Nine links for the tenth anniversary

One week on, here's a round-up of some of the best blog posts and articles marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with brief quotes:

Minnie: 

Those who perpetrated these acts were – and are – in the dark.  And there is no light in them. They chose to pursue petty and irrational hatreds promoted to insane levels. These they nurtured in tandem with a sense of victimhood (characteristically an excuse for childishness when not used as a spur to constructive action). They chose killing other human beings rather than at least accepting the right of those others to live. They could have chosen joy and wonder. And they are owed no more respect than any other violent criminals who get off on hatred, selfishness and killing.

Martin McKenzie-Murray:

You would've thought that watching mass murder - committed in the name of love and God - live on television would've invited humility into the hearts of my friends who considered themselves enlightened progressives.

No.

They deserved it, you see. They had it coming. It was inevitable.

Norm on Seamus Milne:

People were revolted by his own reaction and that of his co-thinkers neither principally because of the causal hypothesis they offered nor principally because of their immediate policy recommendations. It was, rather, the use of a causal story to put the central emphasis of blame for 9/11 - just a day or two after the event - not on those who had planned and organized the attack and those who had carried it out but on...America.

Julie:

We must stop apologising for our own position. We did not cause 9/11 and we did not give rise to the ideology and narrative represented by Al Qaida, based on the perversion of Islam. We have to be confident and prepared for a generation-long struggle. This battle is far from over but it is too fundamental to allow a defeat.

Osama Bin Laden once said that the West’s problem is to find people willing to die for our values, while his problem is to hold back people willing to die for his.

We must prove him wrong – let this be the memorial for all those innocents who died on 9/11, 2001.

Poumista remembers another fascist attack:

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the horrific attacks on New York and Washington, carried out by far right Islamists [...] 9/11 is of course also the anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile, which replaced Allende's elected government with one of the most brutal dictatorships of our time.

Max:

For what it's worth, I believe that President Bush's response was right, at least in the counterattack he launched on Saddam and the Taliban. War against dictatorship, theocracy and fascism was worth doing, 9/11 or no.

Hitch:

10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Tony:

The threat’s still from the same ideology and the same narrative, which is based on a perverted view of religion and which regards cultures and faiths as in fundamental conflict with each other. And there are two ways of life in the world today, this is why I say that the big divide in politics today is not so much left versus right as much as open versus closed.

And these people, you know, their view of the process of globalisation – and they’re very adept at using its tools by the way – they regard that as basically wrong, and contrary to their belief system, and they’ll fight very hard against us who want an open attitude of mind, and that’s the battle. Now I believe we will win it but it’s going to take time, and as I say, the struggle goes on, for sure.

 Terry: 

Mourn the dead. Fight for the living. No surrender.