After converting planes into weapons of destruction, flying will never be the same again. Taking over a passenger jet and directing it to another destination is now relatively easy. Some knowledge of martial arts, a few months training as a pilot and a person can qualify as a hard-core heartless terrorist.
Security measures at airports and aircrafts are going to change substantially. The added costs are going to inflate travel costs. And despite all the steps, determined criminal minds will still find ways to overcome the safeguards. A slack surveillance system, a malfunctioning x-ray machine, forged travel documents, a government sympathetic to the murderous maniacs can cause the world to once again view the horror of human carnage.

We have seen planes heading into a sunset, flying over an ocean, landing at tarmacs in exotic locales. Now we have to add to that the horror of seeing jets flying headlong into buildings causing untold destruction and death.

Can one ever go back to New York and see, without an involuntary shudder, the empty space where the Twin Towers once stood? How can one not remember the horror of it all, when one gazes once again at the thrusting high rise, often superb, occasionally horrendous? It's a city most people seem to know before they get there, thanks to the hold it has on popular imagination, as the Big Apple.

When you see it in the flesh, its energizing buzz and movement, colour and noise are overwhelming. Right in there among the city's Irish, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Indians, Puerto Ricans and Blacks one gets a feel of the gritty New Yorker and his or her ability to survive the worst. The term "melting pot" takes on a new meaning here and the American dream takes its most alluring form. It wasn't a coincidence that its most potent symbols were smashed on that Black Tuesday. For the traveler, New York is the ultimate adventure because the city seems to renew itself each day. And now it must renew itself once again. In the words of Prophet Isaiah: "They will rebuild the ancient ruins … they will renew the ruined cities …"

Today the American dream has become a nightmare; the aviation industry is in turmoil and has lost billions in the space of a few days. For a long time to come, the spectre of terror will loom large each time one boards a plane, and the usual peeves of travel such as long queues, lost luggage, missed connections, immigration and customs formalities will pale into insignificance.

From an editorial in the Voyage, September 2001

STOP BLAMING THE VICTIM

Those seeking the mote in the American eye should rather pay attention to the beam in their own.


The average American is probably no more noble (or wicked) than the average New Zealander.
But their country is far richer, bigger, and more powerful than New Zealand, and there are 72 times as many of them. So when they act for good (or ill) a great many more people are helped (or hurt).

They have done some terrible things and supported some wicked men. But without their power and the sacrifice of their soldiers, sailors and airmen the outcome of both world wars would have been different. They also helped to free Russia and Europe from communism, in whose name far more people died than even Hitler ever dreamed of killing.

Yet Americans are reviled by the Western intelligentsia more than communism ever was. Notoriously during the cold war, it was fashionable among Europeans to hold American democracy in snobbish contempt and mouth apologias for communist dictatorship even as they sheltered from possible communist attack under the nuclear umbrella provided for them by the U.S. And earlier this year, there were reports of European leaders snubbing President Bush because he refused to sign a document (the Kyoto Protocol) none of their own governments had ratified.

This kind of disdain has been echoed in South Africa in response to the mass murders of 11th September.

President Mbeki issued a forthright condemnation, but some of his colleagues chose to be equivocal: `Yes we condemn the attacks, but then again the U.S. should not have withdrawn from the World Conference Against Racism in Durban'.
Even more shameful were attempts by some commentators to put part of the blame for the attacks on the alleged evils of globalisation and the disparities across the world between the rich and the poor. Pressure on the U.S. (and other rich countries) for greater trade liberalization needs to intensify, but critics of America also need to consider that that country is rich because it is hard working, enterprising, and democratic, while many other countries are poor because their governments are brutal and corrupt and more concerned with finding scapegoats than solutions for their problems.

The U.S. has been called upon to do some soul-searching as to why it is so reviled. No doubt it will do that even as it buries its dead. But those who see the mass murders in the U.S. as some sort of `come-uppance' for American would be well advised to do the same.

John Kane-Berman

Fast Facts, published by the South African Institute of Race Relations.