Very Unhappy Hour

Nine years after the first plane hit the tower, they gather. Some stoic, some as disconsolate as the moment they realized that their loved one would never be coming home, all of them burdened by a crime most monstrous that defied logic, defiled religion, spat in the face of human decency and showed that our enemy lacked even a scintilla of compassion or empathy normal in Homo sapiens. We were and are facing an atavistic antagonist, a throwback to the unenlightened time of Mohammad, and a butchered faith that has turned into the faith of butchers. Not one person in those towers, in the Pentagon, or on that flight that ended in a Pennsylvania field deserved their fate beyond the nineteen subhumans who committed the deliberate carnage. Time does not heal all wounds, none of my best friends are Muslim and the two Muslims I knew most closely, one in seventh grade and the other in high school despised in the first instance me as a Jew and in the second, hated America (or at least our teen girls) for their supposed lax values and low virtue, morals he imagined and that he claimed put the United States in disrepute. Arshad, I will die a proud Jew and if you do not like it, get the hell back to Pakistan, and Shuab until you can claim some accomplishment for your native Bangladesh, you have little margin to criticize the United States which sheltered you, gave you better opportunity, and certainly a better life than you would have had if we had not welcomed you as an American.