The Catholic Crisis as It Stands Now

By Michael Brendan Dougherty
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/catholic-abuse-crisis-pope-francis-owes-church-answers/
September 13, 2018


Pope Francis during mass at Santa Marta on Tuesday, September 11th.

The Catholic Church is in a novel position. A senior churchman has accused the pope of knowingly rehabilitating a predator cardinal and publicly demanded the pope’s resignation. The accusation itself exposes to the public the political and theological divisions in the episcopacy of the Catholic Church, pitting bishop against bishop — and most dangerous of all — Pope Emeritus Benedict against reigning Pope Francis. The divisions have been a part of Catholic life for decades, but they were litigated openly only by academics, theologians, and the Catholic press. Conflict between bishops happened but in a way that was almost deniable. Attempts to change the fundamental orientation of the Church were disguised as merely legitimate differences of emphasis. Tradition could be in under Benedict. Mercy and renewal, under Francis.

The testimony of Archbishop Cardinal Viganò, demanding the resignation of Francis, with accusations of moral turpitude and doctrinal heterodoxy spreading out to hit a score of senior cardinals, was like a grenade going off between two sleeping camps of inexperienced soldiers. And when an explosion like this happens, each side understandably panicked, reached for their weapons, and awaited orders. It’s worthwhile to look at how things are aligned now.

Earlier this week, the Vatican announced that it would respond to “allegations Pope Francis covered up” sexual abuse by America’s disgraced and now-degraded former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. This was strange in that Pope Francis was not accused of covering up exactly, only that he knew of McCarrick’s serial sexual harassment of seminarians when he lifted some kind of restrictions on his activity that were imposed by Pope Benedict and made McCarrick an adviser in reshaping the American episcopate.

Shortly after this confusing announcement, McCarrick’s successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, sent a letter to his priests, saying he would travel to Rome to discuss resignation — his own — with Pope Francis. The heavy implication was that he would allow new leadership to come to the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

It is useful to review the turns this story has taken in the weeks since the accusations were made. The Viganò letter contained a long litany of accusations, setting reporters and commentators scrambling in several directions at once.

But Viganò is an uncouth right-winger, part of a vast conspiracy against the Pope.The first line of defense for Pope Francis was that Archbishop Viganò keeps repulsive company,daring to dine with conservatives such as the Italian journalist Marco Tosatti or the American lawyer Tim Busch. The latter has denied consulting with Viganò over his testimony.

Further, commentators speculated that Viganò was motivated by a grudge with Francis over an incident involving Kim Davis. As ambassador, Viganò had arranged for Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue same-sex-marriage licenses, to meet Pope Francis during his trip to America. Reports at the time emphasized that Viganò had sprung this on Pope Francis against his wishes. Subsequent reporting confirmed that Viganò followed all the procedures for getting Vatican approval for the meeting but that regret over the subsequent media storm in Francis’s circle led to Viganò’s dismissal from his post.

Despite the attempt by some commentators to describe Viganò’s testimony as part of an “operation” or an organized “putsch” against Francis, the letter’s release has not been followed up by a campaign of new revelations or documents. Its appearance in small, conservative Catholic publications itself was evidence of turning to the first friend on hand, in the absence of real planning.

Did McCarrick even look sanctioned? Not long after Viganò’s letter was published, reporters began to interrogate the public record. Did McCarrick look like a man who had been sanctioned by Benedict as Viganò claimed? The record was mixed, to say the least. Simple searches on YouTube or in newspaper archives turned up appearances of McCarrick at various Masses and social events during the period in question. McCarrick traveled, and he even appeared near Archbishop Viganò and Pope Benedict in public. This certainly did not look like a life retreated into a prayer cell.

On the other hand, reports also confirmed that Cardinal McCarrick did move out of his retirement living quarters at a seminary and into a renovated parish house. He was forced by the nunciature to cancel his appearance at events with seminarians. And after Francis was elected, McCarrick did take on a larger profile. Reporters sympathetic to McCarrick had noted the change, saying that while had been “put out to pasture” by Benedict but was “busier than ever” under Francis.

The nature of Benedict’s discipline is important. Confusing and somewhat contradictory statements coming from anonymous sources near Benedict have confirmed that some action was taken against McCarrick, but the precise details could not be recalled. This might strike most readers as odd in the extreme. How could Benedict remember disciplining a cardinal but not recall the details? Shouldn’t it have made an impression on him?

