9/11

September 11, 2001

John and Margaret returned from a vacation and exploration of the nickel-mining city of Sudbury, Canada, several days before the terrorist attack. If we had been some days later, we would have been stranded for a while, as U.S. airplanes were all grounded for about three days.

The attackers timed the attack for clear weather in New York City, and the time was chosen to maximize T.V. coverage during the day. There was no early list of possible deaths; the people who died just never came home.

The World Trade Center towers collapsed in part because the architecture of the floors used a diaphragm suspension of each floor, between the elevator core and the outside vertical I-beams. This was done to allow a view across the entirety of floors. In video of the airplanes impacting, one can see two turbine engines (or maybe it is the wheel assemblies?) rocket out the other side, before the fireball erupts. There was little on the floor to stop the engines.

Most of the fire that heated the steel to the softening point was from paper and furnishings. It is said that the jet fuel was burned up in minutes. Few or no people above the impact floors survived.

The 2001 attacks were a follow-on to Osama Bin Laden's 1993 bombing of a WTC parking garage, though some doubt UBL involvement.

There is a curious group of U.S. people who say that the U.S. government sabotaged the World Trade Center, perhaps with thermite. They are conspiracy theorists called Truthers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth_movement Truthers are sometimes on Coast to Coast AM. A favorite topic is why WTC Building 7 burned and collapsed, as it was not hit by an airplane. Other truthers say a 757 did not hit the Pentagon, as there is no good video of the impact. But the airplanes were flown at high speed, not landing speed, into the buildings.

Many NYC emergency responders died when the towers collapsed. They had a command center near one of the towers, and civil engineers who knew the danger of collapse (given the great mass of the buildings above the attacked floors, pressing down on the softening steel) were not able to warn them. The pancaking of the floors proceeded at about 45 mph downward. The massive, underground, concrete "bathtubs" that the buildings were built into (keeping groundwater out, the site is very near the Hudson River) filled up with debris and body parts, and the debris pile above ground level was 50 feet tall. There was hope in the minutes after the first collapse that there might be survivors, but all that were still in the buildings died, including many firefighters who were beginning to lead out people above the fire floors. Before the collapses, thousands made their way down the two stairways per building and escaped.

Civil engineers take great care to build tall buildings exactly vertical. A building that is slightly tipped is weak. This is why the softening steel brought on collapse; a slight tilt, perhaps of one inch, on one corner precipitated collapse.

The Pentagon's sturdy construction caused the airplane there to disintegrate inside the outer ring, limiting fire spread. (The Pentagon was built in 1941 to withstand the mass of thousands of file cabinets). A survivor at the Pentagon, seeking an exit in the dark, wandered into a pool of jet fuel that did not catch fire.

Following are some 2015 to 2017 Internet posts where people condemn the U.S. Criticizing the U.S. was one of the themes of President Barak Obama during his eight years as president.

2016 July 13 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/manhattan/nyc-prosecutor-scott-fenstermaker-9-11-deserved-article-1.2710010

Former Manhattan prosecutor Scott Fenstermaker says 9/11 was ‘one of the greatest events in human history’

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Scott Fenstermaker, in inflammatory remarks for the "Humans of New York" website, said the country "got what it deserved" because of past injustices and unapologetically praised the terrorist act. "I think the people in those towers died as representatives for the rest of us, for our crimes against humanity. I don't believe there are that many people that are upset [by my remarks, most Americans agree.] In his time as a defense lawyer, he represented Al Qaeda terrorists Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and another defendant charged as a 9/11 participant.

From the web site of Humans of New York July 12, 2016

“We’re the worst terrorists in the world and it was a long time coming. This entire country was built on the slaughter of innocents. And we got what we deserved. Just look at the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. All those countries are artificial. We created those countries like plastic after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And the only way to rule a plastic country is with a dictator. Assad, Hussein, the Shah—we propped them all up. Decades of torture, murder, and oppression. We sponsored it.

http://nypost.com/2015/09/06/revisionist-history-of-911-being-taught-to-our-college-students/

Colleges brainwash students into believing 9/11 was our fault By Paul Sperry

September 6, 2015

America-hating leftist professors are systematically indoctrinating students into believing it’s all our fault, that the U.S. deserved punishment for “imperialism” — and the kids are too young to remember or understand what really happened that horrific day.

Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them.

The syllabus, which includes books like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “Poems from Guantanamo: Detainees Speak,” portray terrorists as “freedom fighters” driven by oppressive US foreign policies.

Even highly ranked University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has adopted the curriculum. The 9/11 seminar is taught by UNC associate English professor Neel Ahuja, who specializes in “post-colonial studies.”

In Ahuja’s twisted worldview, al Qaeda terrorists are the real victims. “Abu Zubaydah’s torture may be interpreted as simply one more example of the necropower of US imperialism, the power to coerce and kill targeted populations,” Ahuja recently wrote in an academic paper criticizing the war on terror.

