The day the Earth stood still

  Photo “Twin Towers Sky” by fastfocus (flickr)

It’s simply astonishing that, as we observe the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, so many Americans are still quite unaware of who was responsible for the attacks. If you don’t have friends and even family who believe the hijackings were engineered by our own nefarious government, you must be living in a cave–probably with Osama bin Laden.

If anything, seven years after our baptism by fire, the conspiracy theories are more numerous and insistent than ever.

Just yesterday, MEMRI released video footage of a July 31st talk by Indian Muslim cleric Zakir Naik “proving” that George Bush directed the attacks. Naik’s proof?  Why, every discredited and hokey conspiracy theory in the book, including the video Loose Change and the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 911, of course. Many of these same explanations for the events of 9/11 have been rather amusingly spoofed by South Park, notably in the episode Mystery of the Urinal Deuce, in which slinging crap about 9/11 is satirized via some rather stark symbolic imagery.  In other words, these theories are so outrageously stupid they’re comical.  Imam Naik’s audience laughs uproariously as he relates his “proofs”—not because the conspiracy theories themselves are so funny, but because we, the gullible who subscribe to the official version of events, are so obtuse we just don’t get it.  What’s funny to them is that there are people who think that Muslims did it in the name of Islam.

I can understand the Muslim world and our international enemies buying into the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, but Americans?  As I say, slingin’ mud monkeys about 9/11 is possibly more fashionable than ever, which is scary considering that a Scripps Howard poll two years ago found that an incredible thirty-six percent of Americans believe the US government was complicit in the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington!  According to the same poll, a somewhat smaller percentage believes that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down by explosives planted at the base, and that the Pentagon was hit, not by a passenger plane hijacked by Islamic terrorists, but by a cruise missile. 

Not wanting to cut themselves on Occam’s razor, these analytical wizards take refuge in elaborate fantasies about a few evil, clean-shaven men in Washington plotting domestic atrocities in hushed, secret tones while golfing or lunching; but they are oblivious to the legions of bearded Mohammedan zombies in Halloween costumes every day screaming hatred, threatening to destroy us, conducting violent jihad, and blowing themselves up in cars and trucks and on busses, trains, and planes in virtually every nation on Earth. 

Seven years since the world stood still—and almost twelve thousand separate, documented attacks by Islamic militants later—and people yet believe that jihad (if the word is in their vocabulary at all) is a quaint cultural and religious practice like Sunday football for us Americans.  Even today—amid solemn remembrance of the courage, the bravery, and the heroic sacrifice of so many Americans on that extraordinary day—it is hard not to mock the conspiracy theorists and to laugh heartily.  Through our sorrow and our tears, as we search in vain the Manhattan skyline for those familiar, giant twin structures, it is possible after all to smile as we recognize the ray of sunlight beaming through the black cloud.

Maybe you don’t find it as funny as I do (try the linked South Park video to be sure) but you’ve got to find it at least gratifying to know that likely only one of the three people next to you—who are taking in the very same view of that awful void in the skies above New York—is  totally retarded or otherwise mentally deranged.