Eight years ago today I awoke to the news 2993 had been killed in an atrocity without precedent in modern times. It was a "where were you when you heard" moment.
So how does the New Zealand Herald choose to remember this event?
With an AP story titled: The date all US Muslims dread.
Today is not about Islamic grievance politics it is about the 2993 innocent people going about their daily business murdered by Islamic terrorists.
Unbelievable.
So how does the New Zealand Herald choose to remember this event?
With an AP story titled: The date all US Muslims dread.
Today is not about Islamic grievance politics it is about the 2993 innocent people going about their daily business murdered by Islamic terrorists.
Unbelievable.
This goes way beyond "clueless".
ReplyDeleteWhy - because we are supposed to swallow that Islam is a peaceful religion and that the terrorists that led the attacks were aberrations to the true teachings of Islam?
ReplyDeleteIslam is not a peaceful religion. The Islamic holy books calls for the continual waging of war against the infidel.
P.S. it was not an atrocity without precedent in modern times, in fact on the very same date just 55 years earlier there was a worse one - see 9/11 - and that was just one around that time.
Next time the inquisition comes up I wait with anticipation for the headline "remembering the period of history all catholics dread."
ReplyDeleteYeah right.
I'm trying to work out why I feel nothing about this. Probably because it's more of the same old same old - everything is constantly being redefined to fit what we are supposed to think about something.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm still trying to compose myself for a post on September 17, 1939 and what the world thinks about that.
Well, here's what one unreconstructed Stalinist thinks about it: it was "...the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland..."
ReplyDeleteThe resulting comments thread is full of approving comments by fellow totalitarians. It always strikes me as odd that although we don't have any trouble rejecting fascists out of hand these days, communists are still invited to write columns in respected daily newspapers. Everyone's got a blind spot, I guess...
"an atrocity without precedent in modern times"
ReplyDeleteReally? Just off the top of my head, I've got the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (800,000 - 1 million deaths), the 500,000 Iraqi children who died during the 1990s as a direct or indirect result of daily bombing runs and economic sanctions, or the 300,000 dead since the Sudanese genocide began in 2000.
It's a terrible thing when any group of people are killed, but America (or the West, if you like) certainly doesn't have a monopoly on suffering: in fact, two of the examples I cited were a direct result of the United States' actions on the UN Security Council.
Rage against militant fundamentalism all you like, but remember that there are villains in our midst too.
Rory, I think the nature and location of the event was the aspect that was without precedent.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the "500,000" Iraqi children killed by US sanctions etc. That number was later proven to be totally bogus. Although, I'm less likely to dispute the numbers of people Saddam killed directly and indirectly, if you want to pull those out of a hat.
Although there are plenty of other death counts to discuss in addition to Rwanda - Bosnia, Sierra Leone, North Korea and the DRC spring to mind.
But this wasn't a rage against militant fundamentalism as much as it was about the fatuous title of the article - "The date all US Muslims Dread"