Friday, September 11, 2009

Everything Changed

Eight years? Has it really been eight years?

It seems like just the other day that I was sitting at my desk on that bright September morning. My co-workers started coming in with the reports from the news, and soon all the employees were gathered around the one radio in the office that had good enough reception to pick up a clear news channel. The company president closed the office at lunchtime, and everyone went home to watch the horrors on television.

The next day we were all certain that everything had changed for good. And, looking around at what’s happening now, it seems that we were right — everything has changed, just not the way we expected.

Consider this change — this is what Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, looked like just before dawn this morning:

Ground Zero, September 11, 2009

Floodlights, cranes, and a hole in the ground — not significantly different from the way it looked when the last truckload of rubble was carted off back in the spring of 2002.

Or consider this change, a video of Joe Biden addressing the families of 9-11 victims this morning at Ground Zero:


Quite a difference from the sentiments expressed on television 2,921 days ago, yes?
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The Vice President displays a New Word Order of oratorical idiocy. Even when reading from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (with his own grammatical error interpolated), he deserves a gold medal for droning incoherence.

As Vlad Tepes said when he listened to it, “What is he talking about? It sounds like an LSD purity test.”

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Dar al-Harb TowersAfter eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.

In the eight years following John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the United States went from having no manned space program, though designing and testing the Mercury and Apollo spacecrafts, to a successful landing on the moon.

The original Word Trade Center took six years to complete, from the ground-breaking to the ribbon-cutting.

In the past eight years we have seen plenty of candlelight vigils with teddy bears and flowers and tearful remembrances by the relatives of the slain.

But there’s still a hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be.

If we were serious about defying the enemy, we would have rebuilt those towers as fast as our industrial might would allow, and made them twice as high as they were before. But there’s no evidence we are serious about the enemy, or about naming the enemy, or even about acknowledging the nature of the war we’re in.

In the past eight years our efforts have been focused on deterring “terrorism”, and above all on the prevention of further major terrorist attacks on the United States. In that endeavor we have been notably successful.

But it’s important to remember that Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was a rogue operation from the point of view of the more sober-minded planners of jihad, who could only have been dismayed by his action. Not because they objected to it on principle, but because they viewed it as an enormous strategic error: he was jumping the gun.

Before then the West had been nicely lulled to sleep about the nature of Islam, even as radical Muslims poured into the cities of Europe and bought up real estate and politicians in the United States.

Then Osama came along and woke everybody up. Millions of people who had never thought about or even heard of Mohammed and the Koran suddenly became acutely aware of what Islam was all about.

Fortunately for the Great Jihad, most major Western politicians have spent the last eight years lulling their people back to sleep with soothing stories about the Religion of Peace and lullabies of tolerant Multiculturalism.

From the point of view of the Jihad, Bin Laden and his buddies in Al Qaeda are the crazies. They are imprudent and marginal people who set the cause back by showing Islam’s hand before its time has come.

The preferred strategy of the shrewd mujahideen is the probe. For the last eight years, Islam has launched thousands of probes that have nothing to do with terrorism and will never draw the attention of the FBI or Interpol. Everywhere a probe finds weakness, a newer and stronger probe is launched, until infidel resistance at that point collapses, and another tiny piece of the world is converted from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam.

The probe is the continuation of terrorism by other means.

If statistics were available — and they almost certainly aren’t — it would be instructive to discover answers to the following questions:

  • How many more Muslim immigrants have been allowed to enter (or have entered illegally) Western countries in the last eight years?
  • What percentage of Muslims in the West espouse radical aims that include the end of democratic governance in their adopted countries, the forcible adoption of sharia, the suppression of the rights of women, the execution of apostates, and the subjugation of non-Muslims?
  • How many mosques have been built in the West in the last eight years? Of those, how many were financed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the host governments of the countries in which they were built?
  • How many Western countries now allow some form of sharia, whether officially or unofficially?
  • How many more Muslim politicians hold elective office?
  • How many prayer rooms have been added to public buildings in the West?
  • How many footbaths have been installed?
  • How many school systems have introduced all-halal menus?
  • How many municipalities have segregated the sexes for swimming and other recreational activities?
  • How many more no-go zones are there now in Western cities?
  • How many infidel Westerners have been killed, beaten up, raped, robbed, or threatened by Muslim immigrants in the last eight years?
  • How many Westerners have seen their right to free speech trampled upon by being arrested for “hate speech” when they engaged in a frank discussion of the above issues?

