the F-16 pilot probably saw a lot more than he wanted to..

Egypt Air Flight 990 when it crashed off the coast of Massachusetts in 1999.

I have a wild theory about this episode. Remember how no one could figure out why this plane crashed, and the controversy that arose when a voice of one of the cockpit crew--presumably the co-pilot--seemed to make a declaration like "Allah be praised" before the plane suddenly veered into a dive straight into the ocean.

Could this have been a "dry run," a way to determine if it was possible to get one of the terrorists onto a plane, and take it over? Was this sort of the "Apollo 10" for these fanatics, a shakedown cruise straight into the briney?

It would certainly explain a lot.

9-11-01. Remember.

Nothing about the pilot who is said to have brought down Flight 990 jibes very well with the image of an Islamic militant. The whole incident remains extremely curious, and I suspect there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Anything is possible.
You know they had many dry runs.
You know they flew the route at least once to "See" if they could pull it off.

I agree with you. It does make you wonder very deeply. I just can't understand why hate is so deep with some people they will kill. God, Bless America.

That F-16 may have shot it down.

It would have been sadly necessary.

Pray for that pilot.

As I said on another thread, at this point "we" knew what was happening. And a fighter jet was "near". I'm now positive "we" shot it down.

Talk to some of your neighbors who had relatives in the WTC, I am sure they can help you begin to understand.

In Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz promised to look into whether the plane had been shot down.

"I have no information on it at all. In fact, that's the first I heard, and I'm going to look into it," he said

That's not exactly what I would call a denial.

You would think he would KNOW whether or not the Air Force took out a commercial airliner.

That F-16 may have shot it down. It would have been sadly necessary. Pray for that pilot.

I just read another article that asked this question, and I didn't think we had planes up in the air fast enough to have done it. I figured that if there was an explosion, it probably resulted from the bomb going off in the struggle between those brave passengers and the terrorists.

But if some poor pilot did have to shoot down that plane, then he definately needs prayer. Doing the right thing is often very hard to bear--especially when you can't share your grief with others.

" I'm now positive "we" shot it down." Didn't one of the passengers on the phone say that smoke was coming from one of the wings? I'm sure I heard that in one of the early reports but, isn't being reported now.

There is more to the Shanksville PA story. Stay tuned.

Hesperophobia

On blaming the Jews.

By John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor

September 13, 2001 5:00 p.m.

Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]

Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take."

It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice.

What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.

Hesperophobia? Maybe. But I think we should treat them as we would an animal with hydrophobia, better known as rabies. Kill them all.

The Arabs, Chinese, et al were never worthy of western ideals. That is why they cannot assimilate our cultural values with theirs. Our message to Islamic radicals : We are the BORG all resistance is futile.

BUMP

"the F-16 pilot probably saw a lot more than he wanted to.."

As unfortunate as this sounds, I wouldn't be surprised if the F-16 pilot "saw" one of his own missles home into that plane, hard to stomach as that may be for most of us.

One thing is for sure: if the plane did indeed crash on it's own, the F-16 would have taken it down had it gotten close to its intended target.

Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador was fond of saying about the growth of Saudi Arabia, "We want to modernize, but not ot Westernize"

I have pondered these words for many years. how can this be?

There are many, many, good Moslem ,American university educated Saudis who believe this. They believe they can bring their country from the middle ages to he present, while not incorporating the evils of liberal western society.

We at Free Republic are involved in the same sort of action. We as conservatives want to discard the many bad cultural changes that plague our society. The war is the Red Zone against the Blue Zone. If true, much of the Islamic world, especially Saudi Arabia, is within the Red Zone.

The Blue zoners are now on tv and alas, Free Republic, declaring that the Blue Zone mentality is correct and the way to proceed. They are saying Harvard is the voice of the way to go forward. disregard the war mongers.

There is a cultural war within America and it will be fought viciously by the liberals now that they are in serious danger of losing. They must lose. They must be shouted down. They must be hounded into retreat. We must not condem our Moslem friends by lumping them with our Moslem enemies. They struggle with the same problems of change and the fanatics are those who insist on returning to an age long gone.

I don't believe that the government would allow the American public to know that we would take down a plane full of innocent Americans until everything about this attack shakes out. Revealing this could cause some division of support from within the U.S. at this point. However, it doesn't take a "rocket scientist" to figure that this airliner was shot out of the sky over a rural area is a very distinct and likely possibility.