This has led a number of commentators to surmise that Benedict never formally imposed anything on McCarrick other than a personal request, perhaps not much more authoritative than a wish, that McCarrick lay low and mostly keep himself out of the public eye. The implication being that Benedict, for whatever reason, did not take McCarrick’s behavior so seriously.

But one theory that would reconcile all the above facts is that Benedict imposed a form of discipline short of a canonical sanction after a trial but more authoritative than a mere personal request.Subsequent reporting has indicated that the likeliest form of discipline imposed on McCarrick was not the product of a canonical trial but a “precept,” which, the reporter and canon lawyer Ed Condon explained, “is essentially an authoritative canonical instruction to do or not do something; it often includes direction on where a cleric must live.” The details of such an instruction would be handled by the Congregation of Bishops, the very curial office Viganò says would have the pertinent documentation on McCarrick.

That McCarrick, after the election of Francis, moved back into another seminary is some evidence for Viganò’s claim that a disciplinary measure imposed under Benedict was lifted under Pope Francis. Though it is at least for now conceivable that such measures were simply unknown to new administration in the Vatican.

Would it be so bad? We didn’t know about the kid.Notably, media very close to Pope Francis haven’t quite dared to deny the main charge, that McCarrick was in some way rehabilitated by Francis. They have questioned the severity of the sanctions. Reporters with close access to papal advisers have relayed reports that simply downgrade the severity or question the seriousness of Benedict’s disciplinary methods. This is a strategy of mitigating the charge and qualifying it.

These reports take care to remind readers that once a credible report of abusing a minor reached the Vatican, McCarrick was exposed and his status degraded in public by Francis. These include reminders that it wasn’t until just this summer that McCarrick was alleged to have abused a minor (the first boy he baptized, in fact), and once these reports were made, Francis made his sanctions against McCormick public fact.

We’ll shoot the hostage. McCarrick was exposed under us. If there is a coverup, it implicates your friend. One theme of this story and the spin surrounding it is that Pope Francis’s defenders have pointed at Pope Bendict XVI or the legacy of Saint John Paul II and implied that conservative critics of Francis shouldn’t be so anxious to turn over rocks. There might be collateral damage. “Those who conceived and managed this operation with the intention to force Francis off the throne of Peter did not realize that such an attack would have involved his two predecessors,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian and an active defender of Francis.

In fact, many reporters and commentators recently found themselves on the receiving end of sympathetic private appeals, explaining that what was really going on was that Pope Francis was protecting the reputation of his predecessors. It was hard not to detect the whiff of a threat.

By promising to address accusations of a cover-up, the Vatican seems to be trying to reframe the issue as one of disclosure, rather than rehabilitation. In this, Francis defenders may believe that their best argument that Viganò’s testimony was wrong is to say that Pope Francis only recently imposed on McCarrick sanctions similar to ones imposed by his predecessor.

As Andrea Tornielli, the Italian Vaticanist closest to Francis, wrote:

Actually though, the sanctions are not similar. Those of Benedict XVI, according to Viganò himself, were personal and secret. Nobody should have known them. Those of Pope Francis were instead made public immediately, so that everyone knew that the old cardinal had been sanctioned after the emergence of a well-founded allegation of abuse of a minor.

But the question is not whether sanctions are public or private. The question is whether Francis knew about McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians and lifted the restrictions on McCarrick’s life because he wanted McCarrick’s counsel in reshaping the American episcopate. And who else knew of them? Did Cardinal Weurl?

If some conservatives have miscalculated the damage that could be done to the legacies of Benedict and John Paul II, some of Francis’s defenders may be underestimating the will to discover how men like McCarrick advance to positions of authority in the Church and the will to reform the Church in response. Further, Team Francis may be underestimating the willingness of those around Benedict to protect him. Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who acts partly as a caretaker to the pope emeritus, hasin recent days found himself energetically defending Benedict against his critics and, while doing so, not so subtly taking shots at Pope Francis’s advisers.

Silence before reporters, raving at Mass. Pope Francis’s initial reaction was not to deny any part of the grave accusations against him. Instead he told reporters that they could make a judgment on the nature of the accusations themselves and that he might speak on the matter later. For now, though, he told them, “I will not say one word on this.”

