[mujahedeen], By The Way, Don't

Speaking As A New Yorker, I Found It (9/11 Event] A Shocking And Terrifying Event, Particularly The Scale Of It. At Bottom, It Was An Implacable Desire To Do Harm To Innocent People.

[9/11] Was Bloody-minded Destruction For No Other Reason Than To Do It.

And In This Relentlessly Unfolding Series Of Interactions, The U.s. Has Played A Very Distinctive Role, Which Most Americans Have Been Either Shielded From Or Simply Unaware Of.

It Was Thought That To Rally Islam Against Godless Communism Would Be Doing The Soviet Union A Very Bad Turn Indeed, And That, In Fact, Transpired.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.