James Carroll: ‘Ground Zero Is A Holy Place, But Bush Is The One Who Desecrates It’ By Solomon

26 Sep, 2007 by John Hawkins

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Oh wow, just when you think you’ve read it all from the Globe’s James Carroll, he goes one step further. Now it’s George W. Bush’s fault that Iran isn’t with us any more. That’s right, Iran, because everyone knows their regime’s sincere empathy for us after 9/11 had them supporting us until the president overstepped: N.Y. site transcends boundaries

…The scorched acreage at what was quickly dubbed “Ground Zero” was, at first, a wound inflicted on the human family. All over the globe, especially through that constantly rebroadcast television footage, people experienced what had happened in New York as happening to them. One fact long gone down the memory hole is that, when the United States launched its military campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Tehran was supportive. The old enmity had been transcended, precisely, by the hurt that Iranians, too, felt after Sept. 11. “I would also like to add,” Khatami told CNN that fall, “that the Americans were not the only ones who suffered.” In that suffering, most of the world was united.

It was George W. Bush who transformed Ground Zero from a site toward which the world looked with empathy for American pain into a hypernationalistic symbol of a singularly American victimhood. Sept. 11, 2001, became our wound alone, and New York’s ravaged precinct became a restricted preserve, as global sympathy for the United States curdled into fear of it.

What if, instead of shunting Ahmadinejad aside as one unworthy to enter the sanctuary of our national trauma, we Americans had said, “Yes – stand here with us. Look at what threatens the universal future if we do not find other ways to relate to each other than with contempt. Relive that horrible September morning with us, when the rank evil of terrorism showed itself with such clarity that the human family, decidedly including the Iranian nation, stood together against it. Let solidarity be the meaning of this place.”…

If only we’d welcome him here to hold hands and sing kumbaya… How naive can you get? Ahmadinejad isn’t coming here to learn, he’s coming to teach.

The kicker is the conclusion:

Here is George Bush’s most grievous failure: Instead of enabling his nation to reckon with the blow of Sept. 11, and move on from it, he has worsened that anguish immeasurably. Yes, Ground Zero is a holy place, but Bush is the one who desecrates it.

Meet the modern Left. The patience of Job for foreign murderers, nothing for domestic disagreements. Shame on the Globe for continuing to give column space to this unfortunate deranged man.

This content is being used with the permission of Solomonia.