“For it is a day of trouble and treading down and perplexity by the Lord God of hosts in the Valley of Vision – breaking down the walls and of crying to the mountain.” (Is. 22:5)
Today marks the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On this day 10 years ago, nearly 3000 people lost their lives. There are various memorial services and ceremonies planned throughout the day to remember these events. And we may certainly mourn with those who mourn, decry violence and terrorism, and give God thanks for our relative freedom and safety in the world. But despite the catastrophe, despite the truly startling horror of those events, the overwhelming sentiment of America is actually rather more horrifying for its blindness and hypocrisy.
Just in the last few years, around 3000 civilians have been killed by US bombing raids in Afghanistan, with many more thousands wounded. The US and her allies are responsible for many thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003, with many thousands more wounded.
And our hypocrisy is even greater at home. Since 1975, we have murdered over a million of our own children every single year by a legal medical practice called abortion. Since its legalization in 1973 there have been approximately 50 million children murdered by abortion in the United States. This means that over 3000 children are legally murdered every day in our nation. What those terrorists did on September 11, ten years ago, in the name of Allah, we do to ourselves and to our little ones every single day. And we have exported this holocaust to the rest of the world. An estimated 42 Million abortions occur every year throughout the world, approximately 115,000 abortions every day.
During the course of World War 2, it is estimated that around six million Jews were murdered in the holocaust. But America has done that 8 or 9 more times in the last 35 years. The leaders of this nation claim to stand up against terrorism, claim to care about justice and innocent lives, and have the audacity to sing patriotic songs pretending to be morally superior, pretending to be Christian, a force for good in this world.
So what should our response to all of this be? When the Lord brought catastrophes against Israel of old, His hope was that they would turn to Him: “In that day the Lord GOD of hosts Called for weeping and for mourning, for baldness and for girding with sackcloth.” (Is. 22:12)
Elisabeth Thunderberry says
i watched the memorial on tv, weirded out! The memorial was beautiful aesthetically..but the vision unnerved me reminding me that this is about politics and dominion of idealogies..i overheard in a conversation i was a having that they designed the memorial after carbon footprint..weird….it looked also like one huge gravestone in NYC…..more thoughts on this another time. Also, isnt the place of wells in the bible a place where disputes broke out….and that in itself is something I have thought about.
elisabeth
Curt Frazier says
Great balance and perspective. Certainly the murder of innocent people for political gain is the essence of terrorism. And certainly there exist a few who are responsible for 9/11 that deserve retaliation. But this forces the question of the overall justice/legitimacy regarding our current wars. If the wars are unjust (certainly unconstitutional), yet claiming to be legal (not unlike abortion), aren’t the killings committed by our troops acutally acts of murder whether the victims are uniform clad or children in the street?
Or are the wars just and thus merely misguided in there tactical execution (total war)?