Quote: (09-14-2015 08:30 PM)wi30 Wrote:
Call me an asshole, but at this point I just mock 9/11. Almost 3,000 people died over 14 years ago. I'm sure the U.S murders way more civilians every month in the Middle East. What makes an American civilian life more valuable than someone who happened to be born in the Middle East?
I texted my girlfriend "happy holidays" last Friday based on that scene. She got the joke immediately.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
9/11.
9/11 who?
You said you'd never forget!
And so on...
An abjectly false moral equivalence, because no one disputes that Salafists kill more fellow Muslims than non-Muslims. (The figure "80% of all deaths" from Islamist terrorism gets cited widely.) Islamism is a quest for moral and political purity within Islam, you ought to know.
And then there's the 2005 UN Report on Human Security, which found declining in trends in violence in all aspects of war, even as the War in Iraq reached its most violent levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Secu...eport_2005
(The report was research compiled by schoolars outside the US, from Italy, Canada, and Scandanavia.)
Going back to the video I linked to above, and answering the question: "Why were we attacked on 9/11?" I'd point to Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris: the bombing of trains in Madrid; the bomoing of buses in London.
Why were they attacked? For the same reason.
Although with 9/11 leader Mohammed Attah there was something special about the target, the Twin Towers - something left over from the attempt to bring down the World Trade Center Towers in 1993 (
http://www.history.com/news/remembering-...-bombing): in Hamburg, Germany, where Attah studied architecture, he learned that in proper Islamic cities, the highest buildings are always Mosques. Anything else is an impudent insult to Allah! Thus, the US must be humbled before God.
And the date "9/11" was chosen to symbolize the rejoining of the Muslim campaign to subjugate the West, immediately after their defeat (the Ottoman Turks) at the Walls of Vienna, September 10th, 1663.
http://www.historytoday.com/walter-leits...ege-vienna
In short, we were - and are still - attacked because we are secular and Enlightened! - and they are the righteous mystical warriors who defend Islam and Allah!
Not really any different than what the War Aganst the Barbary states (Libya and Algeria) was about when the US had to defend fredom of the seas after the Founding decades, when Adams and Jefferson predicted that the US would fight Islam again for much the same reason.
And therefore the war will go on until Islam makes peace with the Enlightenment. There is no other end.
Analogously, the US waged the final pacification of the Indian from about 1862 in the Souix Uprising (which killed proportionately MORE people than 9/11 did) to Wounded Knee in 1893. The US campaign of pacification today - The "GWOT" as it's been dubbed - has proper precedence in our history.