Oh yes, things have definitely changed since 9-11. We’re no longer the same people we were back then.

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Another sign of how much things have changed is revealed by the video posted by Dymphna early this morning. ACORN, the former employer of the President of the United States, cheerfully advised an undercover investigator on how he could establish a prostitution service using underage illegal aliens, disguise the nature of this operation, and receive subsidized federal housing funds while he did it.

This is the same ACORN whose blatantly fraudulent efforts helped elect Barack Hussein Obama.

In gratitude for the above, the very same ACORN has been authorized to receive more than a billion dollars in federal stimulus money to be used for poor unfortunates in need of housing, education, or legal help.

Eight years after 9-11, this is the kind of thing that your federal government is borrowing trillions of dollars to accomplish.

So don’t tell me that things haven’t changed. They most certainly have.

If they hadn’t, we never would have elected the Messiah as our president.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

If there weren't a whole bunch of people who think that they, not Silverstein, have the right to say what gets built, it would have been finished long ago.

Papa Whiskey said...

A chilling and spot-on essay. One might add that the American mainstream media, which in the days after 9/11 were at least partially willing to take a critical look at Islam, are now completely disinclined to do so. Their editors, reporters and commentators have become nothing but a craven corps of lickspittles.

Fjordman said...

Yes, it's been eight years, and you look more and more like a defeated nation every day that goes by. After Jihadist Muslims attacked your country you now have a President with the middle name "Hussein" who was educated at an Islamic madrasa and has publicly pledged to strike down upon those who OPPOSE the spread of Islam in his country. Muslims have every reason to gloat.

What's more, your former President Bill Clinton in front of an Arab audience bragged about the fact whites, i.e. people of European origins, will be a minority in the USA in a few years if current trends continue. No wonder Arabs don't want to be counted as "white" anymore. White Westerners look like a pathetic and weak bunch of losers. Who wants to be identified with that?

Anonymous said...

There are two options:

1. The western peoples wake up somewhere along the line before it is to late. In that case I will join the fight even though it might mean jumping right into the eye of full scale civil war.

2. The Horde takes over the whole operation. In that case I will convert to mahoundianism and get myself some wives. Whether they want it or not. Some of those who wouldn't give a s**t about Islam today. If one of them complains... bang! I would then laugh at them and all the leftist losers that helped so enthusiastically to bring forth the system that would eventually erase them. It's their own fault after all.

Can't help it, option 2 sounds like fun.

And I still can't quite decide whether or not a culture that so enthusiastically embraces a painfull suicide actually deserves to be saved in the first place.

Orlando said...

3. Convert to Catholicism and identify with Karl Martel, Don Pelayo, Jan III Sobieski, Godefroy de Bouillon, Pope Urban II, et al.

Deus vult.

Afonso Henriques said...

"After eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two."

Excellent essay Baron,
Excellent comparison.

Unknown said...

Spot on essay. Who'd have thought that eight years after 9/11, Max Hastings would be writing that the fact that Mohammed is the third most popular boy's name in England now is being covered up by the powers-that-be? See link.

laine said...

The hole in the ground is in fact the perfect symbol for America eight years later. We have gone down into negative territory in our handling of the Muslim threat. We'd have to crawl up just to get to where we were on 9/10.

We'll be lucky if Hussein doesn't dig us all the way through to China before he's finished with his:

no terror attacks, but manmade disaster (we won't mention which men)

America does not consider itself a Christian nation...

