9/11 remembrances

John McCrarey thinks back to 9/11/01.

I was working at the Department of Education in Washington, DC on that beautiful September morning. I was having a meeting with my staff in the conference room. Someone mentioned a plane hitting the World Trade Center building in New York, but we assumed it was just a tragic accident. During the meeting, the phone in my office kept ringing. I ignored it at first, but the persistent callbacks convinced me to interrupt my meeting. The caller was my then-wife, Carol, who worked for the Department of Justice. She asked if I’d heard the news–a plane had hit the Pentagon. And things started going crazy throughout the city.

Dr. John Pepple has some profound 9/11 insights.

Twenty years ago something of extreme importance happened – we all know what it was – but to understand it, we must go back to 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I understood this to be a message to the West that said, “We Muslims intend to rule you Westerners.” At the time, I assumed everyone understood this message, but it’s now clear to me that almost no one did. I was puzzled by the lack of demonstrations supporting Rushdie, but I now know that the vast majority of leftists did not get the message (or if they did, they didn’t care).