The Telegraph (U.K.) editorials and comments (combined to save bandwidth)

ALL we can do is to pray for the victims. As I write, we can only guess at casualties, but their number is evidently legion.

The scale of the catastrophe was already clear to anybody watching the almost surreal pictures of the World Trade Centre reduced to an inferno, of the Pentagon in flames, of Manhattan wreathed in smoke, the Statue of Liberty rising above the billowing clouds like St Paul's in the Blitz. The destruction wrought by Islamic terrorists in New York and Washington constitutes a declaration of war on the United States, on the hub of the world economy, on the Jewish people, and on Western civilisation.

Yesterday's onslaught transcends the concept of terrorism as we have known it since the defeat of the Arabs by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. A terrorist blitzkrieg of this magnitude is a continuation of warfare by other means. The suicidal fanatics who carried out this wicked conspiracy had one aim in mind: to provoke Armageddon, a war to the death between America, the Great Satan, and the Muslim world. Their more sophisticated masters, such as the latter-day Old Man of the Mountains Osama bin Laden, hope to force the United States to withdraw from the Middle East, to adopt the craven attitude of Europe towards Islamic extremism, and above all to abandon Israel to her fate.

The use of hijacked passenger aircraft as flying bombs means that Islamic fundamentalists have plumbed new depths of inhumanity in order to achieve their dystopian dream of a world purged of unbelievers. They take literally the dire warnings of the Koran to Jews and Christians: "You shall be overthrown, and mustered into Gehenna - an evil cradling!"

The cult of suicide terrorism has grown notably during the latest Palestinian intifada; but it has been seen before in attacks on Israeli and American targets overseas. Suicide terror is actually as old as the Ishmaeli suicide squads who murdered Crusader leaders, and from whose corrupted Arabic name we still derive the word "assassin". The modern suicide bombers and hijackers, like the medieval assassins, draw inspiration from passages in the Koran which promise all the sensual delights of immortality to those who die engaged in jihad, or holy war: "And those who are slain in the way of God, He will not send their works astray... And He will admit them to Paradise." There are some similarities to the Judeo-Christian notion of martyrdom - the Jewish Zealots, too, committed mass suicide at Masada rather than surrender to the Romans. But orthodox Judaism and Christianity have never sanctioned suicide as a path to Paradise. Only Islam, of the Abrahamic religions, has this tradition, and it has now sown a bitter harvest which innocent Muslims, too, may reap for many years to come.

Let there be no mistake: global Islamic terrorism is rooted in global anti-Semitism. This was, in many ways, the most vicious blow aimed at the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Though the victims yesterday were Americans, the chief target was what the perpetrators would call international Jewry. New York is not only the richest city on earth, the capital of capitalism; it is also the largest Jewish city. That it had hitherto remained invulnerable was a challenge to the diabolical ingenuity of the terrorists and their sponsors. Last year the intifada had brought a wave of assaults on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and individual Jews across Europe. Last week the grotesque "anti-racism" conference in Durban reiterated the equation between Zionism and racism which, inverted, means that anti-Zionism translates into anti-Semitism. The refusal by the US and Israel to accept this equation, symbolised by their walk-out, helped to create the context in which yesterday's monstrosity could be condoned, or at least relativised, by many Muslim fundamentalists.

As with suicide terrorism, anti-Semitism is unfortunately endemic in the Middle East, despite the fact that Arabic and Hebrew are both semitic languages. This anti-Semitism often still takes the crudest form, drawing on every scrap of discredited mumbo-jumbo since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with the Nazis is only the most notorious instance of a long line of Judeophobic Arab leaders. Mosques, not only in the Palestinian territories but far beyond, have echoed to imams and mullahs preaching against the Jews, reaching a crescendo in recent months. Yasser Arafat may have been quick to condemn yesterday's attacks, but his primary motive will have been self-preservation, while many of his followers will have rejoiced at America's greatest humiliation since Vietnam, if not indeed since Pearl Harbor.

Mention of that last great airborne onslaught on the US is a reminder that the Japanese, too, used suicide bombers to devastating effect during the closing stages of the Second World War. The kamikaze was a nightmarish weapon to defend against, but its use by an increasingly desperate Imperial regime did not have the intended effect of deterring American attacks on the Japanese homeland.

