…nearly three years after the nightclub bombings that killed 200.
Preliminary reports via CNN, AP, and Reuters claim at least 25 are dead this time, and four times that many wounded.
*sigh*
Update (10/3): The Economist posts its initial coverage as details continue to emerge:
FOREIGNERS were the target but most casualties were locals. The three suicide-bombers who walked into restaurants on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on the evening of Saturday October 1st, carrying bombs packed with ball-bearings, nails and glass, clearly aimed to kill and maim large numbers of tourists. By Monday the number of casualties was still unclear—perhaps 22 dead and 90 injured. However, most were known to be Indonesians, though several Australians and one Japanese man are also reported dead or missing.
The bombings were almost certainly the work of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), an Islamist terror group with a presence across South-East Asia. Unlike al-Qaeda, with which it has links, JI does not normally admit responsibility for its attacks, though it is known to have been behind the much larger bombings in Bali in October 2002, which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, as well as other attacks across Indonesia.
Tim Blair:
“The big “why” in all of this isn’t anything to do with terrorist motivation, but why so many on the left—facing a force that opposes feminism, homosexuality, diversity, freedom of expression, and democracy—seek cosy understanding of that force.”
I had hoped by this date to have reached the point of September 11, 2001 in the telling of my own story, but I haven’t yet managed to set aside enough time for that project to make it happen. I’ll save the untangling of that painful knot for a future date. For now I just want to join others in solemnly marking the day and the passage of another year.
In past years, I’ve looked without much success for 9/11 memorial services to attend in the Bay Area. Maybe we’re just too far removed from the sites of the attacks out here. (Maybe, I often think, we’re also too far removed from the reality of that day.) Last year I ended up spending the day alone in quiet remembrance, watching and reading as memorial posts unfolded across the “blogosphere” with which I had only recently become acquainted. In hindsight, I did attend a memorial service of sorts that year, with a far-flung extended family that shared my grief. I expect I’ll be checking in again with many of the same folks as today wears on.
Yesterday I finished watching the remarkable two-part National Geographic documentary “Inside 9/11” that Bill Whittle mentioned in his recent essay and that has been waiting for me on the TiVo all week. It was difficult stuff to get through, to be sure, but a journey I had to take. We must remember and clearly understand what happened on that day and in the decade-plus of malicious planning that led up to it, and I think the creators of the National Geographic documentary have helped facilitate that by producing an exemplary piece of journalism — one that presents us with the known facts, and leaves us to weigh them.
My watching of “Inside 9/11” prompted many thoughts, but I will leave it at one for now. In our grief, we must not forget this was not merely a “tragedy” or misfortune (though it was certainly the former), but an act of war by violent extremists who mean to destroy us by dividing us against one another. I often fear they may be succeeding. If we care anything for our culture and way of life, we must not allow them to prevail.
UPDATE:
One of the most moving and memorable reflections I read this year was this 2003 article about the search for the identity of the famously photographed “Falling Man”. (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the pointer!)
Also recommended: a 9/11 photo-essay at Pajamas Media.
Web-essayist extraordinaire Bill Whittle is back and in top form, with a new piece entitled “Tribes”!** Bill’s is some of the best work I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of reading this past year (and quite possibly ever). If you haven’t experienced a Bill Whittle tour de force before, I highly recommend you pay a visit to his site.
Bill’s latest piece has left me reflecting on how fortunate I am to have lived most of my life within the artificial sanctuary of the flock. The attacks of 9/11 awakened the sleeping sheep dog in me, and I humbly hope to make myself useful in that capacity.
* UPDATE 2009-09-08: Sadly, “Tribes” appears to have been a casualty of Bill’s move to pajamasmedia.com. I’ve updated the above link to point to where the essay should be — and, I hold out hope, will be someday — but for now the text of it is missing in action, and can only be found in the Second (print) Edition of Bill’s excellent “Silent America” essay collection (which I can’t possibly recommend highly enough).
** UPDATE 2009-10-13: “Tribes” is back online!
OK. Today, I begin.
But first, a tip of the hat is in order. (I’m not actually given to wearing hats very often, but let’s just set that minor detail aside for the moment and go with the metaphor, shall we?)
One of the blogs I’ve been frequently reading and enjoying since first encountering it last Spring is written by a trained therapist living in New England. Blogging anonymously under the pseudonym “neo-neocon“, her goal has in part been to explore the process of her own political change in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in an ongoing series titled “A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change“. Reading her insights and perspective, and occasionally participating in the discussions in the comments sections following her posts, has been a very helpful kind of therapy for me, as someone going through a very similar experience earlier in life and on the other side of the continent.
Neo’s thoughtful work has helped motivate me to begin recounting my own story and exploring my own process of change and of coming to better understand myself. I’ve been grateful for the thought and effort she puts into her writing, which consistently comes across as being motivated by a sincere desire to better understand things, and I hope to follow her admirably level-headed example in that regard. (Hers is certainly a blog to which I’d refer any Democrat with a sincere interest in understanding what the heck happened to his or her wayward former compatriots.)
As a practical means of keeping momentum on the writing end (with the added benefit of hopefully not boring my readers too terribly) I expect to try to stick to the essentials and get through this bit of storytelling fairly quickly. There is plenty of stuff in the recent past and present that I want to blog about, and I hope to start making more time for that soon. So if I can manage it, I’m going to do my level best to suppress any perfectionistic tendencies that might become an undue hindrance, and try to treat this more like writing a series of e-mail messages — which, for whatever reason, don’t seem to take as long to compose. Better to post something rather than to wait indefinitely for the right turn of phrase to come to mind, or to be sure that every last detail is in place.
The above said, I do feel the need to start this blog by establishing some basic context: Who am I, and what’s motivated me to begin this project? In my most recent post, I wrote:
Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?
As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I’ll be setting out to explore.
I’ve been told that I have changed over the past several years. Have I in fact changed in my views? Have the Democratic party and “liberalism” with which I once decidedly identified changed? Have I grown to become more aware of and to more clearly understand the foundational differences between my own beliefs and the philosophy of contemporary liberalism in the U.S.? To some extent, each of these things has happened. And while the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath have certainly been a catalyst for my own change and reexamination of my thinking, the story goes back farther than that and there’s much more to it.
My first piece in the series is coming together. If I don’t quite manage to finish it today, I hope to get it posted sometime in the coming week for sure. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!
I was driving in to work this morning when the news of today’s bombings in London came in. Thankfully they appear to have been an utter failure casualty-wise, due to faulty detonators. Investigators seem hopeful at this point that the undetonated bombs may yield significant forensic evidence that could identify the perpetrators of the attack, and apparently two suspects are now in custody in connection with the explosions.
Instapundit had the day’s news roundup here, here, here, and here. John Howard’s remarks seemed spot on to me.
Hold fast, London. We’re with you.
A section of the exterior walls of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum still bears damage from the Blitz, which has been preserved as a reminder of a time when Londoners lived under constant threat of attack.
I snapped these pictures during a visit last year, not imagining that I would soon revisit them with new eyes.
