Scrapbook
Scrapbook They Shoot Photographers, Don't They? Perhaps the most disgusting images following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the ones of Palestinian men, women, and...
...Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha...
...Ayers, who spent the 1970s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago...
...But I do smell destabilizing violence in the wings...
...The only thing atypical about the video that was shown was that it somehow managed to escape the censorship-by-death-threat that the Palestinian Authority otherwise imposes on unflattering photography...
...Blank Slate The Times has the bare excuse that it couldn't know with what horrifying juxtaposition its bit of radical chic would land alongside shrapnel and ashes on Manhattan doorsteps...
...But the New York Times's crashingly tasteless profile of an American terrorist would have been egregious whenever it was published, and therefore deserves special mention...
...By the end of the week, though, some media sympathizers were cluck-clucking that too much had been made of this footage, that the video is atypi-cal—that, after all, we have been shown the same images over and over...
...Perhaps the most disgusting images following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the ones of Palestinian men, women, and children dancing in the streets in east Jerusalem, celebrating the death of thousands of Americans, yelling, "God is great," and enjoying some celebratory sweets...
...In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen...
...Ayers, by the way, claims that last part about killing rich people and parents was a joke...
...Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago" et, ad nauseam, cetera...
...Dinitia Smith wrote the piece, which was headlined "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives...
...Break up their cars and apartments...
...FORWARDED TO THE SCRAPBOOK'S e-mail, and no doubt to millions of others by now, was an unknown artist's rendition of a possible replacement for the fallen towers...
...Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: 'Kill all the rich people...
...Whatever its technical limitations might be, we thought the work admirably reflected the combination of pluck and defiance under fire that makes the American character the envy of the world...
...The sometimes barely edited Slate, on the other hand, distinguished itself by publishing the following musings from New Yorker theater critic John Lahr on September 12, the day after...
...I asked the sergeant at arms of the Capitol just 45 minutes ago in a meeting with 70 senators and House members, how much advance notice did you have...
...Ayers...
...is probably safe from prosecution anyway...
...Isn't it odd that on the day—the DAY—that the Democrats launched their most blistering attack on 'the absolute lunacy' of Bush's unproven missile-defense system, which 'threatens to pull the trigger on the arms race,' what Sen...
...The fact that I could even think such a thought says more to me about the bankruptcy and moral exhaustion of our leaders even in the face of a disaster where any action, in the current nightmare, will seem like heroism...
...He said, none...
...But there's a good reason for this last fact, that also does no credit to the Palestinian Authority...
...Anyone who tried to film or photograph cheering Palestinians after that first disastrous bit of footage was released might have gotten himself killed...
...This is why no one has yet seen the AP's video of the Nablus rally, which reportedly numbered 4,000...
...Frantic apologists for Yasser Arafat, who have spent years toiling in the propaganda vineyards, saw their long work souring before their eyes...
...Mr...
...The jarring scenes—so at odds with the familiar images of aggrieved Palestinian victimhood that are a staple of international news broadcasts—infuriated Americans, and, for a different reason, the Palestinian Authority...
...It's a tragedy that it took the loss of thousands of lives to wake this country up and realize that our number one responsibility is not education (and I'm a teacher) and it's not health care (I'm married to a nurse)—it is in fact the security and the safety of the American people...
...it took us a long time to find out the hidden agenda to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin 'incident,' which tipped us into Vietnam and a war we should never have fought...
...It's reproduced above for the enjoyment of readers who are not yet online...
...Curt Wel-don of Pennsylvania, whom we saw on CNN at around noon on Tuesday and who seemed better than anyone in those chaotic early hours to have grasped the sudden turn in American statecraft...
...It appeared in Tuesday's paper, as the world was crashing in around America...
...Biden calls today in the Guardian, his 'theological' belief in 'rogue nations,' that the rogue nation should suddenly become such a terrifying reality...
...In fear, the nation, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent...
...Hence AP footage of similar celebrations in Nablus was never released...
...When Lahr writes of absolute lunacy and moral exhaustion, we think the fox smells his own hole...
...For the most part they deserve to pass in silence...
...A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted...
...Soundbites Under Fire Finally, full credit to Rep...
...The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings...
...Several Palestinian Authority officials spoke to AP in Jerusalem urging that the material not be broadcast...
...A New World Trade Center...
...We still don't really know who killed Kennedy or Martin Luther King...
...According to the AP, which protested to the Palestinian Authority, Arafatallied Tanzim militia made death threats to an AP cameraman who recorded the Nablus footage...
...Perhaps it's eerie serendipity, perhaps it's my paranoia, but an acid thought keeps plaguing me...
...Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority 'cannot guarantee the life' of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast...
...The Times's Bad Timing Lots of people said and wrote and published things in the days before September 11 that look foolish or tasteless or worse in retrospect...
...Yasser Arafat rushed off to give blood for shipment to Amer-ica—and the gesture got him almost no credit...
...Over the decades, I've become instinctively skeptical about the events that have burned themselves into our consciousness as watermarks of the era...
...I feel we didn't do enough.' Mr...
...He participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972...
...But Mr...
...This is a failure that was caused by a lack of resources and by a complacency that set in in America over the past 10 years, a complacency that convinced all of us that with the demise of the Soviet Union there were no more threats...
...There was no intelligence...
...Some excerpts: "'I don't regret setting bombs,' Bill Ayers said...
...He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
