3 paragraph essay on 9/11
O n the morning of Sept. Her French class was just about to start when a strange announcement came over the P. The teacher, hearing those words, logged onto her computer. Then she started to cry.
The World 9/11 Took From Us
No single figure since the second world war has made so profound an impact on world events as Osama bin Laden. It was a brief moment of American moral supremacy. Yet by launching armed aggression, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq, America wholly squandered this gain.
The aggression led to a tide of anti-Americanism and surge of support for fanatical Islamism across the Muslim world. The wars cost tens of thousands of lives and caused mass destruction. The billions of dollars expended on them was financed largely from borrowing, which in turn has destabilised the world economy. He saw widespread hostility towards the west and its aggressive behaviour in the Muslim world. Civil liberties were curbed and governments reverted to cold war paranoia.
America was again the great Satan. The peace dividend so eagerly awaited at the end of the 20th century evaporated as the security industry exploited counter-terrorism and seized every chance of profit and risk aversion. Bin Laden became a role model for fanatics everywhere. For Americans it genuinely was a new Pearl Harbour, an attack on the homeland that made them feel vulnerable for the first time in 60 years.
It turned an administration with quasi-isolationist tendencies into one committed to robust intervention overseas. The outcome was a new focus on combating global terrorism, particularly al-Qaida. Huge new resources were thrown into the battle. The group has since been unable to mount so spectacular an attack again. The Arab spring has now rendered it almost irrelevant. In retrospect, perhaps the west put too much effort into the physical battle against international terrorism and not enough into addressing the grievances the extremists were able to exploit, particularly the failure to advance peace in the Middle East.
The destruction of the twin towers graphically illustrated the dark side of globalisation. Terrorists used the tools of a modern global society, the internet, open borders and hi-tech aeroplanes, to attack the west at home. Fortunately, they failed to provoke our societies into closing their borders and hunkering down at home and instead we reacted with a greater willingness to engage internationally. The attack gave birth to an unprecedented universal coalition of revulsion.
That consensus fragmented over Iraq. Divisions over Afghanistan, Libya and Syria show that it has not yet been rebuilt.
I hope one day it can be recaptured without a repeat of the appalling tragedy that first brought it into being. American drones hovering over Pakistan's northern areas are programmed to work with the same logic: guilty until proven dead. When United States decided to outsource part of its "war of terror" to Pakistan's military establishment, it effectively sealed the fate of democracy in the country for a decade. When George W Bush embraced General Pervez Musharraf he was doing exactly what his predecessors had done when they propped up another military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq , to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
We all know how that turned out. Taliban fighters are mujahideen's orphaned children, and they believe that American innocence is nothing but a well-rehearsed pose. Even the Taliban's victims concur. But those bombs fell on Pakistan. And when they didn't fall from the sky, they blew up in mosques and bazaars.
Pakistanis are too poor to go and seek treatment for post traumatic stress disorder. They also realise that the trauma is far from over. When army generals and their cheerleaders talk about Afghanistan's end game people see a series of random slaughters across their land. There is no dearth of western academic sneering at bewildered Pakistanis and telling them that they brought it upon themselves.
Al-Qaida has been a non-factor in the Arab spring. The inspiring protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere are uninterested in taking their region or their religion back in time, as Bin Laden advocated.
As they push autocratic leaders to the side, they seek a political state close to democracy, certainly not a Caliphate. The protesters, connected to the internet and the modern world, don't define themselves as being separate.
They see the gap in political, economic and social development that exists with the rest of the world and want better. They want opportunity, within a religious framework that is not yet fully defined, but open to debate, not closed by dogma.
Over the past decade, international co-operation and co-ordinated action have reduced, if not eliminated the threat. Networks that engage in or support violent extremism are under pressure, but they remain dangerous. From Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan and the Maghreb, these groups could take advantage of chaos or disillusionment if the ongoing Arab transition fails to deliver real results. It is politically tempting after Bin Laden's demise to declare victory, but the job is not done.
Building up a global immune system to fight this disease will take more than a decade. It will take a generation. The twin towers collapsed oceans and miles away from Afghanistan — at that time a country that looked like a graveyard, whose people were still suffering from war, discrimination and humiliation.
In , a small battery-run radio was the only means of communication in most of the country. Many Afghans felt that the US attack may mark the beginning of the end of the horror we were experiencing. Many felt good may come from what the United States had experienced, not because they are sadistic, or take pleasure in the death of others, but simply because they thought that the world powers will only understand our suffering if they experience it themselves.