The United States is one of the biggest Muslim nations...

In inauguration speech Hussein makes it his personal duty to defend Muslims and Islam everywhere. Defender of the Faith.

Servile bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, the country that financed and provided most of the men for the man made disaster on 9/11.

Ramadan in the White House

Presidential directive to State Department for inter-faith prayer sessions to commemorate 9/11 (guess we know what the Muslims will be praying for)

and on and on ad nauseam.

Anonymous said...

We certainly have changed. It's quite sad to me to see how short our collective memory. Many people seem to have forgotten 9/11, or at least what it signified for the Western world. (Though, of course, one may argue that they never really understood its significance even in 2001.)

It is sad how far we have fallen in just eight years. I feel that even in that short period of time, this country has changed beyond recognition.

u.l. said...

Excellent post Baron.

Eight years have passed in a war in which we cannot even name the enemy. It is not 'islamists' or 'extremists' or even terrorists but Islam itself, plain and simple, an ideology, a death cult masquerading as the 'RoP'. I have come to believe that we lost the war the moment Bush called this cult a religion of peace a few days after 9/11. As they had attacked symbols of American power to make a point, we should have done likewise by destroying the very symbol of evil: ‘We give you 24 hours to get out of there, then Mecca will be turned into dust’. Instead a few thousand more western civilians and soldiers have died either in terrorist attacks or hunting an elusive enemy in the wastelands of Iraq and Afghanistan. All the while western submission to moslem demands is continuing, perhaps best symbolized in the infamous picture of Obama bowing low to that moslem tyrant, the Saudi ‘king’. I don’t know, is there still any hope?

Grandescam said...

Or better yet, join the Opus Dei, the new Knights templar and acquire the immortal tongues of latin and greek to really get in touch with Europe`s defiant soul. The last two civil duties (yes, I consider it as an impiety in the old sense of the word not to) are of the essence, because the person who has been injected, as it were, with antiquity will run the risk of becoming a breathing embodiment of the greeks and romans, and we are in sore need of such!

Unknown said...

@ u.l.: "we should have done likewise by destroying the very symbol of evil"

I actually think the "Muslim world" didn't expect anything else the first few days following the attacks. New York would have been their final Gates of Vienna.

christian soldier said...

One of the best takes re: 9/11 that I have read ...
C-CS

Anonymous said...
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Sean O'Brian said...

In a way Osama Bin Laden woke the West up to the need to surrender to Islam and that's why we have halal menus and segregated swimming pools. That would also explain George W. Bush's declaration of support for a Palestinian state, made on 10 October 2001.

Unknown said...

I've thought a few times about the way Islam is similar to the Japanese during WWII - the belief in their own superiority, the indoctrination of children, death cults, suicide bombers, behading of prisoners, etc.

Once we knew how, we finished Japan in short order. If we had stood up for ourselves and finished the Islamic world in October 2001, they would have had a chance to rebuild their nations properly by now, just as the Japanese did following their surrender at the end of WWII.

And the world would be a better place today.

Zenster said...

If we were serious about defying the enemy, we would have rebuilt those towers as fast as our industrial might would allow, and made them twice as high as they were before. But there’s no evidence we are serious about the enemy, or about naming the enemy, or even about acknowledging the nature of the war we’re in. [emphasis added]

I cannot agree more. My own feeling was that the towers should have rebuilt in their exact form as a direct and intentional thumb-in-the-eye to Islam. As to "naming the enemy", there is no better time to quote Sergy Trifcovik:

The elite class, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and irreversibly jihad-friendly, has every intention of continuing to "fight" the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win.

This craven refusal to name the enemy is tantamount to treason.

In the past eight years our efforts have been focused on deterring “terrorism”, and above all on the prevention of further major terrorist attacks on the United States. In that endeavor we have been notably successful.

My own definition of deterrence differs a bit in that, immediately afyer the 9-11 atrocity, the entire group of rogue nations like Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea should have been told that a single WMD attack on America would result in ALL OF THEM being converted into glow-in-dark parking lots.

Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was a rogue operation from the point of view of the more sober-minded planners of jihad, who could only have been dismayed by his action. Not because they objected to it on principle, but because they viewed it as an enormous strategic error: he was jumping the gun.

This is one of the most important lessons to be taken away from our suffering.

ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WILL ALWAYS OVERREACH THEMSELVES.

For Islam to assault the nuclear-armed West is supreme folly. The very nature of Muslim barbarity literally guarantees that they will commit some sort of ultimately hideous atrocity that will sweep away any remaining moral compunction about annihilating one, if not several or all, Islamic nations as a demonstration of our wrath. I thought that Beslan was just such an event. Still, the only question is a matter of time.

laine: The hole in the ground is in fact the perfect symbol for America eight years later. We have gone down into negative territory in our handling of the Muslim threat. We'd have to crawl up just to get to where we were on 9/10.

America's inability to harness its collective outrage and rebuild the towers is emblematic of its similar inability to formulate a coherent response to Muslim terrorism. Just as Muslims attempted to decapitate our military leadership by attacking the Pentagon, we should have just as quickly set about targeted assassinations of the clerics, financiers, scholars and political leaders that comprise Islam's jihadist aristocracy. Only by making terrorism into something that brings abrupt destruction for all who participate, from the top down, will there ever be an end to it.

Zenster said...

Kenny: I've thought a few times about the way Islam is similar to the Japanese during WWII - the belief in their own superiority, the indoctrination of children, death cults, suicide bombers, beheading of prisoners, etc.

You omitted how both of them launched a war they have little hope of winning. However, there is one key difference in that the Japanese code of bushido instilled an extremely strong sense of honor, whereas Islamic taqiyya and kitman prohibit any such thing.

Once we knew how, we finished Japan in short order. If we had stood up for ourselves and finished the Islamic world in October 2001, they would have had a chance to rebuild their nations properly by now, just as the Japanese did following their surrender at the end of WWII.

Your suggestion is by far superior to the course being taken at present.

And the world would be a better place today.

The sheer barbarity of Islam assures that the world must either surrender to it or eradicate such a malignant force for all time. As is the case with Islam in so many other ways, there is no middle ground.

Just as with its historical record, Islam's current strategy seeks the deaths of untold tens or hundreds of millions of people. The West's only obligation is to ensure that those numbers are overwhelming Muslim. Such slaughter is intrinsic in Muslim culture because:

ISLAM WOULDN'T HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.

Anonymous said...

Ralph Peters gets it atlast

Instead of acknowledging that radical Islam is the problem, we elected a president who blames America, whose idea of freedom is the right for women to suffer in silence behind a veil -- and who counts among his mentors and friends those who damn our country or believe that our own government staged the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Betraying our dead
Forgetting the vows we made

ɱØяñιηg$ʇðя ©™ said...

I know I can't vote in America but still, Zenster for president!! At least it would mean the end of dhimmitude.

Andre (Canada) said...

I believe that the next elections in the US in Nov 2010 are crucially important. If the dhimmicrats are resoundingly defeated, there is hope that America will be on its way to rid itself from Barack Hussein. If the dhimmicrats stay in power in Congress, it means that the American people has been completely fooled by Obama and his entourage of Islam apologists. If that is the outcome, then Obama will have a free hand to permanently change the US into a servant of Islam and of the Wahabis. The West will effectively have self-destructed following 9/11.

Profitsbeard said...

And Joe Biden's quarter-hearted (half-hearted would be far too generous), rambling, vacuous, pedantic, pseudo-poignant drivel was both and insult to the seriousness of the ceremony and the memories of the slaughtered.

As well as being a slap in the face to the survivors, and all Americans.

A low-class, small-souled buffoon.

Picked by an AmerKKKa-loathing, USA-undermining, Islam-grovelling weasel

WAKE UP said...

Joe Biden: a Nowhere Man.