Okay, i'm probably contridicting what i just said in the other september 11th thread, but i agree with most of what you say.

The media does dictate a lot of what we feel about subjects because of the way they protray things. The Holly and Jessica thing seemed to make much bigger news than Laura Payne or Wesley Neely did.

It was the deaths that got to me about September 11th, and the political stuff mostly still eludes me. I don't know for certain who did it, or if we were jusfied in bombing afgaistan, or if we should bomb Iraq. and i agree that we don't know enougha bout the issue to see if the people that did do it were in the wrong.

Okay thats all i got to say. Apoligises if i contridicted myself...i do that sometimes. (it's scariest wehn i agree with both sides of the contridiction though )

I disagree with what you say about people only taking notice because this happened in America. The World Trade Centre was so called because it housed businesses from all over the world and was the centre piece of the most important financial district in the world. So the atrocity affected pretty much all of the world. It was the single biggest act of terrorism in the world, so it would have been very difficult to ignore wherever it happened. Although, I concede that, because it happened in America, the reaction/aftermath was that much more intense.

That said, at least you put forward your opinion in a mature and thought-provoking manner. Unlike some members...

we had 2 minutes silence today, for this cause, but similarly no-one took it seriously. Sure people wanted to do it, it was a nice idea in theory but pretty pointless in practice. At least i tried to think about what happened people were just stifling laughter etc if someone moved and made a noise...:/ there were also people looking genuinely confused at what the silence was for.
i'd expected more from people my age.

Theres no way anyone can ever condone what the terrorists did, even if they did have their reasons. but what gets me, is the botched attempts by America on attacking Afghanistan. many innocent people were killed , who most likely had nothing to do with the attacks. it could be argued they acted on the same level as the terrorists...:/

rambling now heh....*stops talking*

Not getting into a row on the war or the terorists cause.

As for the media, yes, there was a lot of attention. for 2 reasons i think, 1) those that Whistler mentioned. and 2) because NY is a big city with a lot of cameras.

lets face it, if this happened in some remote land where there wernt any cameras, we probably wouldnt have heard as much. The media need images and NY had lots to offer.

However, the media didnt affect my reation, those phone messages did. it broke my heart becaue it hammered home that these were real people who were scared and about to die, real families without fathers, mothers and/or children. like this transcript of a call. it still has power, without hearing the voice.

I love you mom, and please tell all my friends at home, I miss them and I love them, 'cause I might not make it back. I'm on a plane that's taken by a terrorist attack, we passengers have heard about the other crashes too, I wanted to ask you if everything we heard is true. We're going to try to stop these men from doing what they've planned, I hope we stop them safely, but if things get out of hand … tell dad I love him lots and that I hope I made him proud. Tell him that I did my best to not follow the crowd, I have to do what's right today, and if that means I die, I hope I save some others, but at least I have to try, I hope I'll see you soon mom. Bye.

the media coverage doesnt affect the way i view this tragerdy, the people involved do. thanks to the media though i saw a little of the pain. it was unberable to watch, let alone be directly affected.

as for Holly and Jessica, yep I am mad. hopping mad. but i'm mad about any child who is killed, expecilly intentionally. sadly what most people miss in a media storm like that if that children are most likley to be murdered by a relative and before they are 18 mths old.

sure, we hear about tho odd case that Social Services missed, but what about the other cases, the ones that dont make it inot the press?

contrary to popular belief strangers are the cause of very few child deaths/abductions. it's normally someone they know.



(Edited by Cat 11/09/2002 20:33)

Difficult to know where to start with my actual feelings about the events of last year. I hope I don't *need* to say that none of the people who died at the hands of Saudi fundamentalists on Sept 11th deserved to die. That's not to say that, given the site of their employment, the victims couldn't have been a lot *more* innocent (Disneyworld could have been targetted, for example). The World Trade Center wasn't chose at random. Rather, it's symbolic of what's seen as occupying the attention of most Americans ("It's the economy, stupid", etc.), and the persuit of America's economic interests is fundamental(ist) to the foreign policies which have aroused the ire of many arabs. The WTC must have seemed like an apt target to them.