On the contrary, such attacks intensified; and the decision to deploy the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb, against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in part justified by the fear that kamikaze tactics would oblige an Allied invasion of Japan to suffer very high casualties (the figure of a million dead, though exaggerated, was widely believed). Those who use airliners as human missiles to strike against America will find that condign retaliation is no empty threat: the US armed forces have used overwhelming force to defeat the kamikaze threat before, and they will doubtless do so again.

This hideous crime against humanity will bring a deeper anxiety to the surface. Does Western civilisation still have the moral courage and determination to defend itself against barbarians who have armed themselves with the West's own weapons? In Britain, alas, we have already answered this question. Tony Blair's capitulation to the IRA rendered his Churchillian protestations yesterday hollow. Our European partners are no less irresolute in the face of threats to civilians. In Washington and New York, too, there will be voices urging a cautious, "proportionate" response: for the sake of US diplomatic interests, for the sake of Wall Street, above all to avoid casualties, civilian or military.

What, though, is proportionate when an enemy strikes at the very heart of one's homeland, spreading mayhem on an unprecedented scale? An act of war, such as this, justifies the Commander in Chief in taking the most draconian measures at his disposal. George W. Bush may not look like America's man of destiny, but that - whether he likes it or not - is what he must needs become. Unless he can rectify this failure of intelligence and security, unless he can demonstrate ruthless leadership, unless he can make himself once again feared and respected throughout the world, then he is a lame, if not a dead, duck. Americans will not tolerate a second Jimmy Carter. In this, the bloodiest massacre on their soil since the Civil War, they need a second Lincoln. The speech President Bush gave off the cuff immediately after the attack was not the Gettysburg address, but it summed up admirably the trauma of his countrymen.

I am confident that the United States will survive this test. The scenes shown on television yesterday looked like pure Hollywood, but the reality must have been closer to Dante's Inferno. Americans will not forget this cataclysm: it will have seared their collective memory and conscience. They will emerge stronger, no longer reluctant to make the supreme sacrifice for their country and for civilisation. This new century has begun for Americans under dreadful auspices, but this ordeal may be the making of a generation.

PERHAPS it would not have been so bad if I had not decided, a few years ago, to go back to New York after more than half a lifetime away. Would yesterday's disaster have felt different if I had not set foot there for more than 30 years? More remote, less of a personal affront? Maybe. But is it ever possible to see your home town engulfed in a cataclysm, however long you have been away, without being shaken?

Watching from a distance of 3,000 miles as the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed, one after the other, like a toy structure kicked by an angry child, I felt something like guilt. I should not be here in this safe London suburb. I was born to be there: to be American, to take whatever punishment it is that the world feels like handing out to Americans, however absurd and unjust the hatred is that motivates it.

Ironic, this. Living in London since the 1960s, I have been dodging IRA bombs (some of them remarkably near misses) for years, feeling little except annoyance at the inconvenience of it all - the commuter train stopped for hours because somebody has left his shopping on a seat; the department store evacuated because of a hoax call.

In England we have learnt to live on intimate terms with the possibility of Armageddon. It has become almost cosy, almost amusing, at least among journalists who are known for their black, cynical humour.

So why is this so different? Have I always assumed, like most Americans, that the country of my birth was immune to the lunatic international terrorist? Why is the sight of the World Trade Centre being blown up inherently more disturbing to me than the Bishopsgate blast (which happened less than a mile from where I worked at the time), or even the Docklands bomb, which shook my present office and knocked my colleagues to the floor?

And if it affects me this way, watching from here, I can scarcely begin to imagine the effect that it is having on my compatriots, for whom this is utterly uncharted territory.

Americans are notoriously smug about their sense of security. It is not absolutely clear why this should be so. I am quite sure of one thing: it isn't only geography that isolates the United States from the tumult of the world. It is something about the newness, the uniqueness, the unprecedentedness of its great social experiment that seems to separate it from history, as much as the huge oceans divide it from the lands that its dispossessed people left behind.

The act of leaving, of setting off, even when there was little to lose, must have been such a triumph of will and blind courage that it led you to believe that you were cut off definitively from the primeval forces and the ancient blood feuds of the old nations.

Somebody once said that America was an optimistic country because that's where the optimists went. If you had left despair behind you, then you probably believed that you had conquered fear itself. That must be it. There has to be some profound reason why Americans feel that their way of life is so removed, so imperturbable. It cannot be a matter purely of physical distance: what does that mean, after all, in an age of jet travel? Europe is no further from New York than is Los Angeles.