However, as in previous public controversies, Francis has taken to using his homilies as an occasion for issuing undisguised commentary on current events. In his homily on September 3, he recommended his own chosen strategy for dealing with those who seek scandal. “With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family — silence, prayer” are the appropriate answers, he said. He said silence makes us better imitators of Christ.

His homily the following week is worth quoting at some length:

In these times, it seems like the “Great Accuser” has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins so they are visible, in order to scandalize the people. The “Great Accuser,” as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, “roams the earth looking for someone to accuse.”

So in two consecutive weeks, the pope has managed to praise nondisclosure in his homilies. The first time he did so while comparing himself to Jesus Christ, and the next week he did so while comparing Viganò to Satan. The only thing that is astonishing is the pretense that the pope is still silent.

What matters. In all the noise, the question that matters is still this: What did Pope Francis and those around him know about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick? How much influence did McCarrick have on the pope and his appointments? Does Pope Francis overlook the moral turpitude of those prelates he sees as allies (Cardinal Daneels, Cardinal McCarrick) in order to advance what his allies describe as his “larger agenda” for the Church?

If the Church is in the middle of a cold civil war between a Benedict faction and a Francis faction, the question all laypeople have is whether that factionalism has now become all-consuming, so that even the punishment of flagrant sexual abuse is subordinated to factional concerns. Pope Francis should dignify us with an answer.

UCLA's infatuation with diversity is a costly diversion from its true mission

By Heather Mac Donald
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mac-donald-diversity-ucla-20180902-story.html
September 2, 2018




Students who support the passage of a new diversity requirement proposal rallied at Meyerhoff Park in 2015.

If Albert Einstein applied for a professorship at UCLA today, would he be hired? The answer is not clear. Starting this fall, all faculty applicants to UCLA must document their contributions to “equity, diversity and inclusion.” (Next year, existing UCLA faculty will also have to submit an “equity, diversity and inclusion statement” in order to be considered for promotion, following the lead of five other UC campuses.) The mandatory statements will be credited in the same manner as the rest of an applicant’s portfolio, according to UCLA’s equity, diversity and inclusion office.

A contemporary Einstein may not meet the suggested evaluation criteria. Would his “job talk” — a presentation of one’s scholarly accomplishments — reflect his contributions to equity, diversity and inclusion? Unlikely. Would his research show, in the words of the evaluation template, the “potential to understand the barriers facing women and racial/ethnic minorities?” Also unlikely. Would he have participated in “service that applies up-to-date knowledge to problems, issues and concerns of groups historically underrepresented in higher education?” Sadly, he may have been focusing on the theory of general relativity instead. What about “utilizing pedagogies addressing different learning styles” or demonstrating the ability to “effectively teach and attract students from underrepresented communities”? Again, not at all guaranteed.

As the new mandate suggests, UCLA and the rest of the University of California have been engulfed by the diversity obsession. The campuses are infatuated with group identity and difference. Science and the empirical method, however, transcend just those trivialities of identity that UC now deems so crucial: “race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity and socioeconomic status,” to quote from the university’s Diversity Statement. The results of that transcendence speak for themselves: an astounding conquest of disease and an ever-increasing understanding of the physical environment. Unlocking the secrets of nature is challenge enough; scientists (and other faculty) should not also be tasked with a “social justice” mission.

But such a confusion of realms currently pervades American universities, and UC in particular. UCLA’s Intergroup Relations Office offers credit courses and “co-curricular dialogues” that encourage students to, you guessed it, “explore their own social identities (i.e. gender, race, nationality, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, social class, etc.) and associated positions within the campus community.” Even if exploring your social identity were the purpose of a college education (which it is not), it would be more fruitful to define that identity around accomplishments and intellectual passions — “budding mathematician,” say, or “history fanatic” — rather than gender and race.

Intergroup Relations is just the tip of the bureaucratic diversity iceberg. In 2015, UCLA created a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion, funded at $4.3 million, according to figures published by the Millennial Review in 2017. (The EDI vice chancellor’s office did not have its current budget “at the ready,” a UCLA spokesman said, nor did Intergroup Relations.) Over the last two years, according to the Sacramento Bee’s state salary database, the diversity vice chancellor’s total pay, including benefits, has averaged $414,000, more than four times many faculty salaries. Besides his own staff, the vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion presides over the Discrimination Prevention Office; BruinX, the “research and development arm of EDI”; faculty “equity advisors”; UCLA’s Title IX office; and a student advisory board. Various schools at UCLA, including medicine and dentistry, have their own diversity deans, whose job includes making sure that the faculty avoid “implicit bias in the hiring process,” in the words of the engineering school’s diversity dean.

