I didn’t want to post anything on the actual day, but please know that my thoughts are with all my American friends at this time, this year and every year.
9-11 is one of those “Kennedy/Dallas” events where you will never forget where you were. For me there are a number of these, the death of Princess Diana, the Dunblane massacre, the murder of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and the murder of Ian Gow MP. 9-11 really stands out though.
The news would have broken here in England sometime after 2 pm, but at the time I was working 12-hour nights in the printshop of a large factory in my hometown of Southall, west London. I had got up and headed off for work without turning on my TV. On the bus I overheard some snatches of conversation, it was clear something big had happened, but I couldn’t make out quite what. Where I lived, Hounslow, and Southall are both areas where English is very much a second language for most folk, most of the conversations veered in and out of Hindi, Urdu etc.
Once I got to work, I found out just what had happened, or at least, what was being reported at the time, things were still quite confused. It was truly shocking, tragic and unnerving news. Details were still coming in. We had no TV, only a radio in the inkroom. Throughout the long night we all called in there whenever we could to find out the latest. Sometimes there’d be five or six of us gathered around, listening in silence like a family in the Second World War.
When I got home the next morning, I turned on the TV and sat in front of it for hours, seeing at last with my own eyes what my mind had been unable to truly imagine. I went to bed around 2pm I think, tired as I was sleep did not come easily.
At the time my assistant was a Somali guy, compared to his other countrymen at the factory he was pretty intergrated and ‘westernised’. He’d mostly grown up in Milan and was a fairly small ‘m’ moslem, we got along quite well. He felt the New York attacks were ‘wrong’ (nothing stronger than that, just wrong) but he thought the Pentagon attack was justified. What his mate, a hook nosed old Satan of a chap who refused to speak to any non-Moslems other than for purely work matters thought I shudder to think.
I understand some reports of Molsem celebration of 9-11 have been illustrated with ‘fake’ pictures or film. I’m sure some reports have been exagerated, but I KNOW that many Moslems where I lived and worked at the time were less than upset by the attacks. Some shops did display posters celebrating 9-11 and there were some public scenes of celebration. I don’t reacal hearing one single unqualified condemnation coming from that quarter. Where Moslem comentators did express condemnation it was usually framed in terms of the harm that might now befall Moslem communities.
Inevitably, 9-11 has accrued a huge amount of myth but the fact remains, America was attacked that day, the very concept of the West was attacked that day. Both America and the West in general had been under attack for long before 9-11, on and off since 711 A.D..
On 9-11 we finally woke up to that fact, well, some of us did at least.
2 replies on “Some 9-11 thoughts”
Dear Davey,
I greatly appreciate your comments.
I also recall where I was on that fateful morning. My wife and I were starting to rouse for another day at work, when we heard what we thought to be an FM radio DJ’s attempt at a bad joke. We got up and turned on the TV to scenes of fire and destruction.
Until that day, I had never give Islam or Muslims a second thought. Since that day I have developed a complete distaste for that political ideology, which is wrapped in a death-cult religion, and anyone who either ascribes to it or apologizes for it. It is the epitome of evil on this Earth.
I watched the memorial event in Pennsylvania and I was struck by how much we, as a culture, appreciated police and firemen after 9/11, compared to what’s going on now. Of course, the riots, etc., are happening in Democrat cities and are being hyped by the media, and most people don’t support the Marxists. But how quickly we forget, especially when we don’t teach young people our own history. Reagan was right when he said that tyranny was always only one generation away.