On the September 11 attacks
September 11, 2001
Early this morning terrorists hijacked four separate commercial airliners, flew these planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, with one of the planes crashing in Pennsylvania.
This is the most devastating act of terrorism in the history of the world. Having spent the past several years studying the left-wing West German terrorist phenomenon of the 70s, I find it hard to draw any comparisons between the area of my study and the events of today. The enormity of death is so massive that drawing comparisons would only dishonor the victims; both from Germany and the victims of today.
I have always been ambivalent about this web site. I have not, in fact, updated it in over a year; partially a reflection of my ambivalence. I created it to provide an accurate resource for factual information about specific terrorist phenomenon in Germany in the 1970s. So much right- and left-wing rhetoric flavored the information available and I felt that there was a need to provide a more balanced source of information. But I have always been troubled by the strong, significant minority of visitors to my site who think of the Baader-Meinhof era, and terrorism as "cool."
Terrorism is not "cool," and the devastation that it wreaks is indefensible.
Perhaps more than with most people, I have the right to be indignant toward terrorism; my dad was targeted by terrorists and I could have easily spent the last three decades fatherless.
But I have always believed that my site benefits from my attempt to make the site fair and unbiased, as I believe it benefits from my attempt to refrain from much editorializing on the toll of terrorism.
Please, as you read and learn from my site, absorb the most important lesson: terrorism devastates individual lives in atrocious ways.
My thoughts and prayers are with the families, friends, and companion animals of the victims of today's terrorist attacks.
Richard Huffman
Seattle, Washington
September 11, 2001
