I was teaching a class of 10-year-olds in a Jewish school in London on 9/11. The coverage broke in London in the afternoon just as school was finishing up. Like everyone I remember where I was and what I was doing. School of course had only just started a week or so ago after the summer break, and one thing that sticks in mind even now is that one boy in my class told us in class on the morning of the 10th that he and his family had visited the World Trade Centre just ten days previously.
Now twenty five years have passed. I don’t know what has happened to that boy, or any of those fresh-faced optimistic children, who on that day had the horrors of the adult world encroach inescapably in to their lives. They will all be in their mid-thirties, with families of their own, having now taken on the cares and worries of the adult world. Some still here in London, some likely in Israel, who knows maybe even some in New York.
9/11 was a fracture in our lives, in our history. One week families looking out of the “Top of the World Observation Deck” in the South Tower, and the next everything gone. A strange metaphor for the loss of that naïve belief the world had in the 90s – in the wake of the end of the Cold War – that things were getting better, that somehow everything would be OK.
Noone in a school classroom today remembers that shock. They say that for many kids the reruns on the media in the last few weeks have been the first time they have seen or heard of what happened. But none of them will have had a classmate who was looking out from the South Tower the week before. None of them will remember where they were when they first heard the news.
Whether we were fresh faced kids or adults, we all lost the innocence of a generation in those days, and we all have a responsibility to remember. To remember what happened and to remember why. To remember that the twisted ideas of Islamism, and those evil people who acted on them, sought the destruction of our innocence and so much more. To remember that they hoped to end the rights and liberties of the free world. To end America’s role as the hope of the world. To end our way of life. It is for us to remember that they just as much aimed to destroy the Jews and the Jewish state.
Those of who stand for liberty and democracy also need to remember that even in the days after so many joined the terrorists in their hate. I read of an NHS doctor recalling how he went in the work the weeks after and that some of his colleagues were energized and happy by what had happened. I remember the celebrations in Ramallah, and the conspiracy theories about Israel. And I remember a few years later, a senior academic colleague, when I had moved into higher education, telling us in a seminar how so many in the streets of the “Global South” were ambivalent about the events of 9/11 and not sure who to blame. Oh yes, that innocence of the 1990s was well and truly extinguished as progressive voices delighted in turning truth into falsity and light into dark. And the dark drum roll of their unforgiving voices has only grown louder since, culminating in their triumphant wave of hate following October 7th.
But they cannot stop us remembering. Remembering the North Tower. The South Tower. The dead of the Pentagon. The irredeemable tragedy of the scorched ground where United 93 came down. We remember.
My class of 2001 have gone on to live their lives, their young faces dimly remembered in my mind. Such is the way of the world. But somewhere in my memories and perhaps theirs too is that picture of one of their friends telling us, shockingly, of the world as it was, as they looked out with their family from the top of the Twin Towers. The world before the evil of Islamist terrorism came upon us, rooted, as the 9/11 Commission said, in Bin Laden’s extreme intolerance drawn from Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, with which there is no common ground – not even respect for life – on which to begin a dialogue. The world before ISIS and Hamas and the pain and suffering they have wreaked on the innocent.
That view of the panorama of New York that my 10-year-old pupil saw in the summer holiday of 2001 has gone forever. I remember the awkward silence when he told us on September 10th 2001 about his trip up the South Tower. Perhaps the reason that neither I or his classmates knew what to say was that somehow we realised, but could not yet fully grasp, the enormity of what we had lost. That the world truly would not be the same again. For any of us. But still, we can remember. We can remember what we lost and the evil Islamist terrorists who were responsible, and their supporters in the Islamist world and in the West. And we can remember, in London, in New York, and Jerusalem, to fight for liberty and freedom. Always to fight.
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Joseph Mintz was a primary teacher at Jewish and non-Jewish schools in London in the 1990s and early 2000s. He moved on in 2005 to work in higher education and is now professor of inclusive education at University College London.