These bureaucratic sinecures are premised on the idea that UCLA is rife with discrimination, from which an ever-growing number of victim groups need protection. The Intergroup Relations Office scours the horizon for “emerging social-identity-based intergroup conflicts,” according to its website. It has been hiring undergraduates and graduate students to raise their peers’ self-awareness of their “experiences with privilege and oppression.” These “diversity peer educators,” whose internship salaries come out of mandatory student fees, will host workshops on “toxic masculinity” and “intersectional identities” this fall. If UCLA is putting a comparable effort into organizing campus-wide workshops on the evolution of constitutional government or the significance of Renaissance humanism, it is keeping the effort out of sight.

Reality check: UCLA and the University of California are among the most tolerant, welcoming environments in human history for all races, ethnicities and genders. Every classroom, library and scientific laboratory is open to all qualified students on an equal basis. Far from discriminating against underrepresented minorities in admissions, UCLA and UC have sought tirelessly to devise surrogates for the explicit racial preferences banned in 1996 by Proposition 209. UCLA’s proportion of black undergraduates — 5% in 2016 — is less than one percentage point below the black share of California’s public high school graduates.

In 2016, 4% of UCLA’s faculty were black, 6.6% were Latino, 66% were white, and 18.6% were Asian. This distribution reflects the hiring pipeline, not hiring bias.

Blacks made up 4.7% of all doctorate recipients nationwide in 2006, 4.9% in 2010, and 5.2% in 2016, according to the National Science Foundation. But black PhDs have historically been concentrated in education; in the sciences, which make up a large proportion of the UCLA faculty, less so. In 2016, for example, 1% of all PhDs in computer science went to blacks, or 17 out of 1,659 doctorates, according to the Computing Research Assn. Many fields — nuclear physics, geophysics and seismology and neuropsychology, for instance — had no black PhDs at all.

Given such numbers, it is unrealistic to assume that every academic department at UCLA will perfectly mirror the state’s demographic makeup, absent discrimination. And yet the equity, diversity and inclusion office puts every member of a faculty search committee through time-consuming implicit bias training.

The ultimate solution to any absence of proportional representation in higher education is to close the academic skills gap. In 2015, only 14% of black eighth graders in California and 13% of Latino eighth graders scored as proficient or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math test, compared with 57% of Asians and 43% of whites. In reading, 16% of black eighth graders and 18% of Latino eighth graders were proficient or above, compared with 50% of Asians and 44% of whites. Such gaps have been constant over many decades.

It does not do UCLA’s students any favors to teach them to see bias where there is none. UC’s diversity bureaucracy is a costly diversion from the true mission of higher education: passing on to students, with joy and gratitude, the treasures of our cultural inheritance and expanding the boundaries of knowledge.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, “The Diversity Delusion,” goes on sale Tuesday.

Pope SHOCKS With Homily, Attacks 'Great Accuser' Satan For Exposing Bishops' Sins In Church Scandal

By Emily Zanotti

https://www.dailywire.com/news/35730/pope-shocks-homily-attacks-great-accuser-satan-emily-zanotti

September 11, 2018

Pope Francis preaches at mass at Casa Santa Marta (Vatican Media)

In a strange and almost tone-deaf homily delivered Tuesday morning, Pope Francis implored the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to pray and resist the "Great Accuser," Satan, who seeks to expose sin in order to divide the faithful.

“In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The ‘Great Accuser,’ as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, ‘roams the earth looking for someone to accuse,'” Pope Francis said, according to an official report in Vatican news.

He added that in the current times, "the Great Accuser, has been let loose and he's got it in for the bishops. True, there are, we are all sinners, we bishops."

The "Great Accuser" is a reference to Satan first seen in the book of Job, in the Old Testament. Satan is there attempting to sow division by making false accusations of sin. Many faithful Catholics took the Pope's word, however, as an attack on lay people seeking transparency from the Vatican, which is accused of covering for bishops, cardinals, and other clerics accused of sexual abuse over the course of at least four decades.

Concluding, it appears the Pope suggested that people consider the real victims of the sexual abuse scandals currently roiling the Church: the bishops. The Devil, he said, "roams the world seeking how to blame. The strength of the bishop against the great accuser is prayer — his own and Jesus', the humility to feel chosen and staying close to the people of God without heading toward an aristocratic life."