Then there is the scale of the event itself, which is almost indescribable in its horror. This is not just mass murder. It is not just a political outrage. It is moral chaos. There will be no American experience or emotional vocabulary for dealing with it.

Not that terrorism is unknown there - and, of course, violence of a low-grade criminal kind is a permanent fixture. In recent years, the United States has produced its own home-grown loonies who have carried out their adventures on a domestic scale but the Unabomber and the anti-government militias seem almost comic after this.

The Oklahoma bombing was thought at the time to be a jolt to the national psyche, but yesterday's events were not only on another scale altogether, but they were also of another nature. The outside world is doing to Americans what was once thought inconceivable: it is terrifying them on their own home ground.

There can have been no trauma like this since the assassination of John Kennedy, after which, as Norman Mailer once said, Americans of my generation had a collective nervous breakdown. Not just because their popular head of state had been killed but because he was shot, like some Third World despot, in full view of the public, after which his alleged assassin was himself shot in full view of the television cameras.

It was more than a crime, more than a tragedy: it was the undermining of the order of the universe. Nothing and no one was safe and normal, in the way that Americans had always thought themselves to be safe and normal.

What now? Where do you go after the apocalypse? There are really only two possibilities. Either the United States, both its people and its political class, will decide that the country has entered a new phase: that it is now irrevocably a part of an unstable world with all the risk and the endemic dangers that that involves - in which case it will become a fortress and its security arrangements will be adapted to a more or less permanent state of paranoia.

Or else there will be a swift and terrifying decision taken to restore the safety of the nation - with whatever bloody retaliation that requires. My own suspicion is that it will be the latter: Americans are descended from people who risked everything for the sake of being safe. I doubt that they will be about to relinquish that birthright now.

'KILL one, frighten a thousand" is the terrorist watchword. Yesterday, a terrorist organisation, or group of organisations, killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

The atrocity will frighten not merely individuals, but whole populations and the states that rule them. It was a dark event in the history of human liberty. The most likely outcome is the imposition of measures to restrict freedom of movement and residence. Such measures will be ineffective in preventing a repetition of the disasters, but will be made all the same.

The introduction of identity cards, compulsorily to be carried at all times, is a probable response, even in countries where "police papers" are regarded as repugnant. Registration of residence is another, and notification of change of dwelling. Officially or spontaneously, surveillance networks will emerge, in order to enforce residence controls at the local level. There will be a huge increase in the amount of personal information entered into government computer databases, and a consonant increase in the numbers of personnel employed in internal population control.

Such measures will, in a comparatively short space of time, transform the atmosphere of social life in all countries with reason to fear this new style of terrorist attack. There will be a return to the mood of the Second World War, remembered popularly as a time of neighbourly closeness. It was also a time of snooping, informing, poison-pen letter writing and, of course, intense xenophobia.

It should not be forgotten that, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the immigrant Japanese population of the American West Coast, several hundred thousand in number, were deported from their homes and locked up in remote detention camps. The United States will not start locking up Muslims tomorrow - it has yet to be established that the perpetrators were Muslim - but, if an Islamic organisation is identified as responsible, life for Muslims inside the country will become socially difficult quite quickly and may be legally circumscribed soon after.

The advancing tide of human rights litigation will be thrown into reverse. Aliens protesting at refusal of admission or at detention once admitted or at expulsion will find that new laws, hastily enacted, have abolished the rights on which they and their lawyers expected to take their stand. The withdrawal of human rights provisions will be widely welcomed by the established population, which regards such laws as unfairly favouring incomers, social misfits and the undeserving.

The reaction may be sharpest among the young, who, traditionally more open in their dealings with strangers and foreigners than the middle-aged, also come into contact with them more closely and freely. Friendly campus life for Middle Easterners may soon be a thing of the past. An event of this dimension can arouse latent nationalist passions and hatreds very easily and, if it suddenly becomes fashionable to display a violent patriotism, as it may, the next generation or two may be entirely different from the casual, obsessively tolerant teenagers of the 1990s.

Meanwhile, whatever external military action the United States government decides to take will be warmly endorsed by old and young alike. The difficulty in the immediate aftermath is to identify a target and the possibility is that Washington will strike at almost any suspect - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, perhaps all three - simply for the satisfaction inherent in retaliation. Another difficulty is that there are, after the internal and foreign wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, not many targets of value left in those countries, which made poor objectives for punishment in any case.

