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September 14, 2001/Elul 26, 5761, Vol. 54, No. 1
Home of the braveEditorialJust at the time of the Jewish year when we ponder who will live and who will die, thousands of innocent Americans have been consigned to death. The devastating statistics measuring the magnitude of this week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., will come to light as rescue and recovery operations continue in the coming days and weeks.But it is the ordinariness of where the victims were and what they were doing when they were killed, not mere numbers, that is a measure of the enormity of the attack. American citizens were murdered on American soil, sitting at their desks, checking their e-mails, sipping their morning coffee. There is a lesson here. We have quibbled endlessly during the past 11 months about media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with calls for "balanced reporting"; a quest for "moral equivalency"; distress about the bias inherent in determining blame by body count. And now, in an eerie reversal, we know for certain, that it's not about numbers. It's about every mother and father, every son and daughter, every friend and neighbor, who did not go home at the end of the day Tuesday, and who will not go home again. Some say perhaps the world now knows what Israel has suffered for so long. And that is true. The underlying fear, the randomness of attack, the failure of theoretically sophisticated security measures to detect suicide bombers slipping through Israeli roadblocks and hijackers entering U.S. airports, puts into painful relief how extraordinarily difficult it is to counter insidious violence. So, as we begin the Jewish New Year 5762, we must raise our voices to demand that combating terrorism, wherever it exists, move to the forefront of our nation's agenda. The United States must let the world know we will not be intimidated by threat or by deed. The capture of the perpetrators of Tuesday's tragedy must be swift, their punishment fitting to the crime. Our borders must be safe, our citizens secure. Let us act to protect and preserve America as the land of the free and the home of the brave. |
