9/11 permeated every experience for that first year because, for the US, it was completely, shockingly, harrowingly unprecedented. Nobody — not trusted anchors, not politicians, not comedians — had any instincts that could help: each was accustomed to dealing with tragedy from a distance. And the average American was even more unprepared for the sudden shock of vulnerability, the thought that their country, so distant from anywhere problematic, could no longer rely on that physical remoteness. Which is why parts of the US where politicians can win elections by denouncing big cities nevertheless responded so strongly to the attacks on New York and DC: the geographical isolation was shared, the freshly-felt insecurity too. They hadn’t realised that they were targets; they were trying to figure out why.
Indians knew terrorism. The attacks horrified, but we knew what about them horrified: the scale, the targets, the cold-bloodedness. It was not as if we discovered for the first time a year ago that there was an outside world, in which many people disliked us enough to try to kill as many of us as spectacularly as possible. That explains both the loudest initial reaction — anger instead of shock, and not at the perpetrators but at the government and at “politicians” — as also how, over the year that followed, people began to shout themselves hoarse about the mysterious disappearance of expressions of that anger.
But shouting won’t help. India just doesn’t feel the same way that America did about 9/11, and no number of borrowed phrases — “Lest We Forget”, anyone? — will change that. And we should be glad of that. Because the feverish atmosphere that American public life had that year was in no way a good thing. Individuals made misjudgements then that they have since regretted; and so, far worse, did the organs of government, rushing panicked into policies since repudiated — such as “waterboarding” of detainees — and which have now been blamed by officials on the paranoia that seemed everywhere those months.
http://newageislam.com/india%E2%80%99s-26/11-was-not-america%E2%80%99s-9/11/current-affairs/d/2153
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4:06 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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