Terrorist Attack Sad Quotes

It is not a question of whether France will be attacked by terrorists again but only a question of when and where. It is a sad fact that more lives will be lost to the fires of extremism. Regrettably, this is what it means to be a citizen of Europe in the twenty-first century. - French president

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

Chastened by the searing experience of Indochina, American presidents refrained from committing the country to ambitious foreign adventures in the last quarter of the twentieth century, for the most part. Sadly, in the emotionally supercharged wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Washington forgot this hard-won lesson, and tried to create pro-Western states in both Afghanistan and Iraq, countries US policy makers knew even less about than their predecessors knew about Vietnam. Those war have not had as dramatic an impact on American society as Vietnam, but they, too, were failed crusades, and for many of the same reasons that obtained in Indochina.

They concluded that the predominant emotion was anger and that, compared to words like sadness or fear, expressions of aggression increased in the days following the terrorist attacks. This was one proof of the theory that violence leads to more violence.

Thanks to the September 11 thing that happened that fall, the posters now were stapled on top of each other, and the recruiters likewise. Let’s go kick terrorist ass, they all said, and many answered the call. Why not. Lured by the promise of one paying job at least, between high school and death. Because the attack itself didn’t seem quite real. To us, skyscrapers are just TV, so watching two of them fall down, over and over, looked like the same movie effects of any other we’d seen. We knew people died. We had our assembly, flags down, sad and everything. I’d had nightmares of falling like that from on high. I know it was real buildings. And they still have lots more standing in those cities, so I guess that’s a worry. Here, if any terrorists came flying over, they’d look down on trashed-out mine craters and blown-up mountains and say, “Keep going. This place already got taken out.” It was hard to see how September 11 was my fight.