There are, no doubt, concerns that some accusations being leveled at the Vatican hierarchy — particularly some of those contained in a letter from Archibishop Maria Vigano, which often veers into the ad hominem — are unfair. But ultimately, so much evidence exists that the Vatican, and particularly bishops and clerics in the United States, silenced victims of sexual abuse for decades and protected and even hid their abusers, that a full and fair investigation is warranted in the name of justice.

There are most certainly guilty men, or the sins of those like the now-deposed Cardinal Theodore McCarrick would not have gone unnoticed for decades.

The crimes the Church is accused of are not "uncovered sins" that should have been left at rest. It's the act of covering for the sins of its priests and clerics that got the Church into trouble in the first place.

Pope Francis seemed to lay the blame for the accusations at the feet of "elites," further confusing the issue, and fomenting division. "The ‘elites’ criticize bishops, while the people has an attitude of love towards the bishop. This is almost a special unction that confirms the bishop in his vocation,” he added.

In the month since Archbishop Vigano leveled his damning complaints — that not just Pope Francis, but the last three popes either ignored, abetted, or impotently punished McCarrick — "leftist" Catholics have tried to level their own accusations: that more traditionalist Catholics are simply out to get the pope, perhaps for his agenda, for his humility, even for his race, even as Pope Francis faces some of the most serious McCarrick-related allegations, that he restored a tainted cardinal to the role of trusted Vatican adviser.

Others have suggested that McCarrick's dalliances with male seminarians were consensual — which is a little like suggesting that Harvey Weinstein's affairs were just flings between two people who were sexually attracted to each other at Cannes. It's the power and the privilege that makes such "relationships" problematic, not whether both parties were willing and able to partake.

Demanding transparency of bishops and other clerics who are credibly accused of serious crimes is not the work of Satan, it's the work of justice.

How 9/11 Made a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical a Conservative

By ANNIKA HERNROTH-ROTHSTEIN
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/9-11-changed-european-radical-to-conservative-president-bush-speech/
September 11, 2018

President George W. Bush holds the badge of New York City police officer George Howard during his address to a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC, 20 September 2001 (Getty Images)

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the floor of my sister's living room, babysitting her one-year-old daughter. We were lazily playing, with the afternoon news on the TV in the background. The first thing I noticed was how the anchor’s voice changed. The woman was saying “Wait, wait,” while staring to the side of the camera. There had been a horrible accident, she said, as I watched the smoke pour out of the first tower. When the second plane hit, I hoped beyond hope she was right.

I had just gotten back from a year in France. A few months earlier, I’d been standing in a crowded bar on Place de Clichy, celebrating my 20th birthday. I remember that night, although several bottles of bad white wine say I shouldn’t. I was surrounded by my peers, other upper-middle-class liberals who had fled to Paris to fulfill their fantasy. We had come to this historical city to live the life of songs and books and Technicolor movies. We were radicals. We were heroes. We were going to change the world.

The people with me in that bar were a random sample of the political atmosphere of Europe at the time. Militant feminists, pro-Palestinians, members of the autonomic environmentalist movement, and your run-of the-mill anti-government thugs. Having a friend who had been jailed for rioting was as necessary as a Malcolm X T-shirt and a back-pocket paperback of Catcher in the Rye. I gladly picked up that uniform, just as I picked up rocks and banners knowing that this was the ticket to ride.

Raised in a family of academics, this was a natural evolution on my part and a result of a serious political interest. I identified as an intellectual and as a political thinker with a critical mind. What I failed to acknowledge at the time was that my country was a controlled environment and that the spectrum on which political analysis took place was limited. Not unlike The Truman Show, where the choices you think you are making were already made for you long ago, and any dreams of a different fate are swiftly corrected.

I left my one-bedroom apartment in the chic slum of the 19th Arrondissement in June 2001. I was headed back to Gothenburg, Sweden, and the mass protest against the EU summit and George W. Bush. I planned to be back in time to see the first leaves fall on the Champs Elysées. Turns out, that didn’t happen.

Night fell and morning broke before I managed to get off that floor to answer my phone. On the other end I heard my boyfriend’s voice, chanting frantically:

Two more towers! Two more towers! Two more towers!

He and his friends were having a party, celebrating the attack on America. He called to invite me, and to this day I have never felt such intense shame.

