11 September 2011

Ten Years After

Ten years ago today I got a phone call from my niece. "Turn on your television!" she shouted. "Somebody flew jet planes into the World Trade Center!" I did as she said. The networks showed replays of the second plane impact. It looked like terrorism to me, and it looked like they had engineering help.

At that time, I was involved in scientific and engineering support of efforts to counter the spread and mitigate the consequences of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). If the terrorists had used WMD, my group might have been called. It was a relatively small step from what I had been doing to scientific and technological support of homeland security and counter-terrorism.

"I have to go to work," I said.

What else I thought that day and the day after, is in this blog.

Today, I just want to make a case for the superiority of the Western Way of Justice to that of Jihadi-Takfiris (aka Islamo-Fascist terrorists and their sympathizers) who think that it is justice to kill any Westerners in any numbers that they can, for whatever set of grievances on which they fixate on any given day. If we Westerners believed in a theory of justice like theirs, there wouldn't be any Muslims in the West. Our way is superior - case closed.

And it is therefore case closed that our way must prevail. We need to find a way to fight the war of the Civilized World against the Jihadi-Takfiris (or Islamo-Fascists) less expensively, so we can stay in it for as long as it takes. Decades, perhaps generations. Until all the world's people, especially women, are free to act, speak, and dress as they choose, until all the world's governments are answerable to their people, and until all the world accepts that it is just to punish people only for crimes that they themselves have actually committed.

I'm still at work, even though I've changed fields again. And I intend to keep on working on it, even after I officially retire.

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