9/11 at The JPost: Reporter's Notebook
"Now Do You Understand?" 23 years later "Apparently Not," becomes, "Yes - we welcome it"
(via Words by Eitan Chitayat)
“Today is Sept 11. Radical Islamists murdered 2996 people. Oct 7 was equivalent to 13 9/11's” — (Adele Raemer, a forced evacuee from Gaza Perimeter Kibbutz Nirim, and founder of Life on the Border, where I co-admin)
Twenty-three years ago today, I was a breaking news reporter at The Jerusalem Post. When the first plane hit the WTC, the entire news crew quickly gathered in the bullpen, riveted to the CNN feed on the TV set mounted in the corner.
I’ve observed Eitan's depiction above of his friend's naivete before and often in America since then, and as a working reporter over the decades, spoke with veteran, experienced reporters and editors who I worked with about the burgeoning threat we all faced, as professionally and competently as possible.
Hopefully, my first-hand reports of coping with war and terror attacks in Israel left an impression, though I’ve often wondered since if I was merely baling out an Olympic-sized swimming pool of misreporting and increasingly prevalent un-and-sometimes-spoken identification with the perpetrators, instead of their victims. More on that below.
While some stared in disbelief as the second aircraft slammed through the other tower, I was busy typing like crazy to pump out initial details and keep up with the two Israeli news-talk radio stations I followed for local official reactions to the horrifying scenes roiling through Lower Manhattan. One of the senior editorial secretaries stood at my shoulder, eyeballing my hurried copy for typos before I posted to the website's backend.
At one point in the surreality, I got a call forwarded to me from - of all things - official Bulgarian Radio, requesting local comment. The host - even more surreally - had the lunatic nerve to ask me if it was true that "the Mossad warned all the Jews in the Twin Towers to stay home on September 11th?"
Nonplussed and gritting my teeth at the imbecilic, glaringly antisemitic conspiracy theory being spouted live on-air by a national broadcaster, I - as calmly as I could - replied that, no - such a ludicrous allegation was beneath comment, and that Jews and Israelis - along with office workers and business people from literally the four corners of the earth - were in those buildings.
That's why they were targeted: they represented everything the attackers reviled: international commerce and relations, the free exchange of goods and ideas, and everyone-and-everything thing-else good that was demolished in a hellish double cloud of death.
Later, at the end of that endless afternoon shift, running on adrenalin and borrowed cab fare, I and a staff photographer grabbed our camera gear and recorders, a ceramic vest and helmet, and headed over to the Old City to get feature material and vox-pop interviews with Muslim, Arab Christian, and Jewish residents - and impromptu color commentary from whoever we could buttonhole along the way:
A pair of stunned and frightened American tourists - two women on a church mission from Kentucky - nervously made their way down darkened, shuttered souk alleyways to shelter at their hostels; Manhattan and Long Island-based yeshiva seminary students at a less-ominous pizza parlor, desperately trying to call family members who might have been at the towers.
One of the newspaper’s headlines for an op-ed article that was published soon thereafter echoed a question by Israeli orphans and widows, grieving grandparents and parents, spouses, children, and grandchildren bitterly posed towards the West:
"Now Do You Understand?"
23 years later, sadly, it’s not only worrying that the targets refuse to comprehend the extent of the transnational war being waged against civilization by the modern barbarians, but that so many welcome it.
And just so it's clear: this post isn't against nominally devout, peaceful, respectable Muslims or Arabs in general - but against the tsunami of Islamic supremacism sweeping the West: "Dar al-Islam" vs "Dar al-Harb" - essentially, "the spreading" Realm of Islam" vs the contracting "Realm of the sword" (the as-yet-unassimilated lands and peoples beyond the “Islamic Crescent”).
On 9/11 I discovered the profound difference between Israeli thinking and American mindset. I was at home and my mom called from working, telling me to turn on CNN. The reporters were bathering about how much money is made in these important buildings, the construction of the buildings... and I was going nuts because they weren't providing answers to my questions: What about the people? How many were injured? Are there enough ambulances...
I was on the verge of pulling my hair out - but before that I checked what they were saying on the Israeli news. I changed the channel and you know what the first thing I heard there?
“What about the people?“