Hundreds and thousands of Afghan once again had to flee their homes, as they feared being hit by US bombs. As terrorists and all who collaborated with them were targeted, the fear of B52 war planes persuaded many warlord commanders to shave or shorten their beards and dress like democrats in black suits — but as we have subsequently seen, many of them remained the same on the inside. First bombs and then political settlements followed the events. In Bonn, Germany, most of the active Afghan actors gathered to agree on power sharing and the only two groups who felt unrepresented there later became the ones who cause most of the troubles.
Ten years on, it would be unrealistic to ignore the tremendous level of progress that Afghanistan has made thanks partly to the international community and partly to the determination of Afghans themselves, who chose to work rebuilding and recreating Afghanistan again. From paved roads to girls going to school, to historical record-breaking media development, there have been positive developments.
However, the war — never the choice of the Afghan people — has done great harm to our people for all sorts of different local, national, regional and international reasons. Widespread corruption, the massive arming of militias, the fuelling of war by neighbouring countries, the civilian losses and night raids and deterioration of security have all undermined our children's education, out women's ability to work, our ability to provide basic social services to the neediest part of population.
Overwhelming dependency on foreign aid is still a challenge for Afghan people who would like to make their country stand on its own feet and live life peacefully. Within an hour of the second plane striking the twin towers in New York I was filing a piece for the Guardian. What I wrote was widely criticised at the time by kneejerk, laptop warriors because, while placing the blame for the atrocity squarely on the Bin Laden-inspired Salafists who turned out indeed to be the culprits , I argued that the planes didn't come out of a clear blue sky but emerged from the swamp of hatred the west had sown over many years.
I drew attention to our double standards and the injustice we had perpetrated and facilitated throughout the Muslim world.
I identified — in the article, and in a speech a few days later when the House was recalled — our role in the Palestinian catastrophe and the propping up of the dictators who ruled almost all of the Muslim world as being the twin reasons that some enraged Muslims were being drawn to Bin Laden.
I argued that for as long as Muslim blood and freedoms were regarded more cheaply and more dispensable than the west's own wellbeing we would face a deepening confrontation with the near 2 billion-strong Muslim world. And we have. I underestimated the extent to which our own people would rise up against the failure of western policy towards the east, and also the damage that this and the subsequent militarised mendacity would do to the whole credibility of governance in countries such as our own and the United States.
Now scarcely anyone believes the state whatever it says, on terrorism, war, freedom of information, climate change, even when the governments are telling the truth.
It is the final vindication of the great Claud Cockburn's famous dictum "believe nothing until it has been officially denied". It's tempting to think that the aftermath of September 11 was felt largely Out There: in Washington, say, or Kabul. Places like Norway. Or Britain. Hours before he began his killing spree this summer Anders Behring Breivik posted a 1,page manifesto. He claimed to be waging war on "Islamic imperialism" and his supposed "martydom operation" was against an Islamic civilisation rolling across western soil.
Breivik and other neo-Nazis used to assert racial superiority; now they claim an existential threat from Islamic culture. For proof they point to Osama or to home-grown terrorists. This is the argument pushed by the English Defence League , who so impressed the Norwegian gunman. As academic Matt Goodwin points out, the EDL bases its arguments not around the BNP staple of white supremacy but "the more socially acceptable issue of culture". They don't hate Muslims for their colour, but their beliefs — although on a dark night in Luton after a fascist march you'd struggle to discern the difference.
Nowadays, former ministers to Silvio Berlusconi justify Breivik's ideas as "in defence of western civilisation". And in this year's Munich speech, David Cameron attacked "Islamist extremism" and "state multiculturalism" before laying down the most blandly toxic of lines: "Let us engage groups that share our aspirations.
All the better, after all, to convince young Muslims across the world that America was really at war with Islam and that they should heed al-Qaida's call to come to the defence of their faith. Osama bin Laden must have been thrilled by the wars launched against Afghanistan and Iraq, and the opportunities this presented to them. What the turmoil of the past 10 years have served to emphasise is the need to be vigilant about the power exercised by our governments, and to work to ensure that the human rights of all people — Muslim or otherwise — are properly safeguarded.
It is that between states and statelessness or, to put it another way, between states and borderless or globalised phenomena. Al-Qaida transcended borders. It has succeeded in starting a global movement, with almost no structure, few funds and virtually no hierarchy. Groups and individuals have affiliated to it in almost all regions, and including the US and UK. There are no membership requirements, save shared belief and a willingness to kill. Apart from this last quality, al-Qaida represents a new form of political organisation in the 21st century: stateless, self-organised, dynamic not fixed or institutionalised.
