Yesterday I wrote that twenty-five years ago this Great Nation was attacked — and that almost everyone knew what was done was wrong. I also wrote that I would not spend that post on the minority who thought we deserved it.
That day is today.
Almost everyone is not everyone. A minority answered mass murder with a theory. Not grief. Not horror. A syllabus. The towers fell and they reached for the word deserved — or the softer cousins: blowback, chickens coming home to roost, consequence of American policy. Same move. The dead become a lesson. The lesson is always that America had it coming.
That is not analysis.
That is ungratefulness with footnotes.
Ungratefulness does not always storm a border or fake a ballot. Sometimes it stands inside the house — or watches from abroad — and calls the murder of your neighbors justice.
Domestically
Start at home. That is the wound that still surprises people.
On September 12, 2001 — the day after — University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill wrote an essay later famous as “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” He framed the attacks as a response to American policy. He treated Pentagon dead as military targets. Of the World Trade Center dead he wrote that they were “civilians of a sort,” then asked whether they were innocent — and answered no. He called the financial workers “little Eichmanns,” technocrats of empire who supposedly earned a penalty. He later narrowed and defended. The original move remains: rename the murdered so the murder feels like symmetry.
That is domestic ungratefulness in academic dress. Allegiance inverted. The dead of your own country become the moral problem. The murderers become the ones who “pushed back.”
Susan Sontag, in The New Yorker in the immediate aftermath, did not need Churchill’s Nazi metaphor to do related work. She rejected the framing of the attack as cowardice against civilization. She insisted it was a strike on a “self-proclaimed superpower” as “a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” She suggested that if “cowardly” applied, it might fit those who kill from the sky more than those “willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” She said the perpetrators were not cowards. Whatever else that is, it is not the posture of a steward mourning the murdered. It is the posture of a commentator who cannot let American dead be simply wronged without first putting America in the dock.
You will find softer versions across campuses and salon left circles in those weeks: not always “deserved,” often “understandable,” “inevitable,” “blowback.” The moral center moves. The murder becomes a weather report caused by Washington. The killers shrink. The victims swell into symbols of empire.
A minority. Not the country. The country bled and stood. Firefighters ran toward the fire. Ordinary people lined up to give blood. Flags went up without a branding meeting. That is the record of the many.
The minority still matters. Because minority ideas, protected and celebrated, become the thousand cuts later. Yesterday’s post was about apathy sanding the edges off the day. This post is about the people who never needed time to sand anything. They started on day one with a brief for the other side.
Remember the three A’s — they apply here without stretch.
Accountability: the men who steered planes into buildings own the mass murder. Not a spreadsheet in Manhattan. Not a voter in Ohio who never heard of a sanction regime.
Assimilation: you do not get to live under American protection while teaching that American dead are “little Eichmanns.”
Allegiance: stewardship of the house means you do not call the arson justice because you disliked the landlord’s foreign policy.
Internationally
Abroad, the picture was never one color. Most of the world condemned it. Even regimes at odds with Washington — Iran, Libya, Syria, the Taliban’s public line — issued denunciations. NATO called it war. Europe mourned. That is also the record. Do not erase it to win an argument.
Then look at the minority that did not mourn.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the clearest governmental voice of “deserved.” State outlets framed the attacks as fruit of America’s “crimes against humanity.” Iraqi television played anti-American song over footage of the towers falling. That is not a street rumor. That is a regime telling its people the murder was a harvest.
On the Palestinian street — not every Palestinian, not Arafat’s official condolence — cameras caught celebrations: cheering, candy handed out in places like Nablus, gunfire in the air in West Bank and Gaza and some Lebanese camps. Officials and militant voices reached for the same script Hamas and Islamic Jihad figures used: this is the consequence of American policy, of American injustice, of America in the region. The murdered office workers become a bill paid.
Elsewhere you got the quieter international cousin of Churchill: European and global left commentary that led with American guilt before American grief. Blowback as liturgy. The dead as proof of a thesis written years earlier.
Again: minority. The world’s majority knew what a passenger plane into a skyscraper meant.
But minority joy and minority theory are not nothing. They reveal the same moral disease at different temperatures. Domestically it wore tenure and magazines. Internationally it wore state TV and candy in the street. Same sentence underneath: you had it coming.
That sentence is the opposite of grit gratitude. Grit gratitude can criticize a policy. It cannot turn murdered nurses, traders, cooks, soldiers, and secretaries into a deserved outcome. Stewardship of a culture starts with a bright line: mass murder of civilians is wrong. Full stop. Then you argue about policy. Not the other way around.
Why this belongs on this blog
An immigrant who swears allegiance is not swearing to perfection. He is swearing not to join the chorus that cheers when the house burns. He is swearing not to teach his children that American dead are a teaching tool for anti-American sermons.
Ungratefulness has more than one face. One face never enters legally and still demands the keys. Another takes the oath as costume. Another — this one — watches the towers fall and files a brief for the killers’ “justice.”
Twenty-five years later, the country that almost entirely knew the truth still has to name the minority that did not. Not to obsess. To refuse the sanding. Yesterday: do not let the day become a punchline. Today: do not let the day become a deserved lesson.
Next we turn to the quieter domestic work — the apathy and the thousand cuts from every angle: academic, social, popular culture, media, immigration. Deliberate. Exhaustive. One cut at a time.
For now, hold this.
Almost everyone knew it was wrong.
A minority said we deserved it.
That minority was wrong.
The dead were not a metaphor.
The murder was not justice.
It starts in the spine, not on your knees.
LIVE GRATEFUL 🇺🇸
– A Grateful Immigrant
Grateful Immigrant 