Posted on 09/25/2001 7:02:41 PM PDT by Kenyon
Shame on journalists who insult the dead
By Jonathan Foreman, film critic of the New York Post
(Filed: 26/09/2001)
AS A BRITON living in Manhattan, I was sickened to read articles in the British press that could barely contain their delight at America's "bloody nose", or told the United States that it had brought the destruction on itself.The most contemptible made snide remarks about the victims: a New Statesman leader, for example, even seemed to imply that "American bond traders" somehow deserved to be terrorised.
With warped logic, it suggested that these men and women were responsible for "globalisation", in the horrific form of Coca-Cola or another episode of Dynasty.
Most bizarre of all were the Statesman's assumptions about the dead and missing. The notion that the 6,200-plus souls extinguished last week were braces-wearing, champagne-swilling, braying bond traders is more of a quasi-Stalinist fantasy than anything resembling the facts.
Anyone who has a slight acquaintance with New York knows that the World Trade Centre is hardly a bastion of yuppiedom.
And even if you did not know that the twin towers were considered unfashionable office blocks - occupied by, among others, the civil servants of the Port Authority of New York and the clerks of Blue Cross Insurance, then a moment's glance at the pictures put up by the families of the missing would make the identity of the victims all too clear.
To an extraordinary degree, they were black, Hispanic, Asian or Russian - often immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were cooks, waiters and dishwashers. They were security guards, messengers, janitors, secretaries and file clerks.
The one financial services company that was all but wiped out, Cantor Fitzgerald, was a notably unpretentious broker. The people it employed came mainly from working-class backgrounds: they were Americans from Colombia, Korea, Ireland, Dominica and Brazil.
The other day, I chose a random section of the flier-covered wall on Lexington Avenue and wrote down the names. Out of 48 people, only a handful were whites of European descent.
The others had names such as Gary Shamay, Benny Suarez, Paula Morales and Luis Revilla. Krystine Bordenabe is seven months' pregnant, says her sister's flier, and has a tattoo of a butterfly on her ankle.
Fabian Soto, 30, from Ecuador, worked on the 107th floor for the ABM window cleaning company: in his photograph, he is a broad-shouldered young man in an open-necked shirt, with a remarkably gentle smile.
Vladimir Savinkin, 21, from one of the Russian neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; it was probably his first job. Among the saddest fliers was that begging for news of Rashaun and Khamiladai Singh, brother and sister, who worked at the Windows of the World restaurant.
A clever Frenchman once wrote about the courage it takes to imagine the real. Certainly, it says something about England that the football players and fans who wore black armbands last Saturday were able to feel for those who were slaughtered in New York, but that the smug media elite represented by the New Statesman lacked the humanity to do so.
It is just as well that most Americans will never know that Charlotte Raven wrote sneeringly about their "bloody nose" at the hands of middle-class radicals who supposedly represent the wretched of the earth.
But I know, and in the name of Eskedar Melaku, Carmen Rodriguez, Salman Hamdani and Tamitha Friedman - among many others - I won't forget or forgive the insult added to injury.
Evil. Genuine evil.
BBC America (cable channel) has added crossed US and UK flags to their logo and has enough sense (or lack of the guts) not to broadcast that left-wing gang-bang they had in London.
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