Al-Qaida is a particularly nasty variant, but this kind of organisation, or rather movement, will eventually become the norm. In response, states have tried to pretend that we still live in a world where states matter most of all, and organise the world. Neither invasion has quelled terrorism. They may have exacerbated it, if the head of MI5 is to be believed. They launched vastly expensive wars, in money and lives. And they have failed.
We now confront a war without end, with our privacy and sense of safety permanently compromised.
Three of the planes struck their targets; the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. In a single day, these deliberate acts of mass murder. September 11 attacks, also called 9/11 attacks, series of airline hijackings and Three of the four plotters who would pilot the hijacked planes on September
On September 11, , 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. On September 11, , at a. The impact left a gaping, burning hole near the 80th floor of the story skyscraper, instantly killing hundreds of people and trapping hundreds more in higher floors. As the evacuation of the tower and its twin got underway, television cameras broadcasted live images of what initially appeared to be a freak accident. Then, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing —United Airlines Flight —appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor.
On Tuesday, September 11, , terrorists linked to al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes. Two were flown into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to overpower the hijackers.
The nation is still working to move past the tragedy, and to effectively combat the techniques and ideology of terrorism that seeks to kill and maim as many people as possible. These photos tell the story of what happened that morning, much of which was captured on live television to a shocked nation. Business Insider logo The words "Business Insider".
Sample Essay on 9/11 World Trade Center Attacks
Thirteen years to the day after the terrorism attacks downed four passenger aircraft and slaughtered nearly 3, people, it is hard not to conclude that the terrorists have won. And that's not just because another president went on television last night to give another speech about another crisis that requires America to fight another amorphous terrorist group that poses another existential threat to our way of life. We've lost. You and me, business travelers everywhere and civilized human beings from Maine to California, from London to Timbuktu, from northwest China to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The goal of a terrorist is to make us fear living our everyday lives.
Teaching About 9/11
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the September 11 attacks and their consequences:. On that Tuesday morning, 19 terrorists from the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger jets. The fourth jet, United Airlines Flight 93 , crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania , after passengers attempted to take control before it could reach the hijacker's intended target in Washington, D. Effects have also been seen in literature, film, and popular culture. On the morning of September 11, , 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners, intentionally crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York City. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon. The fourth plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3, victims and the 19 hijackers died in the attacks.
There is something almost magical about New York as summer turns to fall. The changing of the seasons brings a spirit of renewal.
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Essays on 9/11
On the morning of September 11, , four airliners were hijacked by members of al-Qaeda who aimed to carry out suicide attacks against important targets in the United States. Of the four planes, one struck the Pentagon, one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, and the two remaining planes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York City. Claiming almost three thousand lives, this event gave birth to a war and brought about everyday sociological changes for Americans. If you need help with writing or editing, consider working with a writer from Ultius. We have many advanced writer selection options to connect you with the expert you need. The World Trade Center was a commercial complex in Manhattan spanning over sixteen acres and containing a large plaza, seven buildings, and an underground shopping mall connecting them. In fact, in , there was an attack in which explosives were detonated in a car parked beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring thousands. The group targeting the World Trade Center both in and in was al-Qaeda, an Islam extremist terrorist system started by Osama bin Laden. With franchise operations in at least sixteen other countries McCormick , al-Qaeda seeks to overthrow Middle-Eastern governments or other places with strong Muslim representation that do not force religiously-sanctioned social and political order. On September 11, , four planes were headed for California when they were hijacked by members of al-Qaeda aboard the plane. The first was an American Airlines Boeing leaving from Boston. The plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at in the morning, leaving a smoking, fiery hole between the ninety third and ninety ninth floors Schmemann. The impact killed hundreds of people and trapped hundred more in the floors above. People trapped by the damage and flames leaped off the side of the building to their deaths, desperate to escape Weinberg. Both buildings collapsed and severely damaged five other buildings in the World Trade Center complex.
9/11 Is History Now. Here's How American Kids Are Learning About It in Class
No single figure since the second world war has made so profound an impact on world events as Osama bin Laden. It was a brief moment of American moral supremacy. Yet by launching armed aggression, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq, America wholly squandered this gain. The aggression led to a tide of anti-Americanism and surge of support for fanatical Islamism across the Muslim world. The wars cost tens of thousands of lives and caused mass destruction. The billions of dollars expended on them was financed largely from borrowing, which in turn has destabilised the world economy. He saw widespread hostility towards the west and its aggressive behaviour in the Muslim world. Civil liberties were curbed and governments reverted to cold war paranoia. America was again the great Satan.
