Where were you 9/11/2001?

[EgoDeath]

In my sixth grade classroom. The teacher just turned on the TVs and set the channel to CNN where we saw smoke billowing out of the Twin Towers.

I was also in class.

I was eight years old, in my third grade class. I didn't find out about what was happening until I got home from school, if I remember correctly. That had to be around three in the afternoon.

I remember feeling a very strange sense of shock; it was all just very bizarre and I don't think my eight year old brain was really able to process what was happening and what it really meant. I knew that it was really bad, and that a lot of people got hurt. Watching the video clips on the news of the plane hitting the second tower didn't seem real in any way. It was all just very weird to me.

Years later, I've since processed this a lot more, and have honestly been brought to tears once or twice reading about 9/11 and thinking deeply about how many people must have been affected by this tragedy... let alone how many people died as a direct result of the attack.

It's so fucking horrible, and probably helped shape my view on religion. Part of the tragedy is that the pieces of human garbage that committed the attack are dead, and couldn't be punished at the hands of the American justice system - a justice system I normally have little faith in.

This war they're fighting is very real, and this is the type of shit that Jihadists and Islamic extremists want to do to us simply for being who we are (not Muslims). While I'm not championing America as some proud, noble country that's never done anything wrong, we didn't deserve anything like that.

[GrandizerII]

In the southern hemisphere. Still am.

[Rev. Rye]

This war they're fighting is very real, and this is the type of shit that Jihadists and Islamic extremists want to do to us simply for being who we are (not Muslims). While I'm not championing America as some proud, noble country that's never done anything wrong, we didn't deserve anything like that.

And two points on that note:

1) The US' methods of fighting terrorism couldn't be worse if they tried; One study of how terrorist groups end noted they ended (at least when they didn't splinter) in four different ways: 43% of them adopted non-violent methods and joined part of the political process, 40% died when police took out (whether by arrest or by assassination) key members, 10% when they actually achieved their goals, and 7% when military force took them out. Guess which one was the ONLY WAY the US has bothered to use to fight their terrorists? And because of this, we keep getting more enemies with all the areas we invade. And making this all the more galling, a survey in Afghanistan ten years after 9/11 revealed that 92% of their citizens HAVE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF 9/11. Yes, 11 out of every 12 Afghans KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE CRUCIAL EVENT WHICH LED US TO INVADE. So, as a result, due to an utter lack of context, they become more convinced of the rightness of their cause.

2) That said, in spite of all this, these Jihadists are barely making a dent in their body count. The total death toll from terror attacks on U.S. Soil that could potentially have been done by Muslim extremists (not counting the perps): 104. And about half of them happened in the Pulse nightclub. If not for that, it would be heavily dwarfed by the toll done by right-wing extremists of the more familiar (to the US) variety. The heartening thing about all this: the same force that's making the War on Terror intractable in the Middle East is ensuring that the Jihadis don't make much headway stateside: Guerrilla Warfare. It's a terrifyingly effective way of defeating a larger enemy, because LITERALLY EVERYONE can be the enemy. It's why the U.S. Army has only won one war after Korea: Saddam had a conventional army. Everyone else didn't. Of course, the catch is that the public has to see the terrorists as (at the very least) the lesser evil compared with the occupying forces. And no matter how many Muslims emigrate to the US, the Jihadi ideology is too fundamentally foreign to Americans to make the sort of headway for guerrilla warfare to be effective. No matter how much people hate the War on Terror, we all still acknowledge the Jihadis are worse.

[EgoDeath]

And two points on that note:

1) The US' methods of fighting terrorism couldn't be worse if they tried; One study of how terrorist groups end noted they ended (at least when they didn't splinter) in four different ways: 43% of them adopted non-violent methods and joined part of the political process, 40% died when police took out (whether by arrest or by assassination) key members, 10% when they actually achieved their goals, and 7% when military force took them out. Guess which one was the ONLY WAY the US has bothered to use to fight their terrorists? And because of this, we keep getting more enemies with all the areas we invade. And making this all the more galling, a survey in Afghanistan ten years after 9/11 revealed that 92% of their citizens HAVE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF 9/11. Yes, 11 out of every 12 Afghans KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE CRUCIAL EVENT WHICH LED US TO INVADE. So, as a result, due to an utter lack of context, they become more convinced of the rightness of their cause.

2) That said, in spite of all this, these Jihadists are barely making a dent in their body count. The total death toll from terror attacks on U.S. Soil that could potentially have been done by Muslim extremists (not counting the perps): 104. And about half of them happened in the Pulse nightclub. If not for that, it would be heavily dwarfed by the toll done by right-wing extremists of the more familiar (to the US) variety. The heartening thing about all this: the same force that's making the War on Terror intractable in the Middle East is ensuring that the Jihadis don't make much headway stateside: Guerrilla Warfare. It's a terrifyingly effective way of defeating a larger enemy, because LITERALLY EVERYONE can be the enemy. It's why the U.S. Army has only won one war after Korea: Saddam had a conventional army. Everyone else didn't. Of course, the catch is that the public has to see the terrorists as (at the very least) the lesser evil compared with the occupying forces. And no matter how many Muslims emigrate to the US, the Jihadi ideology is too fundamentally foreign to Americans to make the sort of headway for guerrilla warfare to be effective. No matter how much people hate the War on Terror, we all still acknowledge the Jihadis are worse.

