Five years ago on September 11, 2001, 19 men boarded four planes in the United States with the intention of hijacking them and crashing them into important buildings with the hope of killing as many people as possible.
Three of those planes made it to their targets killing over 3,000 people. The fourth one crashed after passengers attempted to retake the plane after learning the fate of the other three planes.
For Americans, September 11th marked a major turning point for how the country viewed the world. For people outside the United States, the choices and response to September 11th has stirred a great deal of debate. Even within the United States, there is a great deal of disagreement over how best to continue to carry out the response to the terrorist attacks and the growing movement of violent Islamic radicalism.
The people who attacked the United States were part of a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda. A radical Islamic group dedicated to restoring the historic caliphate that once existed from Spain to the far east, Al Qaeda considered the United States as an obstacle to their goals of turning "moderate" Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt into fundamentalist Islamic Republics modeled after then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Their belief was that if the US presence in the middle east as well as its support of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Israel could be removed that they moved one step closer to their goal. They believed, wrongly, that the US response would be to withdraw its presence from the middle east just as it had done so in Somalia in the mid 1990s.
On this day, we at this site give our thoughts to the families of the men and women who died on that day. And we support the valiant men and women in the armed forces from the United States and other countries who are working to put an end to organizations and movements that support the indiscriminate wholesale annihilation of innocents.
We hope the world does not forget 9/11. We certainly will not.
