Never Forget!

“One of the lessons of 9-11 is that evil is real and so is courage.” That is part of what President George W Bush had to say yesterday — September 10, 2011 — at the dedication of the memorial to the heroes of Flight 93. He went on to say

At the moment America’s democracy was under attack, our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote. The choice they made would cost them their lives, and they knew it. Many passengers called their loved ones to say good-bye, then.

Many passengers called their loved ones to say goodbye then hung up to perform their final act. One said, “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you.” Another said, “It’s up to us. I think we can do it.”

In one of the most stirring accounts, Todd Beamer, a father of two with a pregnant wife with a home in New Jersey, asked the air operator to join him in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Then he helped lead the charge with the words “Let’s roll.”

With their selfless act, the men and women who stormed the cockpit lived out the words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And with their brave decision, they launched the first counter offensive of the war on terror.

Three other flights had already been lost. The people on Flight 93 knew that, and refused to be the fourth. They took action. They counterattacked. They prevented the jihadists from accomplishing their mission.

Now it is ten years since their attack — the largest attack ever on the American homeland. Some may have forgotten, but I have not. We still have an implacable enemy, an army of jihadists striving to attack us by whatever means they can manage — by force of arms if they can, by deceit and deception otherwise.

Here's part of what we must remember: Our enemies are adherents of an all-consuming political ideology committed to world conquest. (A political ideology, like Communism or fascism, not a religion as people in the West understand the term.) We can't meet them on just one battlefield. We must oppose them everywhere they bring their lies — everywhere they attempt to subvert or attack us.

And we need to get ahead of the power curve and attack them where they are weakest, in logic and reality. Their entire ideology is based on deceit and deception. Their leadership understands that — and their adherents must be made to understand it, and to understand how thoroughly they have been duped. The alternative is exterminating them like Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted destroyed their predecessors in faith, the assassin and thug cults — both of which have now been reduced to being just words in our dictionaries instead of active Islamic sects.

Certainly, whether by force of arms or by force of intellect, every ideology like that of the jihadists — every ideology that preaches to its adherents that they much kill all who don't believe in their ideology the way they do — must be exterminated.

All this is part of what we must NEVER FORGET!