, where India is locked in a bitter, decades-old conflict with Pakistan. Israel has become an increasingly important arms supplier to India in this clash.

[...]

“There were complex dynamics at work here,” said Jerome Chanes, a prominent sociologist of American Jewry and scholar of antisemitism. “It was about India and Pakistan; it was about ethnic tensions, and it was about antisemitism.”

“The terrorists hate the West as the antithesis of their absolutism,” agreed Rabbi Irving Greenberg, a pioneering theologian and scholar of the Holocaust. “And they hate the Jews because they see them as a symbolic representative of Western civilization. The Jews are a focus, but this is a much broader agenda.” By contrast, he said, “the Nazis were focused specifically on killing Jews.”

[...]

Still, Judeocentric particularism has its staunch defenders. The author of the Jewish Week editorial, Jonathan Mark, the paper’s associate editor, argued in an interview that “no one would ever challenge the Amsterdam News or El Diario or the Advocate,” referring to leading black, Hispanic and gay community newspapers, “if they took a position that reflects their community.”