During his speech on September 14, 2001, President Bush said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. Well, on that day I was introduced to who I had been and who I truly was. I saw my own place in the context of history, and how the ideas that I helped promote, the accusations I had met with silence, all had a part in shaping the world I now saw burning before me.

It wasn’t a game. I had played it, but it was never a game.

In the weeks that followed, I watched the American news with one eye, and its European counterpart with the other. It was like seeing the slow shifting of the tectonic plates, dividing the world through op-eds and analysis. On September 12, 2001, the headline of the largest Swedish newspaper read, “We Are All Americans.” A few weeks later, that beautiful creed had already been forgotten. The one time my country could side with the U.S. was when America was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went back to the smug relativism of World War II, the icy efficiency of a country never having to fight for either ethics or its existence.

Soon enough, the narrative was clear. The end of the story had already been written: The U.S. was unjustly acting as the world police, once again. Bush was a moron and a puppet. America was killing innocent people for oil. It went on and on, and all I could think was that if I know that these things are not true, then what other lies have I accepted as truth throughout my life?

So I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all unraveled before me.

On September 20, I watched Bush’s address to Congress. I had heard him speak before, but on this night, I listened — and one sentence jumped out and grabbed me:

“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”

So I asked myself if I was free. Not free in movement or by law, but free in thought and intellect. I was not, nor had I ever been. The politics I had held and protected so violently were a version of the norm, and for all my intellect and breeding I had done nothing more than tout the company line.

I left everything that year; it was like walking away from the scene of a crime. I remember thinking that it would have been easier leaving a cult — at least then there would be a welcoming, sane majority on the other side. Or if there had been a physical wall to climb and a dictator to topple, instead of the silent oppression of the consensus.

My country did not change that day, but I had to; the tectonic plates where shifting, and I decided to jump.

When I stood in that bar toasting myself, I thought I was a radical. Today, as a neocon in Sweden, I know I was wrong.

I was raised in a country where that neutrality — that indifference before right and wrong — is a badge of honor. I was taught that morality is weakness, faith is ignorance, and the concept of good and evil is cause for ridicule.

On September 11, 2001, I saw, for the first time, the difference between fear and freedom, and I vowed not to be neutral between them, ever again.

The Smell of September 11

By Marina Medvin
https://townhall.com/columnists/marinamedvin/2018/09/11/the-smell-of-september-11-n2517771
September 11, 2018

People make their way amid debris from the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. In one of the most horrifying attacks ever against the United States, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in a deadly series of blows that brought down the twin 110-story towers. Photo Credit: AP

I woke up on September 12, 2001, to rays of sunshine beaming on my face. It looked beautiful outside. It was a brand new day, and the terrible dream about the day prior seemed to be over. I walked over to my bedroom window and I opened it. 

I inhaled the air, expecting the crisp, fresh smell of a New York September morning, a scent that I loved so much. But my heart quickly sank. I smelled something different. I smelled something that will never leave my memory for as long as I shall live. I smelled burnt flesh. 

The reality sent shivers down my spine. The gray ashes that covered my friends and neighbors, who spent six hours walking the bridge from Manhattan back home to Staten Island on the day prior, the ashes that coated their bodies head-to-toe, were not just ashes from the fallen buildings. They were also the ashes of the people inside of the buildings.

“It smells like Auschwitz,” I whispered to myself, as I looked back at the stack of Holocaust books next to my bed. My eyes filled with tears. I closed that window and just stared out at the world for a while. I realized that yesterday wasn’t a dream. September 11 did happen. 

I will never forget that moment.  

It was 17 years ago. But that moment is as clear in my mind as a moment from 17 minutes ago. It was the moment when I, a 17-year-old at the time, grew up. It was the moment that I realized that the atrocities of the past that I have been reading about are not confined to the past. It was the moment that I realized that the present and the future could be as cruel as the past. It was the moment that I understood that on the day prior, New York had met evil. 

The evil that turned thousands of people into ashes was radical Islam. 

That evil permeates our world still.  We continue to battle ominous Islamic fundamentalism to this day. We have been unable to defeat the ideology of destruction. But we cannot rest until we do. 

We must never forget. We must never ameliorate the evil. We must persist. The ideology of life and freedom, the philosophy of American values, must win over the ideology of death, the doctrine of radical Islam.

