The 11th of September 2001 was the day the world changed. It was the day that the whole world saw terrorists, inspired and encouiraged by the bestial nihlistic ideology of Islam, tear down the iconic World Trade Centre Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington. After that date the world will never be the same again. Never again will people think that the complex organism that is a modern city is impregnable or safe. For over 3,000 innocent people sudden, violent death in a most horrific way, came to them at the hands of Islamic savages doing the bidding of their centuries dead Fuhrer, Mohammed.
Even those of us who observed live, but at one remove, the attacks on New York and Washington, feel that this changed our outlook on life, politics and faith. The drama that unfolded on our computer and television screens produced images that are as burned into our minds as other shocking scenes. The attacks by Muslims on the United States produced images as shocking and seminal as those showing other events that changed the world. The images of the attacks will, as time goes by, be seen as markers delineating a change of global mood. The pictures of a dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surviving children being liberated from Auschwitz come into this category, so also do the images from the USA on that terrible day September 11th 2001. These images are a form of shorthand that describes times when the world changed and not always for the better.
The slain Archduke is a short form of describing the start of a conflict that claimed the lives of millions and changed the map of Europe forever. The photographic images of nuclear explosions in Japan describe the change from the Second World War into half a century of Cold War, and the pictures of the liberated children speak of genocide on an industrial scale.
It is into this special category that the images of 9/11 belong. Every pixel or grain of silver in the 9/11 images speaks of an unnecessary death and becomes part of our collective memory.
11th September marks the day when the world changed irrevocably. If the deaths on that day are to have any meaning, if the sacrifice of those innocents who died that day are not to be wasted, then this day must be remembered as the one where the global community started to see Islam for what it really is and not what we would like it to be. As the first Prime Minister of an independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru said: “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes or dislikes”
May the mourners of those who were murdered be comforted among the community of mourners. May the memories of those loved ones be for a blessing. May the names of those who committed these atrocities be, as with the Biblical Amalek, obliterated from the Book of Life.
As long as any of us who saw the events of that day live, their deaths will never be forgotten. Just as the last survivors of those who fought in the First World War were sought out and interviewed for posterity, so those who died will be remembered.