What really bothers me about silences, though, is that the leaders who are most keen on them have done *nothing* else to honour the dead, nothing positive anyway. A CIA-sponsored think tank has suggested that there was no strategic justification for the plane-bombings. It may have been a symbolic strike against America, with no follow-up. The American government, though, even when it's supposed, according to the media, to be flailing about like a wounded dog trying to bite it's persecutor, seems to have an uncanny ability to get it's teeth into countries that stand in the way of American oil interests. People see this, and people think: nothing changes. Even the deaths of thousands just becomes an opportunity to feather nests, it apppears.

My view is that if I have even the *slightest* suspicion that my two minutes silence will be taken as tacit encouragement to go out and kill more innocent people, then I prefer to keep my sympathies to myself.

A country (or race, or person) commits an act during which innocent people are killed, but which is justified in that country's (race's, or person's) eyes, because they do it for what they believe in. Another country (or race, or person) calls it terrorism. Doesn't matter whether the country (or race, or person) is America or Iraq, Bin Laden or Bush, the justification is that it was "for their beliefs". How can anyone say one side's beliefs are wrong and the other's are right?

I also find the "God bless them, rest in peace" messages quite astonishing. It's a pity this God being had turned his back when those two little girls were being kidnapped and murdered. It's a shame God wasn't blessing the people who were killed last year.

Media schmedia... media only reports in a way that people allow them to... if sensationalism sells papers and gets people watching a particular news prog, why change it? If the public allow an event to become a "media frenzy" more fool them. Supply and demand, a basic concept....

Personally I think that the greatest atrocity is that america still hasn't changed since WWII : in that they only came in when there own installations were attacked, and to any americans that read this and assume we owe you a favour may I remind you that Hitler had no desire to go to war with England.

Anyway back to the subject, America is now started attacking organisations such as the taliban and iraq. For years the U.N and N.A.T.O were unable to get a peacekeeping force into Afghanistan because of objections from America.

I don't know, its just that America is complaining about the inhumanity when only 2300 people died. How many have died because of America, there's at least 300,000 in Japan alone. At least some Americans have the decency to admit that partly the reason for Sept 11th (not that i'm condoning the actions) is the way that America has acted towards other countries.

One last rant, did any of you know that there is actually an American proffessor trying to say that Sept 11th was Europe's fault

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by Havoc
One last rant, did any of you know that there is actually an American proffessor trying to say that Sept 11th was Europe's fault

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There was an american evangilist who said it was the fault of homosexuals. that was why god withdrew his protection of the city.

some people will always try and use acts like this to justify their own views.

others are just crazy.

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by Havoc
One last rant, did any of you know that there is actually an American proffessor trying to say that Sept 11th was Europe's fault

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The piece that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week is here. That's actually a simplification of his argument, which is basically that Europe have been soft on terrorists, and particularly the PLO, and that as a result people (including the US government) now think that terrorism is acceptable as a means of achieving political ends. Where the argument falls down for me is - there are no political ends here. One year later, and we still don't know exactly what al Qaeda wanted to, or thought they could, achieve.

(Edited by In a State of Dan 12/09/2002 15:22)

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by In a State of Dan
One year later, and we still don't know exactly what al Qaeda wanted to, or thought they could, achieve.

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IMHO it was more an act of hatred than an act of terrorism. The damage in the middle east has already been done.

Israel is the dominant nation in that area. This is partially, if not exclusively, due to American funding and now that they're in this position I don't think any repercussions from Sept 11th last year could have changed that.

I think Bin Laden simply wanted to exact revenge on the country that he and many other Arabs believe is the reason for current state in the middle east.

I was discussing this yesterday and came to this conclusion: it was tragic yes but not surprising.

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by In A State Of Dan
Where the argument falls down for me is - there are no political ends here.

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do you want to know where it falls down for me: if there are political ends to the act then it isn't terrorism, it's an act of war.

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by Havoc
do you want to know where it falls down for me: if there are political ends to the act then it isn't terrorism, it's an act of war.

