Re: NY

[GGard97342@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/09/2001 17:00:40 GMT Daylight Time,
william_b_ryan@xxxxxxxx writes:


> Just a comment not relevant to the discussions here but I nevertheless
> have to make.
>
> The enemies of freedom have declared war on the United States of America.
> As with Pearl Harbor the American public will awaken from its
> complacency.  First was the Alamo but then came San Jacinto!  First was
> Pearl Harbor but then came Midway!  The henchmen, the so-called "leaders"
> of the "sovereign" nation-states that organized and financed this
> terrorism will meet their ultimate fate--as did Hitler, Mussolini and
> Tojo before them.


We in Britain would like to express our horror at what happened and our
deepest sympathy. As I watched the towers fall I thought of those who worked
in the restaurant at the top and prepared and served my lunch there three
years ago.

We are expecting to hear that many of the dead were British.

But please, Americans, do not make assumptions. The right people must be hit,
and they alone and Bush's remark about "those who harbour terorrists" is
worrying if it means return acts of barbarism against innocents.

We must hope that the terrible experience will make the US think hard about
its own role in "harbouring" terrorists. The IRA bombed the tower blocks of
Canary Wharf, the Commercial Union building in the City of London, the Baltic
Exchange, and a mediaeval church in Bishopsgate. They blasted down the centre
of Manchester. Earlier before my own eyes they bombed the Old Bailey. All
these attacks were financed in part by the cash of Americans. We have never
held those crimes against the American public generally. That would be stupid
as well as wrong. We hope that Americans also on this occasion take a similar
view.

I fear the death role in New York will equal the losses (50,000) among the
British public in the bombing between June 1940 and May 1941. That eleven
months of bombing can now be replicated in an hour is truly frightening.

By coincidence the attacks ocurred while the British Channel Four TV station
was showing a British "propaganda" movie from 1941, Churchill's favourite,
with Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton and Lawrence Olivier as Nelson. Its
authors echoed Bill's feelings about the defence of freedom. But those
sentiments found no positive response from a modern movie critic. How sad.
But I last saw that movie in 1941 and remember how it inspired us in our
darkest hours. The showing of the movie was of course discontinued in order
to show all that was happening in the US.


Geoffrey Gardiner