The Klan and Al Qaeda - Jerry Chandler lets fly
8:46am Eastern Time, Monday September 11, 2006. I should be sad, reflective. Five years ago at this moment American Airlines Flight 11 melded with the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and the world turned upside down.
I should be praying. Instead, anger tumbles over me like a tsunami. How could they? Why did they?
For all the analysis, all the rhetoric that followed the attacks, I think southerners understand what happened best. I am one. I live half way between Birmingham and Atlanta, in a little town that saw the worst of us hijack the very name "Southerner" back in the1960’s - hijack the name and fly it flat into the ground.
Back then, civil rights workers were beaten, churches bombed, and little girls in while linen dresses butchered all in the name of God. This was a Caucasian God, a God whose adherents also cloaked their gap-toothed, bloodstained ignorance in flowing white robes.
The Ku Klux Klan and Al Queda are cut from the same coarse cloth. While the former is all but dead, the latter flourishes in this new age of ignorance. Both draw their strength, their solemn charge, from the notion that God is truly on their side. That anything they do, no matter how horrendous, is justified. It’s a great way to avoid responsibility. Just blame it on the Almighty.
Has a far better, infinitely more socially acceptable, ring to it than "the devil made me do it".
Burn a cross and kill a kid; shout Allahu Al-Akbar and plunge an airplane into a tower full of people. It’s all the same. All in the name of God.
Enough of this rubbish about 9/11 being "the desperate action of desperate men". The attacks were the actions of people who, while proclaiming God’s mercy, fundamentally, purposefully pervert the very meaning of the word.
Yeah, we’re at war today, and it appears so will our children’s children be – at war with the same old enemy, one who comes clothed in purist white, proclaiming piety and sewing the wrath of hell.
© Cheapflights Ltd Jerry Chandler
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Cheap Flight News