He says America’s depiction of the 9/11 terrorists as “monsters” is merely an attempt to “animalize” them as insects and justify “squashing” them in “a fantasy of justice.”

This colonialist “construct” of an “animalized enemy,” he added, “dovetails with the work of mourning the nation after 9/11 (which in the logic of security must be made perpetual, melancholic).” To him, it’s all cynically designed to justify more “imperial violence” against “Muslim, Arab and South Asian men.”

Ahuja goes on to decry the US “colonization” of Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, along with “aerial bombing (and) indefinite detention” of al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanimo. In other writings, the professor bashes Israel and sides with Palestinian terrorists, further revealing his agenda.

He clearly has an ax to grind, which critics say the university gives him license to exercise through “The Literature of 9/11” curriculum.

A group of concerned UNC students has complained to administrators that the 9/11 course, also taught at the University of Maryland and other campuses, is being used to brainwash impressionable underclassmen.

“These readings offer points of view that justify terrorism, paint the United States and its government as wholly evil and immoral and desecrate the memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” the UNC College Republicans said in a recent letter to Chancellor Carol Folt.

“There is not a single reading required that focuses on the lives of the victims, the victims' families, American soldiers (or) families of American soldiers,” they added. “Nor is there a perspective that portrays the United States as acting in good faith before, during and after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

The course, moreover, “does not teach students how to think, it teaches them what to think,” the letter continued. “And the material it presents is an apologetic for the violence and murder against the United States.”

The university replied that freshmen should be exposed to differing points of view, even radical ones.

“Part of the college experience is the opportunity to learn from those who have differing points of view. Carolina’s first-year seminar program is part of that growth,” the administration said in a press statement, while insisting “the university isn’t forcing a set of beliefs on students.”

But several students who have taken the course warned in a professor review blog that Ahuja, who earns $72,100 a year spewing his unAmerican propaganda, does not tolerate dissent.

“He favors kids who share his views, so learn to do that,” said one reviewer. “A very interesting guy, just don’t disagree with him.”

Added another student, in a January 2014 post: “I would avoid contradicting him openly.”

“AGREE WITH HIS STANCE IN YOUR PAPERS!!!!!” advised another in November.

What’s happening in Chapel Hill is not isolated. Presenting terrorists in a sympathetic light and the U.S. as an imperialist nation is standard fare. This is what, in varying degrees, most college kids are learning today, all over the country.

Paul Sperry, a visiting media fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.

JE critical review, all up and down this web page: Sperry's comments in the New York Post are appreciated. Americans and parents need to know about this sort of thing. A big danger to college students is the attempt by liberal professors to implant and foster a liberal attitude in a student that never gets challenged, then the student spends the rest of his life thinking that way. It is hard to change your attitude because you have to admit you were wrong. Some callers to the Rush Limbaugh program tell Rush that they were liberals all their life, then they listened to some Rush Limbaugh programs, heard reason and logic, and decided that they had been lied to all their lives.

Before I accepted Jesus' forgiveness in 1977, I though that abortion was fine. That fetus doesn't have a brain and no senses, what does it matter that it gets discarded. Then I found out what the Bible says about abortion. https://bibleresources.org/abortion/

2017 07 September http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/september-11-attacks/8754523/911-The-dark-day-that-brought-out-the-worst-in-Britain.html

Janet Daley

A grotesque fusillade of anti-Americanism that burst immediately – and I mean immediately – onto the British scene in the wake of the 9/11 attack in the U.S. Anyone who claims that the latest fashionable wave of political hatred for the U.S. has been provoked by the Iraq war should look at the press coverage that sprang up in the first 48 to 72 hours after the attacks. When the invasion of Afghanistan – let alone Iraq – was only a possibility on the horizon, when the death toll was climbing into the thousands, and when people here were still desperately trying to contact American friends and family, sections of the British media were already engaged in a frenzy of vitriolic retribution.

The Guardian led the way, of course, with a now infamous series of comment pieces which reiterated the same vengeful theme: America had got what it deserved.

Its pages were filled with callous triumphalism ("They can't see why they are hated", "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully") alternating with frank threats: until the U.S. changes its policy on the Middle East, it will continue to suffer terrorist attacks – which turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. (Oddly, there were no claims that the Spanish had got what they deserved after the later Madrid bombings, even though that incident was related to the Islamist goal of re-establishing the caliphate.)

The other Britain – which can orchestrate an instant hate campaign against people who have just suffered a shocking bereavement – is, 10 years on, in full flood. Now the refrain is: America lost an opportunity to examine its role and question its assumptions. Why, in other words, couldn't it have reveled in the kind of self-doubt and identity crisis that has become Europe's chronic condition?

I am willing to predict that America's fundamental optimism is what will see it through, while Europe tears itself apart in moral confusion and historical guilt. The U.S. is a country that (still) knows what it stands for and why it exists, and it will continue to offer that self-belief to the waves of immigrants who arrive, wanting to be free.