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Sun. May 19, 2002

QuoteLog, 5/19

QuoteLog, 5/19 – "Eight months after Sept. 11, most children in New York seem to have bounced back and returned to rooting for the Yankees or Mets, flocking to ‘Spider-Man’ or playing in their soccer league with the same childhood zeal they showed in living their lives before Sept. 11. But many others continue to struggle to find their old bearings. Sometimes they are seemingly carefree children. Sometimes they are living children’s lives with adult worries. The scope of the problem was underscored by a recently released study conducted for the Board of Education. It concluded that roughly 200,000 of the 712,000 public school children in grades 4 through 12 were candidates for some sort of mental health intervention — at least a visit with a mental health professional — because of the lingering trauma of Sept. 11 […] Her friend and classmate, Rima Ibrahim, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said, ‘I feel like that day took away some of my innocence.’ Things that once seemed significant, like her school uniform’s being perfectly pressed, no longer do. ‘I know that my friends feel more anxious, like we always need to be worried, that we are not invincible and anything can happen to us when we least expect it,’ she wrote in an e-mail message

N. R. Kleinfield, N.Y. Times

"Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria all claim they just want Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, but anyone reading their official media, which regularly spew articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and extolling the virtues of Palestinian girls who commit suicide amid Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv, would hardly be assured that for them the only problem is the Israeli occupation — and not the Jewish people’s right to a homeland in the Middle East. And ditto-ditto the Europeans. Yes, yes, many Europeans really do just want an end to the Israeli occupation, but the anti-Semitism coming out of Europe today suggests that deep down some Europeans want a lot more: They want Mr. Sharon to commit a massacre against Palestinians, or they want to describe what he did in Jenin as a massacre, so that the Europeans can finally get the guilt of the Holocaust off their backs and be able to shout: ‘Look at these Jews, they’re worse than we were!’ I just attended an Arab media conference and was on a panel with Eric Rouleau, the Middle East correspondent of Le Monde, who said he had recently spoken to some French generals who told him that what Israel did in Jenin was worse than anything France did during the Algerian war. One million Algerians were killed in that war and two million were made homeless. So far 60 bodies have been recovered in Jenin, many of them fighters. You do the math."

Thomas Friedman, N.Y. Times

"Enemies of the United States are spreading on the Internet a gruesome piece of propaganda. It is a videotape of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered earlier this year in Pakistan. And it is being used by terrorists to recruit new soldiers for the cause. The tape is titled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl,’ and it as disturbing a piece of propaganda as you will ever see, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin. Interspersed with news clips, the video of Pearl’s final hours is a cold-blooded recruiting poster for America’s enemies, complete with Arabic subtitles. ‘The translation is in Arabic because the audience is Arabic,’ says Ali al-Ahmed, a dissident Saudi Arabian journalist, who found it on the Web a few days ago. ‘The audience for this Web site are young Saudis, college students, high school students and unemployed Saudis,’ he says. The U.S. government asked the Web site to remove the video, but it has since shown up on at least one other site […] The U.S. may be winning the war in Afghanistan, but it is losing the propaganda war in parts of the Arab world. As al-Ahmed sees it, ‘the United States is out of the game in the PR war in Saudi Arabia. They are disconnected from young Saudis. Young Saudis have nowhere to turn if they want to hear the United States’ message.’ "

CBS News

"President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News. The document, a formal National Security Presidential Directive, amounted to a ‘game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the Earth,’ one of the sources told NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski. The plan dealt with all aspects of a war against al-Qaida, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan, the sources said on condition of anonymity. In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans ‘off the shelf,’ Miklaszewski said."

NBC News