I remember where I was. I was in my college cafeteria, eating breakfast, when Emily Watson slapped her tray down, and told me that planes were hitting the World Trade Center. Then she walked over to turn the t.v. on to CNN.

My first though was that some numbskull had flown his Cessna into the side of the building. "No biggie, just Darwinism in action. Hopefully nobody else got hurt. Somebody flew into the Empire State Building back in the '30s, remember." Then I looked up, and saw the hole in the side of the building, and the smoke pouring from it. "That was no Cessna, that was at least a commuter plane."

I'm from the rural Midwest. I had no idea men could build such things, as skyscrapers with floors the size of city blocks. I had no idea how big the towers were...

Then the second plane hit. I was watching, live, when it happened. I got a good look before it hit. "That was no commuter plane, that was a 767, looks like." Every time I see that video, I relive that moment, see the fireball shoot out the other side of the building. I knew I had just watched hundreds of people killed in an instant.

"Somebody must have ROYALLY fucked up calibrating the radar at JFK." That was the only reasonable explanation. "Why doesn't somebody get on the phone and call them, before more people die? Why is it taking so long to get this straightened out?" And as the minutes went by, a new thought crept into the back of my mind... could it be terrorists...? "No. Terrorists are idiots, barely competent to murder Israeli schoolchildren. There's no way they could have pulled this off. An operation like this is way too big, we'd have gotten wind of it for sure..."

Then they told us it was terrorists.




Shit.



"Oh, shit."


"I hope you didn't like the Middle East, because it's about to go bye-bye."



"Thank God Al Gore isn't president."


As I wandered around campus later that day, I heard a lot of people asking, "How could someone do something like this? How could they murder so many innocent people? How could they hate us so much?" I felt like asking them, "Why does that surprise you. Do you not know any history? Were you not taught about the Holocaust? Or about how the Japanese and Vietnamese treated American prisoners of war?" Human beings hate each other, a lot and frequently. It's just one of the things we do. I was surprised by the 9/11 attacks, in that I had no clue they were coming. I was not surprised that a group of individuals could concieve of such a brutal, cowardly and murderous attack. I guess years of studying military history made it impossible for me to be surprised by the depravity which the human mind can concieve.

2,973 innocent Americans were murdered that day. Murdered, without cause or provocation. The United States' record in the Middle East is not spotless, but NOTHING we have ever done justifies the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Since then, attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and elsewhere have killed hundreds, if not thousands more.

Then there's the constant abrogation of our rights and privileges. The constant impositions of airport security are a case in point. Every foiled terrorist attack offers a new opportunity to invade our privacy. I have to drop my trousers every time I fly, so that a TSA guard can swab my prosthetic leg and run it through an electrospectrograph machine to ensure that it's not packed with explosives. Worse, I can't blame them, because I was told the first time that they had in fact recieved specific and credible intelligence that Islamic terrorists were planning to try exactly that. Now you aren't even allowed to take liquids, of any kind whatsoever, onto the plane. I was recently at a wedding, and the guests who flew in told me that even mothers with nursing babies were in fact forced to pour out their formula. If this trend continues, in a few years you will have to hand over even your clothes, and get issued a hospital gown, to fly. You laugh, and say that's ridiculous, we'll never put up with that. Ask yourself this - five years ago, would you have believed that someday we'd put up with mothers being forced to dump out their babies' bottles?

I am sick of this shit. I am sick of the fact that a bunch of murderous little jihadi fuckwits with a massive inferiority complex sitting in some fetid desert on the other side of the world get to fuck with us this way. I am sick of the fact that they get to dictate how we fly and travel, that they can destabilize our economy and society with the mere threat of violence. I am sick of the inconvenience they cause me personally. Maybe it's wrong to wish for the death of other people for the sake of my own convienence. But when I consider just how unjustified these jihadi terrorists are in their violence... I'm okay with it.

I want blood. I want the individuals responsible, every single person who help plan, train, facilitate, or support, the 9/11 attacks dead. If they're tried, that's fine; if not, just as good. No matter how long it takes, no matter where we we have to go to find them, I want them hunted to the ends of the earth, and I want them killed. Not merely for vengeance, either, though I have no trouble admitting that revenge is a pleasant bonus here. But justice demands that these people be brought to account. And because they are, quite frankly, too dangerous to be allowed to live. We may, no, we must, be as magnanimous as possible with other countries in our pursuit of justice, but we must also always get our man. And I want the same for all the other terrorists who think like them as well. I want this, not because of the colour of their skin, or the language they speak, or even because of their beliefs. I want it because of their actions, because of what they've done.

And I want the ideology that spawned them destroyed. Not Islam itself, which is not that different from how Christendom was in 1400. But Christianity, however slowly and fitfully, managed to adapt itself to the modern world over the course of 500 years. Islam can, and must, do the same. No, it is the radical perversion of Islam, this twisted death-cult, with its brutal oppression of women, its brainwashing of young men into suicidal jihadis, its rejection of everything the modern world has to offer, that must be destroyed. Its ideas must be attacked, undermined, mocked and discredited at every available opportunity, across the Middle East and the Muslim world, until it is wiped from the face of the earth, and becomes a faded and unpleasant memory.


Wahabbism Delenda Est.