If Israel were, unprompted or nudged by Washington, now to decide to terminate the existence of the Palestinian Authority, destroy its structures and re-occupy the West Bank completely, those measures would be widely supported in America, just after a moment when it seemed that opinion in the United States was tiring of its traditional support for Israel and becoming ready to accept a further withdrawal and an abandonment of the most exposed settlements. One undoubted effect of the World Trade Centre disaster is to heighten the likelihood of war in the Middle East, which may indeed, in a perverse way, have been its planners' immediate desire.

There will, as an afterthought, be an even more immediate result of yesterday. Do not expect to be allowed to take hand baggage of any sort on flights to or within the United States. Expect delays of hours at check-in, invasive body searches, rejection of luggage and the presence in the seat next to you of an armed sky marshal, ready to shoot it out at 30,000 ft with anyone reckless enough of life to attempt a hijacking again.

EVEN terrorists get their ideas from the American culture they are trying to destroy. The terrible events of yesterday were like scenes from a Hollywood fantasy film.

The timing of the two suicide crashes into the World Trade Centre - minutes apart - would have fitted such a drama perfectly. The notion of hitting America at the centre of its wealth and - in the Pentagon - at the centre of its power arises from a similarly lurid imagination. And the idea that this should involve the death of the perpetrators and the death of the innocent hijacked for the purpose crowns the whole. These were acts of staggering unreality, but they took thousands of real lives.

For a moment, watching, it was impossible to engage full human sympathy. The sheer spectacle carried all before it, as must have been true to anyone far off who watched the beautiful, appalling mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in 1945. But it did not take long to start to feel for the thousands terrified and trapped, the dead and injured, the multi-ethnic workers of a free and open society so savagely set upon from the sky. The skyscraper, that great symbol of American energy and success, was destroyed by the aeroplane, that great symbol of American mobility, with the diabolical aesthetic sensibility of men who are happy to sacrifice their own lives in the process. President Bush was more eloquent in calling for a moment of silence than in anything else he said. The loss is terrible, and it will ramify through millions of lives.

There will be those who speak, as people do after terrorist outrages, of "mindless violence". Certainly the perpetrators of such acts are not balanced human beings as any civilisation or mainstream religion understands them; but it would be premature to suggest that they were mistaken, from their point of view in doing what they did. They knew what they were doing, and had reasons to think that it might work. It is up to the free world to prove by its actions that they were wrong, not only morally, but also pragmatically, to do what they did.

A lthough no one yet knows who launched yesterday's attacks, few doubt that they came from those who link the United States and Israel in a common hatred, people who claim to act in the name of Allah (the Compassionate, the Merciful) against this enemy. These blasphemers against their own faith know that it is beyond their power to defeat America in any ordinary form of combat. They have observed, however, that a modern democratic power can be armed to the teeth, yet weak at its heart. They may well have observed that it was only after the IRA started to hit big commercial targets in the nation's capital that the British state started to sue for peace. They may hope that an American population blessedly unfamiliar with terrorism within its own borders may react, after its initial anger, in a similar way, and try to negotiate a quieter life. Could Israel, like Jonah, be thrown out of the boat?

This hope will almost certainly be vain. The very fanaticism of the attacks, and the fact that nothing less than the destruction of Israel will satisfy the attackers, mean that no American administration, and assuredly not this one, will want to look for compromises, but there will be many questions asked in Washington about whether the authorities in recent years have been eager enough to identify the threat and will now prove tough enough to respond to it.

Under President Clinton, a presidential commission looked at what is known as "critical infrastructure" - the systems of transport and communication upon which a modern, free society must rely and which a terrorist organisation can disrupt. Nothing very impressive resulted. Too many in the field of national security, still working on mental models derived from the Cold War, could not adjust to the new realities - especially in dealing with threats from non-state actors in the international arena. As a result, there seems to have been a failure to distinguish between what Roberta Wohlstetter, in her famous study of Pearl Harbor, called "noise" and "signals". The Arab and Islamist enemies of America made noises of hate, but the intelligence services were not alert enough to the signals of purposeful, malign activity. There were even those who saw a certain level of terrorist violence as acceptable, seeing the price of a firm response as being too high and justifying inaction by burbling about a "cycle of violence".

Perhaps this is not surprising. Anyone watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre yesterday could see that they came, literally, out of a clear blue sky. After 136 years without conflict in the continental United States, not enough people knew how to scan the horizon for trouble.

