The post-9/11 blues

HATED DOING it, but it had to be done, and in full view of thousands of my FFFs (Fake Facebook Friends).

Late Tuesday night, I posted a remembrance of 9/11 - the thousands of civilian lives lost, plus a thank you to our military, the first responders and the nameless heroes in our intelligence services.

You know how they say there's one in every crowd? On Facebook, among the thousands of normal people (more or less) there are the likes of Steve Forman, who posted: "Why did Bush take so long to react to a horrible disaster planned by himself, his brothers, and anyone with him?"

A 9/11 Truther. In full view of the FFFs, I unfriended him. There's just so much I can take.

Had I not, Forman would have been telling me the other towers were dynamited, that the "false flag" operation was a coproduction of the Mossad and that Walt Disney was a Rastafarian.

On the other hand (if it is another hand) are the Trumpified Birthers claiming Barack Obama is not an American citizen because he was not born in America, or maybe not "born" at all, because he is the spawn of the devil.

All the above was a distraction from remembering 9/11, and learning from it.

It's not enough to remember. I still burn. I want vengeance. If I wanted to avoid controversy, I would say I want "justice," vengeance's loftier cousin, but, frig it, I want payback, what English philosopher Francis Bacon described as a kind of "wild justice."

Thank you, Seal Team 6 for killing Osama bin Laden. Can we have some more please?

No matter how careful we are, some innocent civilians will die. Unlike terrorists, we don't target civilians nor rejoice in their deaths, but innocents die in every war. During the liberation that began on June 6, 1944, (and the bombing that preceded it) more than 15,000 French civilians were killed. It had to be done, in the name of civilization - and French survivors hugged our troops.

If the values of some Americans in 2013 were popular in 1943, we'd be told not to invade Europe because civilians would die. That's true, but ignores the hundreds of thousands of civilians already killed by the Nazis and Imperial Japan, which was unbelievably bestial in Korea, China and the Philippines.

There was no peaceful way of bringing them to heel.

Sometimes just the threat of force can triumph. That seems to be happening with Syria and its arms supplier Russia, but that requires suspension of disbelief, because both Russia's Vladimir Putin and Syria's Bashar Assad are gold-medal liars. Is Putin playing Lucy, holding a football for Obama-as-Charlie Brown to kick? While trusting and verifying, reluctant warrior Obama must keep his finger on the trigger.

To bring this back to 9/11, there is no peaceful way for the world to deal with terrorists, from al Qaeda to Hezbollah to Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi and all the horribles in between. Syria is different. Assad has a state, he has assets to lose. Unlike Islamists who are committed to terror, Assad doesn't embrace his own death

With non-state terrorists, it is a binary choice - they win or we win. I am talking about the radical fundamentalists, not all Arabs or Muslims, who are devoted to killing civilians.

We might pacify the crazies if, as they demand, we (the West) exit all Muslim lands, so they can wind the clock back to the 7th century and use sharia law to oppress women, end education, throttle freedoms from dress to speech, cleanse all minorities and kill all gays.

Is the enlightened West willing to pay that price?

What 9/11 means to me is no surrender to the radical Islamist barbarians. This is war, not Quizzo.

Paradoxically, as civilized people, it is our duty to kill them.

Phone: 215-854-5977

On Twitter: @StuBykofsky

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