What's your point?

Also, I find it interesting that when people, especially liberals, compare the death count of Muslims extremists to that of far-right extremists, they ALWAYS leave out 9/11, as if it somehow isn't worth counting. A bit disingenuous, don't you think?

[Rev. Rye]

It does point to them not trying anything on that scale again.

[Little lunch]

I was living in Emerald and I'd just gotten home from helping a fella offload his catch into the pig box.
I switched on the telly and one plane had hit.
I rung me mate and he was cranky that I woke him up.
I told him to turn the tv on and that I think it might be a big deal.
He turned it on and 2 mins later the second one struck.

[Cecelia]

I was at school. In business law class, with my boyfriend (now husband). Both of us had parents who occasionally went to the pentagon. My mother-in-law was supposed to be up there that day. She was delayed only because they heard the news that the twin towers had been hit. Her ride wanted to see what was going on--they ended up not leaving because they heard the pentagon had been hit.

Our school turned all the TV's off for the rest of the day. (A lot of us had parents who worked at the pentagon). But it was still all we talked about. I remember when I first heard it from my 2nd period teacher, I thought a plane hitting the tower was a small airplane. Not a big one.

Our 3rd period teacher worked to get the tv back, so we watched a bit more of it than everyone else.

[EgoDeath]

It does point to them not trying anything on that scale again.

Thanks to the security measures we've taken since a tragic attack where 2,977 people died at the hands of Islamic extremists. 

And still, what you're saying is pure speculation. It sounds good, and I hope you're right. But it's just that.

[Rev. Rye]

It does point to them not trying anything on that scale again.

Thanks to the security measures we've taken since a tragic attack where 2,977 people died at the hands of Islamic extremists. 

And still, what you're saying is pure speculation. It sounds good, and I hope you're right. But it's just that.

And the fact that the Islamists' guerrilla warfare is a double edged sword that works well for them in the Middle East (because their way of thinking might be easier for the local culture to appreciate) and doesn't work so well in America (because for all our diversity of thought, a caliphate isn't something most Americans aren't likely to consider a decent goal?

And while I did try to compare numbers earlier, I think that a better point of comparison is to ask "how alien is the ideology they're working for to the general populace? How popular is it likely to become?" In America, at least, the whole idea of an Islamic theocracy is not really mainstream (a Christian theocracy is another story, but ISIS ain't fighting for Gilead). Hell, even the increasingly visible population of Muslims knows that this is not a good thing. At the very least, they know it puts a lot of negative attention on them, and thus, when asked, they condemn them in no uncertain terms:




Far-right terrorism? Well, America has had a history of racism for as long as a concept of "race" has existed, and it was practically the default until over half a century ago. And after that, questionable attitudes towards other races kept being smuggled in, and I think the first seeds for explicit, politically-sanctioned racism to come back in American political life came with Bush II. After 9/11, it became acceptable to insult Muslims/Arabs (yes, I know in theory not all Arabs are Muslims, and vice versa, but in practice, the religious-ethnicity question is intertwined.) After all, we don't know jack shit about Muslims except they attacked us. Well, that and Aladdin. Also, Dubya decided to get tough on immigration, which helped raise vitriol against Hispanics and make the prejudice, which already existed, more visible. And, of course, when Obama got elected, the right lost its shit and occasional use of racialised language towards Obama (and eventually other black people, once Trayvon Martin got shot) started to become mainstream. And thus, when Donald Trump runs as a dark horse candidate for the Republican Party, building his entire campaign on bigotry, he eventually becomes not only the front-runner, but also the fucking President. Why? Because his race-baiting really resonates with a depressingly large part of the American population.

And that's why I think far-right terrorists are a bigger threat than Islamist terrorists.

[Nakara]

I was 7. Don’t remember too much. I know we were let out of school early. Got home, the TV was on the news. I thought it was a movie. That didn’t happen in real life, right? Explosions in real buildings? Real planes flying into real buildings? Real buildings crumbling, with real people inside? My 7 year old mind couldn’t comprehend it. Even when my shaking mom tried to explain what was happening and why my dad, who flew for the Coast Guard, had to leave for a while—the weight of what happened that day didn’t click til years later.

So many ordinary people living their ordinary lives, just going to work or traveling—none of them woke up that day thinking later on they might have to chose between dying by fire and smoke or jumping to their deaths in a desperate bid for relief.

Such a terrible, terrible day.