Some did, however. For many years, Andrew Marshall, director of net assessment at the Pentagon and author of a recent review of defence strategy, has been warning of the dangers of "asymmetrical warfare". This means the capacity of those who lack the money and high technology of the United States to wage what amounts to war to deploy intelligence, ideology and low technology against the greater power. Writ large, it means the "rogue states" that are now a much greater threat to the free world than any old-fashioned power bloc. The United States cannot counter such methods by the conventional projection of its massed might. It needs, to use the fashionable word, to be "smarter".

I n deciding how to react, America would do well not to become too distracted by the search for individual terrorists. Whether or not a figure such as Osama bin Laden is involved, no single man, or even single group can operate without the backing of states. Nations such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan and, above all, Iraq, give house-room and more to the men and organisations who devote themselves to acts of this kind. They need to know that there is a price to pay for doing so, and telling them that this is so will not be enough. There needs to be action to prove it, action commensurate with the fact that this is the terrorist equivalent of Pearl Harbor. The complicit countries have too seldom been made to account for their active involvement in this covert war. It is increasingly clear, for example, that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the ground-based attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993. As for the more moderate Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, which nevertheless equivocate on these matters, they should be forced to come off the fence.

In one sense, the prospect after these atrocities is grim indeed. One commentator yesterday quoted Kipling:

The people who tried to destroy the commanding heights of the world's one superpower yesterday will feel triumphant today. Unimpeded and unidentified, they have struck deep against their great enemy. They have stilled the commerce of the world, and frightened us all. They have set an example that deluded followers will see as heroic. They have fastened in hundreds of millions of minds unforgettable images of their power to destroy, and so they will be emboldened to do so again. The fact that their chosen method involved suicide will only burnish brighter the supposed courage of their deeds. They will claim that God has blessed them and too many of their co-religionists will be too scared to contradict them.

And yet the free world will surely respond to this challenge. The people of America will not tolerate such an assault on their peaceful way of life. They may tend to think of their country as a fortress and so be slow to notice the threats that menace it, but they have noticed now. No political leader will be able to survive who does not react in cold, calculated anger to such outrages. It will need more than the bombing of an aspirin factory.

In continental Europe, there is a tendency among political elites to regard the Middle East as an adventure playground in which the most exciting game is making fun of America. There may be some crass enough to try to do so even after this, and claim that this problem is not theirs. Even in Britain, far more experienced, unfortunately, in the ways of terrorism, there has been a mood in recent years of appeasement in the face of such threat. That mood should be banished. What we saw in America yesterday was an attack on the freedom and order and peace that are essential to all of us, no less of an attack because it took place thousands of miles away.

I COULDN'T reach any of my friends in New York yesterday. By the time I tried to telephone the city shortly after the horrific news broke, the refined English lady who makes the announcements for British Telecom had already recorded a statement saying in her sweetest voice that "the telephone network is busy at the moment" and that I should try again later. This was her way of giving the incredible news that New York was cut off by telephone from the rest of the world.

This brought home to me as strongly as anything the scale of the terrorists' triumph. Americans pride themselves on carrying on business as usual, whatever the circumstances. They never let snow storms or transport strikes keep them from work. Even the World Trade Centre bombing of February 1993, which killed six people and injured 1,000, caused no more than a momentary hiccup in the smooth conduct of business.

I was working at the New Yorker magazine that year, and came into its offices on 42nd Street after the bombing to find the sort of studied calm that one associates with the British after a German air raid. The Americans were experiencing their first exposure to international terrorism on domestic soil and were eager to show how they would not be cowed by it.

B ut yesterday's was an event of a completely different order. For the first time ever, it grounded all America's civilian aircraft and brought business and government to a halt. On the internet, I stumbled across a poignant comment by John Lahr, my former New Yorker colleague, who is the magazine's theatre critic. He was engaged in an online correspondence for the magazine Slate with the playwright August Wilson when the attacks happened.

Writing from London, Mr Lahr, an American who divides his time between the two cities, said "something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life, and there is no going back What is being lost, even as the BBC TV reporters try to reach America on the phone lines that have been closed down, is not an innocence (that's long lost) but a sense of containment and invincibility.

"Fear will now be our daily bread; and hatred has been given new licence. I fear the hysteria and the distortions and the violence which will soon be acted out in all quarters."

I appreciated the calm with which President George W Bush commented on these events before leaving Florida. It held out hope that his response will be a measured one.

