The front page story that appears in the Sept. 17 issue of The Port Washington Times, “Reflecting on 20 years since 9/11”, is undoubtedly the most disappointing front page story that was ever published in our local newspaper, but it also borders on being unsupportive of America and unsupportive of all the richness and goodness that America has produced and stands for.
According to the story, which continues for a full page towards the back of the issue, 9/11 is observed annually, primarily as a remembrance of those almost 3,000 individuals who were murdered by terrorists on that day in 2001. We are now told about flags waving on 9/11, about local marches with drums and bagpipes playing, and about visits to various impressive memorials.
But nothing is mentioned in the story about who the terrorists were, why they acted, had they acted before and after 9/11, and about the worldwide war that has been going on between the United States and allied civilized countries, and the uncivilized Islamic Jihadist terrorists who carried out the attack. These terrorists have been living in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Somaliland, Iran and in some other Middle Eastern countries for many years now.
The Port Washington Times story, for example, makes no mention of the terrorist attack of February 1993, when Ramzi Yousef and other Islamic jihadists blew up a truck laden with explosives in the underground parking garage of the North Tower of the WTC. Their plan was to collapse that tower onto the South Tower of the Trade Center, in order to murder thousands of innocent Americans, but their plan was deficient and it failed.
However, they did manage to murder six people in their efforts and to injure more than 1,000 others. And, of course, there were a number of other Islamic jihadist efforts to murder American service personnel and civilians, even before the 1993 WTC event and afterward. The Port Washington Times, apparently has no interest in reporting on this ongoing, longtime war, which involves the survival of civilization on this planet, as we know it.
There are now 5,400 students attending our public schools in Port Washington. Every one of those students was born after 9/11/2001 and not one of them knows why the 9/11 terrorist attack came about, who the terrorists were and are, and why and how the U.S. must now carry on that longtime war. The terrorist jihadists spend their time and resources plotting their next attacks against the U.S. and our allies. If they had nuclear weapons, which they may soon get from Iran, Pakistan or North Korea, they would be using them against innocent Americans in the near future.
It does not take much hiding to quietly sail a nuclear bomb into New York Harbor on board an innocent looking cargo ship, or to fly one into one of our area airports on an innocent looking cargo flight. Very poor intelligence work on the parts of a number of U.S. intelligence agencies allowed 20 jihadist terrorists, mostly Saudi Arabians, to enter the U.S. prior to 9/11/2001 and take up residence here, while they attended flight schools, mostly in Florida. Strangely, no one ever noticed that none of the Islamic flight students ever took a lesson about how to land the commercial airliner that they were taking flight instructions about. Our strained intelligence services could just as easily miss the possible bomb laden cargo ship or the cargo airliner mentioned above.
We may not know the cave where every Islamic jihadist terrorist is now living and plotting, but we do know where many thousands of them are. Some of my very liberal friends, who are terribly afraid that the U.S. could be accused of stirring up Islamophobia, don’t want the U.S. to carry out strikes against these Islamic jihadist terrorist forces, wherever they may be, because the terrorists aren’t wearing uniforms and some may be hiding in the midst of general populations.
I believe that the U.S. must advise every country where these terrorist forces are now hiding, that we will strike those terrorists with nuclear weapons, or with whatever other weapons we choose, if the host country does not move quickly to eliminate those terrorists from its territory. The U.S. will do its best to minimize the number of innocent civilians killed or wounded in such strikes, but the strikes nevertheless must be carried out.
This is the new-normal of worldwide warfare that Islam and the terrorists have forced upon us. During WW II, in our quest to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, we did not hesitate to kill hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians by firebomb and nuclear raids. And the U.S. government had no problems during that war teaching American children that the Nazi Germans and their allies and the Imperial Japanese were horrible, inhuman murderers, who deserved to be eradicated from this world by any means possible.
It’s time for our society today to emulate what our society had to do during WW II and to fight to destroy Islamic terrorism to its last jihadist.
Joel Katz
Port Washington
