An interesting article from an English newspaper:

This from Tony Parsons of the Daily Mirror (a notoriously left-wing daily).

Tony Parsons, Daily Mirror, September 11, 2002

One year ago, the world witnesed a unique kind of broadcasting, the mass murder of thousands, live on television. As a lesson in the pitiless cruelty of the human race, September 11 was up there with Pol Pot's Mouintain of Skulls in Cambodia, or the skeletal bodies stacked like garbage in the Nazi concentration camps. An unspeakable act so cruel, so calculated, and so utterly merciless that surely the world would agree, on one thing, nobody deserves this fate.

Surely there could be a consensus: The victimes were truly innocent, the perpetrators truly evil. But to the world's erternal shame, 9/11 is increasingly seen as America's comeuppance. Incredibly, anti-Americanism has increased over the last year. There has always been a simmering resentment to the USA in this country; too loud, too rich, too full of themselves, and so much happier than Europeans- but it has become an epidemic. And it seems incredible to me. More than that, it turns my stomach.

America is this country's greatest friend and our staunchest ally. We are bonded to the US by culture, language, and blood. Have all of you forgotten??

A little over half a century ago, around half a million Americans died for our freedoms, as well as their own. Have we forgotten so soon? And exactly a year ago, thousands of ordinary men, women and children- not just Americans, but from dozens of countries, were butchered by a small group of religious finatics! Are we so quick to betray them? What touched the heart about those who died in the Twin Towers and on the planes, was that we recognized them.

Young fathers and mothers, somebody's son and somebody's daughter, husbands, wives, and children, some yet unborn. And these people brought it on themselves? Their nation is to blame for thir meticulously planned slaughter?? These days you don't have to be some dust-incrusted nut job in Kabul or Karachi or Finsbury Park, to see America as the Great Satan. The anti-American alliance is made up of the self loathing liberals who blame America for every ill in the Third World, and conservatives suffering from power envy, bitter that the world's only super power can do what it likes without having to ask for permission.

The truth is that America has behaved with enormous restraint since September 11. Remember, remember - Remember the gut-wrenching tapes of weeping men phoning their wives to say, "I love you," just before they were burned alive. Remember those people jumping to their deaths from the top of burning skyscrapers. Remember the hundreds of firemen buried alive. Remember the smiling face of that beuatiful ittle girl who was on one of the planes with her mum.

Remember, remember- And realize that America has never retaliated for 9/11 in anything like the way it could have. So a few al-Qaeda tourists got locked up without a trial in Camp x-Ray? Pass the Kleenex...So some Afghan wedding receptions were shot up after they merrily fired their semiautomatics in the sky full of American planes? A shame, but maybe next time, they should stick to confetty.

[Remainder in next post due to size contstraints...]