Every Single Empire In Its Official Discourse

The People Who Perpetrated The Terror Of The World Trade Center And Pentagon Bombings Are Something Different Because These People Were Obviously Not Desperate And Poor Refugee Dwellers. They Were Middle Class, Educated Enough To Speak English, To Be Able To Go To Flight School, To Come To America, To Live In Florida.

And What Terrifies Me Is That We're Entering A Phase Where If You Start To Speak About This As Something That Can Be Understood Historically - Without Any Sympathy - You Are Going To Be Thought Of As Unpatriotic, And You Are Going To Be Forbidden. It's Very Dangerous. It Is Precisely Incumbent On Every Citizen To Quite Understand The World We're Living In And The History We Are A Part Of And We Are Forming As A Superpower.

And In This Relentlessly Unfolding Series Of Interactions, The U.s. Has Played A Very Distinctive Role, Which Most Americans Have Been Either Shielded From Or Simply Unaware Of.

Appeals To The Past Are Among The Commonest Of Strategies In Interpretations Of The Present.

It Is Very Easy To Make Wild Generalizations About Islam. All You Have To Do Is Read Almost Any Issue Of The New Republic And You'll See There The Radical Evil That's Associated With Islam, The Arabs As Having A Depraved Culture, And So Forth. These Are Impossible Generalizations To Make In The United States About Any Other Religious Or Ethnic Group.