Facebook’s September 11th attacks story is not only factually inaccurate, but on the 15th anniversary of the attacks, it is likely to be seen as extremely disrespectful to the memory of the almost 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Pentagon, and the men and women who fought their killers and put the plane down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
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The age of terror had begun. The names of the victims will be read and bells ring in their memory.
Pool/Getty Images News/Getty ImagesNEW YORK, NY – MAY 15: The National September 11 Memorial Museum stands beyond the north reflecting pool during the opening ceremony for the museum at ground zero May 15, 2014 in New York City.
The “Tribute in Light” memorial consisting of two shafts of light to represent the World Trade Center Twin Towers is lit on March 11, 2002, 6 months after the terror attack destroyed the towers.
“We’re still the America of heroes who ran into harm’s way; of ordinary folks who took down the hijackers; of families who turned their pain into hope”, he said in his weekly radio address.
The fact that we are beginning to see things like this occur – something that would have been unthinkable following the attacks – is perhaps an indication that we need to remind each other of how that day affected us personally and our country collectively. “Everyone felt it. Everyone suffered”. Some of these men ascended stairs in the crumbling World Trade Center towers even as evacuees fled past them.
William Ahearn, co-owner of Suspenders Bar in New York City, remembers the first responders who made the spot their second home during recovery efforts at Ground Zero.
Around the Trade Center, lower Manhattan now has dozens of new hotels and eateries, 60,000 more residents and ever-more visitors than before 9/11. The Washington Post noted that Facebook originally replaced the Daily Star piece with another story; that suggests people were talking about other 9/11-related stories besides the Daily Star’s. My journey back to my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan shared some commonalities with the 2015 film, “The Walk”, about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk across “the void” of the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. The financial services firm lost 658 employees that day. “Fifteen years into this fight, the threat has evolved”. The hole is still there.
We woke up that September morning blissfully ignorant of what that awful day would bring. He said he worked this summer with children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were massacred in 2012.
D’Amadeo blew a kiss and looked to the sky. A handful of courageous passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth airliner and fought the terrorists, ultimately crashing the jet into a field in western Pennsylvania before it could turn into another guided missile.
We can recall first learning the news of a plane crashing into one of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, then one into the other tower a short time later.
But many dignitaries attended, including Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
After going to her daughter’s nearby apartment, Clinton left shortly before noon and said, “I’m feeling great”. We wonder how their lives might have unfolded, how their dreams might have taken shape.
In Washington on Friday, members of the U.S. House of Representatives gathered on the exterior steps to the chamber for a remembrance ceremony and sang God Bless America. “And yet you, the survivors and families of 9/11, your steadfast love and faithfulness has been an inspiration to me and to our entire country”.
Ahead of the anniversary, President Obama said it was important to remember America’s “core values”.
Obama said at a Pentagon memorial service that he is inspired by the resilience of the victims’ families.
At the Pentagon, 184 people were killed when hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building.
The Al-Qaeda attacks killed 2,753 people in NY, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington D.C and 40 on Flight 93 – which had also been headed toward the United States capital until passengers and crew staged a rebellion and the hijackers crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania.
After the September 11 Commemoration Ceremony, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo will join more than 450 motorcycle riders participating in the 9/11 Memorial Motorcycle Ride at a lunch in New York City.
Then US president George W. Bush, in Sarasota, Florida, calls the blasts “an apparent terrorist attack”.
History tells us that tyrants and bullies respond only to force, which is why the years of weakness have emboldened our enemies.
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“Our patchwork heritage is not a weakness”, he said. Our commitment to that freedom and to one another, in some ways, was strengthened that day. Some are drawn there to pause and reflect, others to satisfy a morbid fascination with the site of the worst attack on USA soil since Pearl Harbour was bombed in 1941.
