Father of 9/11 victim fights to have "Murdered by Muslim Terrorists" inscribed on son's memorial

Let’s see. I’m an atheist, so if I wanted to self-righteously grind my own axe, I would insist on, “murdered by religious fanatics”. Indisputably true. And law-abiding religious people shouldn’t be offended by the association, right?

Seriously, does anyone not know that the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims? I would think that “murdered by terrorists on 9/11” or “murdered by Al Qaida terrorists on 9/11” would make the pertinent historical facts known to those who view the memorial, now and in the future.

A memorial should try to look down the road. An inscription which reads, “killed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941” looks a lot better today than, “Killed at Pearl Harbor by dirty rotten cowardly Japs”, even though the latter would have gotten plenty of support in the years shortly after the war.

You misunderstand.

Since the original statement effectively called all Muslims terrorists, I was pointing out that you could use the same smear tactics on both Christians and Americans.

A few Muslims were terrorists.
A few Christians were terrorists.
A few Americans funded terrorists.

I’d be pissed if someone tried to score cheap political or whatever other points on something that was meant to be a memorial of my life and death. That is what’s offensive to me in this situation. (not that I’d want a memorial about me anyway, I hate that sort of fuss)

You can’t be dead and pissed at the same time. Unless you believe that you can, which is another thread entirely.

Here lies** Antinor01**
He was much better than
the crappy 02 models
we have today

Note the words on the tombstone do not match those the father wanted on the plaque. In the future don’t be such a butthead.

You’ve been here long enough to know the rules. This is a Warning to not post insults in Great Debates.
[ /Moderating ]

Any sympathy I may have had for this guy for his dead son went out the window through his cheap and racist shot.

He could have substituted Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or just “terrorists” and it would have conveyed the same message, but instead he chose to have his son’s lasting memory be about hatred and ignorance by unfairly stigmatizing an entire religion.

He shouldn’t do it and I’m glad the city stopped him. Nothing gives him the right to pull this kind of shit and have it draped over city hall. Unfortunately for him, he probably lost any privilege he has to put something on the memorial. Instead of something touching, personal, and heartfelt, now it will probably be written by somebody who writes tech manuals for a living.

“James Gadiel (1978-2001)”. The end.

Thanks dad, real class act there. It has all the emotional impact of a venn diagram.

This guy did.

The words were in response to, and taken directly from, the Tim McVeigh web cite used as an example of his Christianity.

Is this a woosh? The answer is every newspaper printed in the last 20 years. Heck, just look back one year. Al Qaeda bombings, Hammas rocket barrages, Taliban in Afghanistan, Taliban in Pakistan, Pirate attacks of the coast of Somalia, Darfur…

Since it would be hard to list all the Islamic terrorist groups I’ll just list Palestinian groups:

  • Hamas
  • the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
  • the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
  • Fatah
  • the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
  • the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC)
  • the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
  • the Abu Nidal Organization

Looking at some of the countries that have recently had bombings:

  • Spain
  • Afghanistan
  • India
  • Iraq
  • Pakistan
  • Philippines
  • Russia
  • Somalia
  • Sudan
  • Thailand
  • The UK
  • The USA
  • USA
  • Yemen

There’s a common theme in there somewhere.

As to the op, the father has no grasp of what would be appropriate.

Rather a serious case of selective amnesia here.

Which is very tortured logic. You seem to be trying to say that because there are so many groups (note that Fatah and Hamas are political parties that are legally elected to run the country) that this is representative of a huge terrorist population. Usually this is actually representative of a fractured political powerbase. In Ireland we had: the Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, Sinn Fein, the Real IRA, (who still commit the odd terrorist act) the UVF, the UDA, and now the Continuity IRA (also listed as a current terrorist organisation). That is seven.

The last 20 years have seen 639 people die in the the Irish Troubles. We can only pray they are over.

You forget ETA. The Basque Seperatists. Since the start of their terrorist campain over 800 people have died in Spain. That one shows no sign of letting up.

Go to Peru and encounter the Shining Path.

Go to SriLanka and try the Tamil Tigers. Perhaps they might not count, and their confict was closer to all out war. Which underlies that in the modern world the difference between war and terror is rather blurred. Civil war especially.

Columbia - National Liberation Army.

Twenty years ago the Afghanistani Islamists were not terrorists. They were allies. So it is a convenient time to draw an artifical line in time and brand them all terrorists.

There is, and it is one of selective reporting to pursue a preconceived truth.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are a huge number of crazy Islamist terrorist organisations out there. (A quick look at the US State Department’s list suggests that about half of them are concerned with Palestine - which is perhaps a serious clue about the real nature of the problem. It isn’t that far off the Irish Troubles.) But this thread isn’t about that. It is about the slur on Islam implied by the original post, and the mooted plaque. With it seems to have come a very new, really post 9/11, view in the West that Islam is the enemy. It makes for easy prejudiced thinking. No different to when the Commies where the bad guys, and aren’t we lucky that the transition from one to the next was so easy? Had the Japanese before that, and so it goes.