A 9/11 Reflection

By Wayne Isaac

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/11/a-9-11-reflection/

September 11, 2018

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum are deeply ugly. Those two gaping pits, a vision of the abyss, mar that tragic earth. Like gashes that never healed, but rather festered into black necrosis, the 9/11 memorial reveals a sickness; a sickness not of the body but of the soul.

That day changed America in ways we still do not fully understand. Seventeen years on, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fester, much like the gaping wounds that mark their beginning. The national unity in the wake of the attacks collapsed quickly. And today the cracks in our national foundation are more obvious than ever.

If we are to make sense of all this, we must still grapple with the meaning of that day and of its consequences. We must still mourn the dead.

But there is a healthy and unhealthy way of honoring the victims of evil and terror. There is a way that points to hope and life and another which mires itself in pointlessness and suffering.

The 9/11 memorial represents the latter. They corrode the psyche and the soul. They sicken the viewer and turn his eyes from what is good toward what is dying and decrepit.

Architecture reveals the spirit. And the spirit revealed by the 9/11 memorials and the museum is one of despair, death, and hopelessness. Take the museum. It sinks into the earth, swallowing the visitor into a sealed crypt. It is a descent into Hell. Here, above the very place where you now stand thousands died in sudden and terrible ways. The bleak, dark, concrete pit around you is barren save for twisted wreckage and scenes of death and destruction.

The museum is an obscenity. There is no hope there, no redemption, nothing to assuage the viewer’s soul. No way for him to turn his eyes to heaven. Indeed, even the names of the dead on the plaques in the museum are marked not by crosses—the Christian symbol of hope and resurrection—but by falling leaves. This rich and powerful symbol of hope and redemption ignored for a symbol of hopeless death and a coming cold dark oppression.

The museum is an endless grave—the inside of the abyss represented by the gaping holes on the surface.

A spiritually healthy country would not have built such a monstrosity. It would have created something along the lines of a proposal I heard many years ago.

The proponent was a common man from the heartland, which, I suspect, is the reason his suggestion was devoid of the embodied nihilism we actually constructed. His proposal was this: Instead of leaving two giant pits as a reminder of the dead, we ought to have rebuilt the Twin Towers over their old foundations in exact replica save one detail—we ought to have added an additional floor to each building. This addition should have been built of gold and inscribed with the names of the fallen. Therefore, when the sun hit the towers, the top floor would shine with a golden light—a halo for the dead.

As the proposer understood, such a monument would have captured the American spirit. It would have represented hope, respect, and, most important, life! Out of the ashes would have come something even greater—a memorial to the dead that, instead of sinking into the abyss, reached back up to the heavens.

A healthy America would have built that memorial. Instead, we engineered a monument to despair. That ought to give us pause. On this 9/11, therefore, we all should grapple not only with the tragedy but with our response to it.

We must confront our sickness of the soul.

Wayne Isaac is the pseudonym of a citizen, a patriot, and a Midwesterner.

REMEMBERING 9/11 IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

At last, beyond denial and fatalism?

Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271292/remembering-911-age-trump-bruce-bawer

September 11, 2018

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, observe a moment of silence last year for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Picture: GettySource: AFP

One day in the early stages of the AIDS crisis – so early, in fact, that I don't think the disease had yet acquired that name – I fell into conversation with a young man at a gay bar in L.A. It turned out that he, like me, was from New York. But whereas I was in L.A. on a trip, he had recently pulled up stakes and moved there. Why? Because, he told me, his friends back east were beginning to get sick and die, and it was having an impact on the “scene.”

I pointed out that the gay population of San Francisco was also hard hit, and that even if the situation was not yet quite as dire in L.A., it would surely catch up soon enough. He admitted as much, but estimated that in L.A. he had another six months during which he could keep leading the freewheeling life he'd enjoyed in the Big Apple. His attitude, in short, hovered somewhere in the dark, uncharted territory between denial and fatalism. 

On September 11, 2001, New York – along with Washington, D.C. – was struck by mass death in another form. It shook the world. Mainstream European commentators attributed the terrorist attacks to legitimate Muslim grievances against America, and breezily dismissed suggestions that Europe might soon be struck as well. Sweeping aside Osama bin Laden's claims, President Bush asserted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which he called a “religion of peace.” He then sent armed forces to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq, on the premise that the people of those countries, if allowed to vote in democratic elections, would choose a democratic path.

