Five years on

It seems weird that we’re already five years on from 9/11. Much has changed in those five years – not least in the way militant Islam in this country seems to be increasing all the while. I’m under the impression that there’s a lot of doubletalk among Muslim leaders – on the one hand they’re constantly saying that terrorism is the work of a few malcontents, the next they’re saying that unless Muslims are better treated there’ll be two million terrorists living in Britain. It seems that Islam isn’t a threat, unless the Muslims want something…

But, back to 9/11
I was working back in my Minimum Wage Hell that was the cinema at the time and I remember one of the projectionists coming down from his booth to say that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. I assumed he meant it was a stunt in a film he’d been watching, until he said he’d seen it on the news. From then on we took it in turns to watch the news coverage in the staff room. So I saw the second tower fall, live, in a state of numb disbelief.

This really was one of those events that just happened out of the blue. If we’re honest and say that this marked the beginning of a war that is only now just getting into gear, then it’s comparable to the blitzkrieg attack on Poland. There were rumours, apparently dismissed in the upper echelons of the US government, but nobody really thought a war was going to kick off as a result of those rumours. But it did, and it has, and in many respects it’s going to be a long and dirty war fought on multiple fronts.

I worked in MWH with a number of Somali Muslim lads; all of whom were shocked and horrified by the events of 9/11. For them the benefit of living in a stable and prosperous society instead of the war-torn hellhole their families had escaped from was obvious. How any Muslim could launch such an attack was beyond them.

One more voice
I imagine there’ll be loads of people blogging about this, talking about it on the radio, replaying the news footage on TV, and so on. Normally I don’t bother to comment on the things everyone else is talking about – what’s the point of adding one more voice to the maelstrom of conspiracy theorists, platitudinal pietists and would-be societal commentators? But, for what it’s worth, this is my story about 11 September 2001.