9/11 Twenty Years On

Twenty years after the world stood still and watched in horror as passenger aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, has a new world order appeared? 9/11. Explosions in a building, caused by aircraft. Not in New York, but in La Paz, Chile, where La Moneda Presidential Palace housing Salvador Allende, Chile’s President, was bombed by the Chilean Air Force given the nod by Richard Nixon sitting in Washington DC. In 1973. Exactly twenty-eight years later, the Twin Towers took centre stage in the world’s media theatre for weeks to come as humankind held its breath at the sheer audacity of the al-Qaeda attack against the people of the United States of America, as passenger aircraft slammed into the building (and later another one at the Pentagon). For some, David had slapped Goliath in the face wreaking revenge for the western treatment of Moslems, its turning a blind eye to Israel’s apartheid policies on lands it stole from the Palestinians. For the majority, civilians and especially women and children, can never be indiscriminate targets of any sort of violence.