The enemy is religious and political extremism. No religion is immune from that, and history shows that they are all pretty even in their propensity to show it. The second enemy is ill though out, prejudicial, bigoted thinking. It is only a small step from the latter to extremism of one kind or another, and then anyone can become a monster. This last century has seen organised genocide in which hundreds of thousands to millions die, on at least half a dozen occasions. That is the spectre that looms over us. Humans of any race, religion, and political colour are all capable of performing the most atrocious acts on one another. No one is immune, and anyone that claims that their side is somehow taint free is kidding themselves. Indeed claiming so is the first step on the road to performng just those atrocities.

Great post, Francis. You’ve covered my thoughts far better than I could have.

20 years. Presumably you mean every newspaper printed in America.

Darfur is tribal warfare between desert tribes that happen to be Muslim, and the Somali pirates are… pirates for fuck’s sake. Jaysus that’s stupid.

Mate, half of those are **Marxist **liberation movements, led by a mix of Christians (e.g. George Habash) and Muslims. It takes an interesting level of bigotry and/or ignorance to list as an Islamic terror group, a group (Popular Front) and its splinters (the remainder) that were founded on secular Marxist principals, by a bloody Christian (Habash). Never mind that the PLO has always included Christians and Muslims in leadership, so hardly counts as an Islamic group.

But hey, they’re all Ay-rabs and must be Mus-lims…

Since you are unable to distinguish this, I’ll have to say that there is a vanishingly small likelihood that you’ve got any real sense of the balance between actual Islamic terror groups and … well anything (such as merely criminal pirates, non-Muslims who happen to dress funny, wear turbans and other stuff, and thus must be Muslims, etc).

You might actually read what was posted before you go off on a PC rant. I responded to Revenant Threshold’s post which was a challenge to a statement Crafter_Man made:
**Yes, because (unlike Muslims) Christians represent a tiny fraction of the modern-day terrorists. **

wmfellows, I can’t restate Crafter_Man’s point any clearer except to point out how errant your post was regarding Palestinian terrorist groups. I don’t know what part of “modern-day terrorists” you don’t understand but The Palestinian groups doing the killing today are MUSLIMS not some historic Christian marxist group. The fact that some of these groups were voted into office in no way makes them less a terrorist group but in fact now makes them a STATE-SPONSORED terrorist group.

Crafter Man’s statement is correct. As a percentage of modern day terrorism, Christian examples are a fraction of Muslim terrorist events.

The words on the “tombstone” were quite clearly and obviously an artistic impression, not a picture. If you read the article, it would be very clear. It seems you did not read the article, but relied on a pretty picture. If you were wise, you would go “oops, my bad”

Hey guys, i haven’t bothered to read the OP, its replies, or the links yet. In fact, I barely managed to get halfway through the title before clicking the “reply” button. But I, for one, think the father is a hero and you all better well show some fucking respect for him as an American. There’s nothing more to debate.

Better stated, Christians represent in the past decade a small fraction of the terrorists that** Americans** care about.

Well mate, it was your bloody citation to those Palestinian groups as Islamic terror groups, not anyone elses. If there is any errancy, it is in your ignorance or perhaps more sinister inability to distinguish between the various Ay-rabs. YOU CITED TO THE GROUPS, not me. [see below for a reminder]

In any case, the Palestinian groups currently active are uniquely concentrated on Israel, like the Anglo-Irish Troubles, that should tell you something. Of course, since you willy nilly cited to Marxist Christian lead Ay-Rabs in your post above as demonstrating Islamic terror, I am quite certain you’ll be unable to follow through the logic.

And your inability to follow a fact based analysis tells me that in a way highly reminiscent of plain old bigotry, the mere touch of someone of the Islamic religion on a group or event renders it in your mind “Islamic Terrorism” but the mere touch of a Christian, well that can be explained away…

Well, that rather depends, are we talking Muslim Terrorists like you cited, i.e. Marxists lead by Greek Orthodox and Catholic Arabs, with Muslim members, Nationalist groups like the PLO with both Christian and Muslim Arab-Palestinian membership that are magically transformed as well into Islamic terrorists, or Chechen nationalists fighting the Russians, etc.

Then we’d best count the Christians (or groups that happen to contain Christians) in the count. Basques, remaining IRA fractions, various terror inclined Christian member African and Latin American terror using insurgencies, etc. By your fuzzy standard they are indeed Christian terror groups.


Reminder, our man’s own word’s

Don’t forget to add that it’s a tombstone that the father paid for, and thus a first amendment right and hey, what can we do about it?