O ne man will be happy this morning as he takes breakfast in an American prison. He is Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man convicted in 1997 of detonating the enormous car bomb that went off in the underground garage of the World Trade Centre in 1993. Although Yousef did not testify at his trial, an American Secret Service agent who had interviewed him extensively after his arrest did so.

The agent quoted Yousef as saying that his only regrets were that the casualties and destruction had not been vastly greater. He had hoped to commit mass murder, the agent said, by toppling one of the 110-storey towers on to the other. He told the agent he had watched in disappointment from the waterfront across the Hudson River in Jersey City as the two towers, billowing smoke, remained upright. This evil man must be feeling satisfied at last.

T he towers, briefly the tallest buildings in the world and still, until yesterday, the tallest in New York, took from 1962 to 1988 to build. The foundations alone took about seven years to construct.

Will New York rebuild the World Trade Centre? I hope not. It was never beautiful and it should not have been allowed to upstage the Empire State Building in height. But I bet that it will be, just to show the terrorists who's boss.

Or else there will be a swift and terrifying decision taken to restore the safety of the nation - with whatever bloody retaliation that requires. My own suspicion is that it will be the latter: Americans are descended from people who risked everything for the sake of being safe. I doubt that they will be about to relinquish that birthright now.

She was correct until the boldened portion. Our forefathers risked everything years ago as we will risk everything now not to be safe, but to be free.

I predict that the WTC will be rebuilt and that they will not stop at 110 floors but will erect the towers so that they are the tallest (for the time being) buildings on the planet. This would be the ultimate statement to those Arab bastards. The WTC and I go way back to the 70's. I remember when they were under construction and there were rags hanging from the building with some unions logo. I remember taking dates to Windows on the World to impress. They had a wonderful wine list but it was held for ransom, the price of which was dinner. They had great bathrooms, for the time, all marble and clean as a whistle. I remember when they couldn't give the space away so many of the NY State Offices moved in. I remember going up to serve the Attorney General's office with process and admiring the view. I remember sliding down the massive escalators going to the path trains.
Just the little things that made the place part of my life. I went to the observatory three or four times. I would walk through the concourse on rainy or cold days. Cutting through the subway station, you could walk for blocks without getting cold or wet. I remember taking the Path train with my girlfriend Denise to get to her place in Newark. There was a great hamburger place on the Path level during the late 70's and early 80's.
I remember the "Big Kitchen" restaurant on the concourse level. My girlfriend Judith's Uncle Aaron used to work there.I remember going to numerous attorney offices to meet with clients. I remember the horrible odor the emanated from the bowels of the Path Station. I always believed that the place was poorly constructed. I had friends who worked on it and they told me so. After the 93 bombing I had new respect for the integrity of the structures. The Trade Center was never the most beautiful structure, or the most posh or best designed. However, it was the most impressive. It showed me what heights man could ascend to when pushed there.

Therefore, sipping my cognac, thinking of I don't yet know how many friends I lost there today, I say my final condolences and pray that the center will rise yet again to new found heights. Making it a park or a memorial would never do the Trade Center the justice it so rich deserves. Long live the World Trade Center and may it outlive all of my bittersweet memories.

Last week the grotesque "anti-racism" conference in Durban reiterated the equation between Zionism and racism which, inverted, means that anti-Zionism translates into anti-Semitism. The refusal by the US and Israel to accept this equation, symbolised by their walk-out, helped to create the context in which yesterday's monstrosity could be condoned, or at least relativised, by many Muslim fundamentalists.

There it is...grotesque is letting those feeble scum off easily. That was obnoxious and a putrid display of cowardice. They could have actually triggered this. How long have we heard the "racist" card been thrown around? I knew something was up and have talked about it before. The "racist" gambit has found it's conclusion, it has been developed to come here. It's pretty obvious, and Mary what's-her-name can rot in hell for kissing Arafat's ring. Scum.

Whether or not a figure such as Osama bin Laden is involved, no single man, or even single group can operate without the backing of states. Nations such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan and, above all, Iraq, give house-room and more to the men and organisations who devote themselves to acts of this kind. They need to know that there is a price to pay for doing so, and telling them that this is so will not be enough. There needs to be action to prove it, action commensurate with the fact that this is the terrorist equivalent of Pearl Harbor.

That says it very well. They are all guilty. They have all aided, abetted and encouraged terrorism. They all cheered at seeing Americans killed. They all must be punished.

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