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That means that there is almost no terrorism in the world, and entirely depends on your definition, which seems to differ from most peoples. The IRA may have viewed themselves as being 'at war' with the British government, but the government regarded them as terrorists.

Add to that, for the most part, terrorist tactics are used by groups who have no means of fighting a war in any conventional sense, and which are organised in such a way that there is no way for the attacked party to fight a war back. Which is why I think the 'War on Terror' is ultimately doomed to failure. The US have invaded Afghanistan, they're poised to invade Iraq. Will they have defeated the enemy and reduced the risk of more terrorist attacks by the end of it? Very likely not.

I think the American Government, like most governments, are self-serving, evil-doers on a magnificent scale. I think what's worse, is that they have conned people, good and bad into believeing their war is just, that what they are fighting for is good - and those that disagree are labelled unamerican, or unpatriotic. I have absolutely no sympathies for America the country or the government after the attacks a year ago, but I have every sympathy with the people attacked - some people seem to think it was okay to hit the WTC because of the nature of the business carried out there (the buying and selling of third world debt for example) but whether the businessmen in question deserved what they got is beside the point. The attacks were wholly unconstructive, the people who perpetrated them knowingly killed both the people we would percieve as good and those we might percieve as bad. The question I ask myself is, 'would I have perpetrated such attacks?' - the answer is no. The attack was in my opinion, intended as revenge for the various nefarious actions of the American government, but perpetrated against American people. I just think it's wrong to confuse a government with it's people. At this present moment, I am ashamed to call myself British when I see Tony Blair jetting off to Camp David to kiss old Dubyah's butt and follow him around like the lapdog that he is. But I don't feel like I deserve to have a jumbo jet flown into me, Tony Blair maybe, but not me, I don't even like the man. So my sympathies lie wholly with the American people after september 11th, as they lie with the Afghans after the war, and as they already lie with the Iraqi people after all they have had to put up with in recent years. Please don't impersonalise terrible acts, wherever they are committed with the notion that somehow, someone had it coming.
Because under that philosophy, somehow, I believe we all have it coming.

Well said.

Well, i'm not sure how I can say it better, other than that i'm proud that most of the people posting in this thread have their own independant thoughts, not influenced by spin or by what the media or their government want them to feel.

I think some of the key message here are that no one agrees that it is right that innocent people should lose their lives over the policy of various governments but at the same time accepting that what comes around, goes around.

If we believed the press and the government, then we would believe the unrealistic, child-like spin on the whole thing.. the western world = GOOD, everyone else = EVIL.

Im sorry, but are we THAT thick that we believe this as a reason for the September 11th attacks, that these people were simply evil. We may not agree with their method of showing their dissaproval, but they must have had a pretty good beef with the old US of A to do it.

It smacks of the cold war, and the fear of communism, where you had the "witch trials" with anyone feared of being a communist being on trial and being persecuted.

As others have said, we get to feel this way about the September 11th attacks because of the technology of the West - it was filmed extensively. I was very disturbed by watching the firefighters documentary the other night to the extent that I had a really good sob about it all last night.

But that said, I'm signed up to the CNN newsflash bulletin on my email - and its so often that I see "dozens killed in bus bomb in Israel" that I just delete them as a fleeting email. If I were to see a documentary about the people involved in those bus bombs I might feel differently. We're indifferent to the thousands of deaths abroad because we dont have a personal connection or involvement. Doesn't make those lives any way less special or important than the people who died in the WTC.

I read one site that said that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died because of a lack of sanitised water. The Americans have imposed this as a punishment for Iraq not meeting their sanctions, as they took out water santisation facilities as part of the Gulf war.

Saddam might be a bastard, but is it right that thousands of innocent children die as a result of him not wanting to bend to their will?

I'm not an expert on politics but i'm sure the Americans (and probably much of the western world too) have a lot to answer to when it comes to world affairs. If some groups of people have such strong feelings about this, then I don't think bombing them is the answer to the problem, it's an attempt to pretend the problem doesn't exist.