Peggy Noonan: September 11 Today (21 months ago)

And there is the declaration of the organizations of World Trade Center families-of-victims that there should not be a statue of the firemen at the WTC memorial site. Three hundred forty-three of them died that day, but to commemorate their sacrifice would be "hierarchical." They want it clear that no one was better than anyone else, that all alike were helpless, victims.

Is that for real? That view won't prevail. Please say it ain't so.

It took me a while to find the spot where I read it, but it
was in Peggy Noonan's book, What I Saw At The Revolution.
Ms. Noonan said she rode her bike at twilight behind the mists of the truck spraying DDT.

Maybe its selfish pride in my own unit, but I want to point out something that was missed in this column. 50 cops from the NYPD and the Port Authority PD and a number of court officers were also lost that day going into the towers, and none of them had even the slightest protection against smoke and fire. No disrespect towards FDNY, but they didn't do it alone.

Most cops that I've spoken to who were there aren't really concerned about a separate memorial. I think its appropriate because the courage of the responders was the only bright light to come from 9-11 in NYC. I think it helped lift everyone's spirits in the days afterward.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: "ATTACK ON AMERICA!"
http://www.truthusa.com/911.html

Thanks for the ping. Peggy is just wonderful.

Good to read Peggy again...Thanks for the ping!

I wonder how many 10's of thousands of kids of that era did the same thing that HRC and Noonan describe?

I certainly did, they sprayed a helluva lot during the encephalitis scares of the late 50's / early 60's.

Ms. Noonan said she rode her bike at twilight behind the mists of the truck spraying DDT.

You need to post the actual passage from the book! I knew I'd read it somewhere else, I just could place where when I posted this on another thread last night:

About NY Times review of Hillary’s book:
...where neighborhood kids thought it was fun to pedal through the haze of town trucks spraying DDT in the summer twilight....

Methinks Hillary is confusing passages in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring with her own childhood. (I seem to recall that description also matches an actual scene in a recent novel or film, but can't recall exactly where, perhaps in Rebecca Wells' books(?).

Not having read Hillary's book, perhaps the reviewer was quoting a passage where Hillary quotes Charles Rush's October 1, 2000 copyrighted sermon: "When I was a child in the South, one of our favorite past times in the summer was riding our bikes in the evening behind the trucks that sprayed clouds of DDT to kill mosquitoes. I swear I never once heard a parent suggest we shouldn’t ride right behind the truck, let alone come in doors, or organize a protest against spraying in general."

(Evidently Chicago and southern parents thought differently. Here on the west coast of Ohio, my mom made us stay inside when the town sprayed for mosquitoes. Just my luck: I remained "safely" inside and I'm the one with massive allergies while Hillary is out "conquering" the world.)

Ms. Noonan said she rode her bike at twilight behind the mists of the truck spraying DDT.

Didn't everyone? I know I did.

bttt for later.

More bump images HERE !

G'morning, amigo

Mornin' !

Peggy is NOT the senator from NY......

Oh, but she could be. The Republican Party is writing off next years Senatorial election? I submit that Peggy would whip Chucky Cheese's ass.

Thanks for the post and ping folks !

This bears repeating:

New Yorkers themselves have returned to fighting with each other. There's been plenty to fight over, from the new taxes to the mayor's new antismoking laws, which are not so much a policy as a non sequitur--New York is in crisis, let's ban smoking! And there is the declaration of the organizations of World Trade Center families-of-victims that there should not be a statue of the firemen at the WTC memorial site. Three hundred forty-three of them died that day, but to commemorate their sacrifice would be "hierarchical." They want it clear that no one was better than anyone else, that all alike were helpless, victims.
But that is not true; it is the opposite of the truth. The men and women working in the towers were there that morning, and died. The firemen and rescue workers--they weren't there, they went there. They didn't run from the fire, they ran into the fire. They didn't run down the staircase, they ran up the staircase. They didn't lose their lives, they gave them.
This is an important disagreement, because memorials teach. They teach the young what we, as a society, celebrate, hold high, honor. A statue of a man is an assertion: It asserts that his behavior is worthy of emulation. To leave a heroic statue of the firemen out of a WTC memorial would be as dishonest as it would be ungenerous, and would yield a memorial that is primarily about victimization. Which is not what that day was about, as so much subsequent history attests.
But go tell some New Yorkers. They're all arguing. September 11 didn't change everything.

A wonderful by Peggy Noonan commentary on what's so!

Thanks for the heads up!

ping

<< .... Mr Bush is pushing a Mideast roadmap because he knows what all but children know: 9/11 grew from, was gestated in, the intense hatred of the Arab-Israeli conflict. >>

Peggy doesn't get it too wrong too often -- but that statement is a monumental heap of Absolute crap!

The islamofascists' anti Israel hatred and rage is but a symptom of the failed Arab culture's psychopathological hesperophobia.

To whit:

QUOTE:

Hesperophobia

Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing -- but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I've been getting the same feeling from some of my eMail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: while I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers," [Perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough] some of this stuff comes pretty close - though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish, [As, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins], and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive emails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: the root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words '?spe??? [hesperos], which means "the west" and f?ß?? [phobos], which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate".

Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.

[While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans]

Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us. Does the name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization -- "the West" -- is widely hated. And as a matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank", i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand.

Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, which had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries. [Or in the case of the Chinese, millennia] When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter.

Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. [That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs -- the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them] Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more.

The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees a hundred and fifty years earlier.

The Chinese are still mad about that and are still making angry, bitter, delusional movies about the Opium Wars.

A hundred and fifty years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed.

There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well-treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: more often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. [Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an antisemite.] It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail?

Apparently not: several of my correspondents have explained to me that the Arabs are enraged by the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons". Oh. No weapons, then [and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have - lots of luck with that, guys]. But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries - China, for example - are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips to hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel's culture is ours. The Nation of Israel is part of the West and if that Nation goes down, we will have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism will have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism or anti-Semitism.

It was in part all those things:

But more than anything else, it was an act of Hesperophobia.

END QUOTE.

[John Derbyshire - National Review Online - September 14 2001]

I wish Peggy WAS the senator from NY.

I, too, take issue with her point that the reason for 9/11 is the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, I did a double-take on that sentence when I read the column.