|
|
|
Responses, Hot and Cool
 The
biggest news of September was not an
event, but the obsessive commemoration of the 9/11 attacks. I watched
CBS’s stunning documentary showing how New York firefighters
responded to the unprecedented calamity, and after 90 minutes I almost
couldn’t take any more.  Then
came an unexpectedly hilarious moment: an
old fireman growling at a cameraman, in his New York accent, to move on:
“This ain’t [bleeping] Disneyland.” The world was getting
back to normal.
Peggy
Noonan marked the occasion with an eloquent reflection in the Wall
Street Journal. She noted that the people in the World Trade Center,
realizing that they were about to die in moments, didn’t express hate
or fear; they called home to leave messages of love. It was their last chance
on earth to say anything to anyone, and all they could think of was “I
love you.” What a beautiful reflection on human nature.
President
Bush, in his televised speech, used the moment to justify the Iraq war again.
He said the attackers had made war on the Free World, and that Osama bin
Laden meant to create a global Muslim empire, even if he hadn’t
actually been in cahoots with Saddam Hussein. It was as if, on learning that
Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist, the United States had reacted to the
Kennedy assassination by declaring war on the Soviet Union.
![[Breaker quote for Responses, Hot and Cool: The terrorism industry]](2006breakers/061017.gif) Bin
Laden is still in hiding,
presumably in a cave somewhere, if he isn’t dead. Yet Bush persists in
talking as if he were on the verge of conquering the world! A cooler response
was offered by John Tierney in his column in the New York
Times: he expressed skepticism that the terrorists are even
capable of duplicating their first feat. Our overreaction has taken the form
of “the terrorism industry,” taking myriad superfluous
precautions, when after all the public is so much on its guard now as to make
a repetition extremely difficult, even if the government does nothing.
Whatever the enemy’s intentions, it’s his actual capacity that
counts. And as Tierney observes, the odds against any American being killed
by terrorists are about 80,000 to one.
Granted, the
United States is now hated in the Muslim world. But there is hate, and there
is hate. The Islamic fanatics are a special breed who have taken hatred to
that rare level where the hater disregards the injunctions of his own religion
(against murder and suicide, for example) and is willing to damn himself to
take revenge on his enemy. Compare Shakespeare’s Laertes: “I
dare damnation! ... Only I’ll be revenged.” Laertes is not a
Muslim. Any of us can succumb to total, self-destructive hatred.
It’s
only realism to note that the great majority and preponderance of Muslims
have not reached that pitch. The few who have are indeed a serious problem,
and will remain so as long as they are antagonized. But as always, we need to
keep our sense of proportion.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |