Never forget - Brit lefties gloated after 9/11

On the ninth anniversary of the kamikaze attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, let us recall that two days later the BBC staged a Question Time with an audience exuding viciously anti-American sentiments, for which the director general "apologised to those offended by it", saying it was "inappropriate" to have aired such a program so soon after the events.

Two days after that the New Statesman published an editorial in which it lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, claiming that Islam had moved into the void thus created in Third World hopes and calculations. That stupidity aside, the main purpose of the editorial was to gloat:

Look at the pictures showing Americans running in terror from the New York explosions and then ask yourself how often in the past (particularly in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq) you have seen people running in terror from American firepower. American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order.

Terrorism on this scale - greeted with enthusiasm on the streets of many poor countries - needs a sympathetic climate, a sea in which it can swim. And the US government and media (along with their British cheerleaders) themselves raise the ideological stakes when they claim that we have seen attacks on freedom and democracy. That is one way of putting it: another is to say that these attacks, using deeply symbolic targets, have hit a civilisation that has grown complacent, selfish and in some respects decadent.

Twelve percent of those killed in the Twin Towers were not Americans. Sixty-seven of them were British. The intellectual bankruptcy and moral nullity of the British leftists was never more clearly revealed.

They were more prudent after that other great multicultural event, the mass killings in London on 5 July 2005, when leftist icon Ken Livingstone made the following declaration:

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners - black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old - indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for caste, for religion or whatever.

Check out the list of those killed - how many of them were "ordinary working-class Londoners"? Livingstone obviously intended to differentiate the 5/5 attacks from those on 9/11, yet they were indistinguishable to any except Brit leftists whose minds are corroded by hatred of the United States.