We Are At A Point In Our

The Definition Of Terrorism Has To Be More Precise, So That We Are Able To Discriminate Between, For Example, What It Is That The Palestinians Are Doing To Fight The Israeli Military Occupation And Terrorism Of The Sort That Resulted In The World Trade Center Bombing.

Speaking As A New Yorker, I Found It (9/11 Event] A Shocking And Terrifying Event, Particularly The Scale Of It. At Bottom, It Was An Implacable Desire To Do Harm To Innocent People.

The Orient And Islam Have A Kind Of Extrareal, Phenomenologically Reduced Status That Puts Them Out Of Reach Of Everyone Except The Western Expert. From The Beginning Of Western Speculation About The Orient, The One Thing Th Orient Could Not Do Was To Represent Itself. Evidence Of The Orient Was Credible Only After It Had Passed Through And Been Made Firm By The Refining Fire Of The Orientalist’s Work.

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.

It [destroying Twin Towers] Was A Leap Into Another Realm - The Realm Of Crazy Abstractions And Mythological Generalities, Involving People Who Have Hijacked Islam For Their Own Purposes. It's Important Not To Fall Into That Trap And To Try To Respond With A Metaphysical Retaliation Of Some Sort.