Over at PJMedia Lifestyle, Dave Swindle asks how 9/11 changed you. My answer, also to be found in the comments there, is that it didn't:
9/11 did not change me politically. I had long been alternately skeptical of and disgusted with the Western Left, ever since I absorbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago one summer in high school. And I had long followed the dreary litany of Islamic terrorism, bombings and hijackings, from the 70s onwards. When 9/11 happened, I knew before hearing any announcement that it was probably Osama bin Laden, because he was responsible for the attacks on the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I had visited Kenya before, and loved the warm friendly people there, so that attack was doubly atrocious to me. On 9/11, watching Muslims party in the streets, and proggs exclaim “How terrible! But…” simply confirmed me more solidly in my opinions. I will never forget or forgive the jihadists, nor how proggs insinuated--or proclaimed--that America deserved 9/11. I've made it a rule to reject with great force the national security advice of such people in the years since.
