Terrorist Plot Fails

POST-GAZETTE - Res Publica

Terrorist Plot Fails

by David Trumbull -- September 9, 2011

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, ten terrorists hijacked two airplanes (American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines from 175) that departed Boston with scheduled destination of Los Angeles. The intention of the hijackers – unmercifully brought to completion – was the deliberate destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on a day and hour chosen to kill the maximum number of innocent civilians – men, women, and children of every race, religion and nationality.

Five terrorists hijacked the Dulles, Virginia, to Los Angeles American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. Another four terrorists hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco for similar nefarious ends, but brave passengers regained control and crashed the plane near Shankville, Pennsylvania before the terrorists could reach their target in Washington, D.C.

In all, 19 hijackers and about 3,000 innocent persons were killed, four airplanes were destroyed, and there was substantial loss of property and disruption of economic activity in lower Manhattan. We must never forget or minimize the losses incurred due to the unprovoked and unjustifiable attacks on September 11, 2001. However, even weighing the losses in human life, property, and economic activity, and the inconveniences we now undergo at airport security checkpoints and other places, the conclusion – the only possible conclusion – is that the terrorist attacks failed.

The terrorists thought that such dramatic scenes as airplanes flying into buildings and some of the tallest structures in America collapsing into the earth would shake American resolve to fight. Just the opposite happened. America strengthened her resolve to fight terrorists around the world. While the terrorists may have thought they were bringing the fight to American soil, the result was U.S. invasion, and overthrow of the regimes, of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the past ten years there has been no successful major terrorist attack in America. They failed to effect any substantive change in U.S. policy toward the Near- and Middle-East. They failed to cripple us economically. They failed to unite the Muslim world in a holy war against United States.

It is said that the hijackers believed that would die martyrs to Islam and be received into Heaven (a Heaven which, if popular accounts are to be believed, sounds rather like Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Mansion”). The notion that an all-merciful God rewards mass murders with the delights of paradise is, on its face, an absurd proposition. Yes, even as regards their expectation for personal “reward” the 9/11 terrorists failed.

God bless the U.S.A. and the free, and freedom-loving, people of America!