It all turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The European savants were shown up by the horrific attacks on Madrid, Beslan, London, and elsewhere. Their perpetrators put the lie to the “religion of peace” rhetoric, repeatedly announcing that they were committing jihad, a core Islamic concept. Some people in the West understood. But the West's cultural elite turned away. And Western leaders, while sending young men to fight abroad, left the gates wide open at home.

In Western Europe, this recklessness had an impact well beyond terrorism. Sharia enclaves. Violent crime. A financial burden that has forced welfare states to cut back on education, health care, elder care. While other immigrant groups integrated into European host cultures, Muslims demanded – with increasing success – that those cultures adapt to Islam.

In recent years, German New Year's Eve celebrations have become rapefests and once-swanky French boulevards have been taken over by migrant tent cities. In Britain, defenders of jihad get embraced by London mayors or knighted by the Queen, while critics of Islam get thrown into prison or turned away at the border. Yet politicians and the media on both sides of the Atlantic keep insisting that Islam “enriches” Western society, and schoolchildren continue to be taught that “diversity is our strength.”

9/11 was the most dramatic of warning shots; every new terrorist is only a reminder: we're under siege. Yet countless Westerners still turn away. Like the man I met in that L.A. bar all those years ago, they're reacting to a manifest existential threat with something between denial and fatalism.

This isn't my first 9/11 anniversary piece. In 2006, I lamented that the spirit of 9/11 had been “steamrollered by an establishment that...routinely turns the truth on its head, representing aggressors as victims and self-defense as inflammatory.” In 2011, I recalled “the shock, the rage, the unashamed patriotism and moral clarity” of September 11, 2001, “all of it as yet unclouded by the poisonous cynicism, moral relativism, and multicultural shilly-shallying that would lead to so much national division and self-doubt in the years to come.”

In 2013, I raged that 9/11 had been “succeeded by twelve years of moral chaos. Twelve years of duplicity, flim-flam, double-dealing, humbug. Twelve years of timorousness, incompetence, impotence.” And why? Because we'd been lied to about our enemies. Bush had “massaged the Muslim world with insipid rhetoric about our shared heritage as 'people of faith'”; Obama had “spun outrageous fantasies about Islam, transforming, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech, fourteen centuries of primitive brutality into a glittering parade of moral, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual triumphs.” 9/11, I wrote,

was a day of heroes and of villains, of stark contrasts between good and evil. Yet how quickly the politicians, journalists, and others in positions of power managed to make a muddle of it all. Instead of witnessing a democratization of the Middle East, we experienced a steady Islamization of the West. Instead of seeing freedom bloom in the Islamic world, we saw a rise in Western censorship and self-censorship on the subject of Islam....It's impossible not to compare the leaders we have had during these years to Churchill – and impossible not to dream of what might have been.

Well, at least that's changed. Not as much as one might hope, but certainly more than one might have expected after all those years of Bush and Obama. Finally, in Donald Trump, America has a president, and the Free World has a top dog, who gets it.

Yes, Trump could go further, in both words and actions, on Islam. But he's already gone light years beyond his predecessors. He's certainly gone far enough to outrage bien pensant types everywhere. And he's gone far enough so that Americans who get it know beyond question that he gets it – and that he's on their side. And they're behind him.

As his rock-star reception in Warsaw last year reflected, most Eastern Europeans – who, unlike the editorial board of the New York Times, recognize a champion of freedom and a totalitarian ideology when they see them – are behind him, too, and are giving the finger to EU leaders who demand that they let in a Trojan horse. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, where the haut monde hates Trump as much as do their stateside counterparts, millions – including those in Germany, France, and elsewhere who are finally rising up in boisterous public protests against their own despised leaders (but, except in Italy, still not casting enough votes for alternative parties to effect meaningful change) – see Trump as a long-awaited truth-teller, a sign of hope, a hero.

His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he's the first U.S. president since 9/11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism. He's as far from denial and fatalism as it's possible to be. He talks sense, he talks tough, and he takes action that's in America's interests. He's crushed ISIS, shown Islamic heads of state who's boss, and (against the resistance of both major-party establishments and the legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government) done his best to pull in the welcome mat. While, at this point, most of his counterparts in Western Europe seem to be all about repeating empty multiculturalist slogans and managing a transition to the unimaginable, Trump is manning the barricades.

Yes, the jury's still out. But big things are happening. Islam is pushing Western Europe to the brink of either ruin or revolt. And seventeen years after 9/11, we have reason to hope that America is at last headed in the right direction.