[Rhodes22-list] Katrina, 9/11, Could be Political

[Brad Haslett]

We just got back from the Mississippi Gulf Coast celebrating the first
anniversary of our little company and my, uh, 50th birthday.  If I'd known
I'd live this long I'd taken better care of myself!  We stayed at the
re-opened Beau Rivage in Biloxi - I highly recommend it.  The Coast is
slowly coming back but the pace is painfully slow.  Our neighbors went with
us and Fan & Cora  to see some of our work and meet a few of the brave folks
who lost everything.  Hope is found in your heart and those of others.

Today we remember 9/11.  I'll repeat the bumper sticker on all my cars.
NEVER FORGET!

A lot of good stuff has been written about this day, perhaps this is the
best -

Brad

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September 11, 2006 Remembering the 'Blessed Terror'*By* *Suzanne
Fields*<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/suzanne_fields/>

Nearly all of us of a certain age remember where we were and what we were
doing when we heard the news that an assassin had slain John F. Kennedy,
just as our parents remembered where they were on "the date that will live
in infamy." The news of the fall of the Twin Towers is similarly burned into
memory. A good many of us watched, unbelieving, as the second plane sliced
through the steel and concrete.

The reality seemed unreal, as if it were one of the science-fiction
fantasies the special effects men of the movies do so well. It was no
fantasy, but our generation's "Pearl Harbor, Live from New York." Five years
after Pearl Harbor, our enemies lay at our feet, defeated in the ruins of
Europe and Asia. Five years after this time, the war against the terrorists
grinds on with neither victory nor respite in sight. The focus has become
the "why not" rather than what must be done to win -- and to survive.

Armchair generals, hindsight experts and politicians are eager to score
points against those in charge, and there's blame enough to go around.
Finding fault with the leaders during a war is always tempting. The death of
every soldier, sailor and Marine weighs heavily on the nation's conscience,
and on the conscience of the commander in chief, too. George W. Bush can
feel the presence of the ghosts of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, of Truman, LBJ
and Nixon restlessly prowling the corridors of the White House in the wee
hours of the new day.

What's so frustrating about this war is that it's not like any before it. If
20th-century wars were about violent new technologies of death -- "perverted
science," in Churchill's phrase -- to support evil ideologies to threaten
the free civilizations, our war throws perverted religion into the mix.
Never in history have so many killing instruments been available so cheap to
so many free-lance warmongers. The Internet enables evil-doers to send
messages of hate across national boundaries with lightning speed.

The Islamic fascists do not long for the glories of a past where Islam
thrived, as in the Ottoman Empire, with theological insights into how to
live the ethical life. The radical Islamic theology appeals to death, the
"blessed terror." Some historians draw comparisons between the suicide
bombers of Palestine and Iraq and the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War
II, but such comparisons are flawed. The kamikaze pilot flew in defense of
an established, aggressive state, and letters and diaries recently found
suggest that many were reluctant "volunteers," often forced by their
commanders into cockpits which were then welded or bolted shut.

The jihadists, brainwashed from an early age to sacrifice their lives for an
evil utopia to rise from the ashes of civilization, represent neither state
nor homeland. We debate whether appeasement can win time against the
terrorism, but Hoover Institution fellow Shelby Steele points out that from
the modern Muslim world "comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist
for its own sake." America and Israel remain the focus of jihadist rhetoric,
but few reckon that the eradication of America and Israel would diminish the
hatred that galvanizes the aspiring killers who sit at the feet of Osama bin
Laden. "Even the fight of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly
self-referential," Mr. Steele writes in *The Wall Street Journal*, "fighting
not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself."

The terrorists exhibit glee in the destruction of life and property, but
they have no plans for rebuilding what they destroy, even in an image of
their own. Destruction is destruction for the sake of creating rubble and
ruin. The Nazis in their genocidal dreams saw killing all Jews as the "final
solution," to rid the world of an enemy born in paranoid fantasies of
psychological inferiority. Al Qaeda texts seized in Afghanistan in the wake
of September 11 talk of suicide missions as "the Solution," an end in itself
to keep the world aware of their nihilistic power. Sating an addiction to
the blood of infidels is all.

The radical Muslims use the shorthand of "big Satan" and "little Satan" as
useful symbols to unite political factions and sects of the Middle East
cauldron. That's a lot easier than examining the distinctions and
differences that divide Islam. A desire to destroy Israel and humiliate
America is the powerful unifying force, "a pretense," as one critic calls
it, "for a universal Jihad."

"This war will be long," says the president, "but it will end in the defeat
of the terrorists and totalitarians." But only if we can summon the will to
see and understand what's at stake.