16 September 2001

Everybody remembers where they were when JFK was assassinated: That’s what they say. I suspect that the same will be said of the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the attack on the Pentagon on Tuesday 11th September 2001.

It was around 2.00pm here in England when it happened: I was at work, standing outside the office smoking a cigarette. I local man, a stranger, passed by and said "You seen the news?" "No," I replied. "Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Centre." Yeah right, was my initial reaction; you mad yokel.

Upon returning to my desk the word was already circulating around the office. People were wandering about saying, "Have you heard…?" No way… surely, I thought. I sat at my workstation and tried to log on to the BBC website: Cannot find server. I tried the Independent Television News (ITN) website… Cannot find server. CNN, ABC News, Fox News… I tried them all but could not access any of them. I eventually managed to get onto an Australian news service… and there it was: a photograph of the World Trade Centre in flames with the second aircraft just entering the right hand side of the frame. I read in disbelief about the two planes smashing into the twin towers in New York and of the third plane colliding with the Pentagon.

"Jesus," said a colleague from across the room: he had managed to download the streamed video of the second plane striking the Trade Centre. People stood around his monitor watching. "Fucking hell…," was what most people said as the video clip played over and over again. We all just looked at each other and then back at the screen. It was like watching some Hollywood action movie. It did not seem real.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon people could talk of little else as more details of the attack began to trickle in: The planes had been hijacked… they were all commercial flights… it was terrorists. And then the news that the two towers had collapsed: the World Trade Centre no longer existed, the fourth tallest building in the world no longer existed. The telephones were not ringing, no customers were placing orders. I tried to do some work: I needed to send out enquiries to software publishers to see if they wanted my company to act as a reseller for their products. I looked down my list of potential suppliers. They were all based in America. I sent no enquiries.

That evening the television schedules were unsurprisingly full of coverage on the disaster. As the hours passed by, more and more footage arrived: The plane ploughing into the skyscraper, the towers collapsing and – an image I found especially surreal – huge clouds of dust and ash rolling down the wrecked streets of Manhattan.

Despite seeing the video footage over and over again the reality of the day’s events had still not sunk in, had not registered. Perhaps it was the scale of the destruction, the size of the thing, that made it difficult to comprehend. We in the United Kingdom have suffered at the hands of terrorists, mostly related to the Northern Ireland troubles: we had the Lockerbie disaster, the Omagh bombing, the Brighton hotel bombing where the government of the day were holding their annual conference, car-bombs, shootings, embassy sieges… Many innocent people have been caught in the crossfire between the terrorists and the government over the years in this country but never so many people at once and on such an unprecedented scale. What happened in New York and Washington on that Tuesday morning in September just seemed too big to comprehend, like trying to visualise infinity.

As I followed the media coverage in the days that followed the disaster, I found myself utterly preoccupied with the attacks. I could not help but dwell on the number of fatalities, currently unknown, but surely to be in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands. I could not help but imagine what it must have been like for those trapped in the towers after the collisions and then when the towers collapsed… I could not concentrate at work. I would constantly drift off into these morbid daydreams picturing the people running from the tumbling steel and concrete or the passengers on the hijacked aeroplanes calling their loved ones moments before the impact. I tried to focus on requests from customers for pricing and product information but all I could think was who cares? I tried to hunt down products on the Internet but instead found myself searching for the latest news reports from New York.

By Thursday (13th August) the onus of my preoccupation had shifted from the human cost of the attacks to the political and social ramifications. By this time the Saudi millionaire renegade, Osama bin Laden, and his Al-Qa’ida organisation had been declared to be the prime suspects. The hijackers of the aeroplanes had been confirmed to have been Arab militants. Whichever organisation had been responsible for the attacks, it was clear that it was connected with the United States’ and her allies’ foreign policies in the Middle-East.

My first thought was I would hate to be a Muslim in America right now. Arabic shop owners have already had angry Americans berating them in their shops, shouting "You guys did it!" and incidents of violence against Arab-American taxi drivers in New York have been reported. Sadly, it is inevitable that a minority will take out their shock and anger against innocent Muslims, Muslims who are as shocked and angered by Tuesday’s attack as anyone; it is disheartening for anybody to see such an atrocity committed in the name of their own religion. Bin Laden has stated that he is merely doing the work of Allah by killing those who not only fail to follow Islam but who also support those who seek to destroy Islam. They see western governments with America at the helm supporting the Jewish Israeli government, a government that has oppressed Muslims for many years; they see the Saudi royal family allowing western governments to monopolise the country’s resources such as oil when they should be working to further Muslim interests rather than sucking up to the west. These would be the same western governments, especially the US and Britain, who were only too pleased to train, arm and finance the mojahedin during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan; again, more for their own business and geopolitical interests than out of support for the Muslim nation.

I do not mention these examples of the West’s questionable policies in the Middle-East in order to suggest that America somehow deserved to be attacked. On the contrary: nobody deserves to be attacked in this way and there is simply no justification for the mass slaughter of thousands of civilians in one fell swoop. But what right do I have to comment on these events at all? I am not American, I had no family or friends in New York. I am no expert on Middle-Eastern politics. I am not a politician or an academic. I am just a moderately educated man of no influence or power just trying to earn a living and create an acceptable life for myself; and so too were most of the fifty thousand people who used to work in the World Trade Centre. They were people just trying to do their jobs to earn their wages so that they could live and that is why I and many others like me around the world felt so affected by this devastating crime. It showed us that the problems and violence that occur in countries many miles from home are not just the responsibility of our politicians, they are the responsibility of us all. We need to take more interest in how our politicians and those in business behave towards other nations, not just geographically speaking but also ideologically. The events in America should remind us that ours is not the only ideology in the world and is not necessarily the only "correct" ideology that we should arrogantly try to enforce onto others. Certainly, those that deny an individual’s or a nation’s basic human rights should be sought out and punished, but the western democracies need to find a way to co-exist with those who follow a different path and different beliefs.

America has always been an insular nation in love with its perceived idea of what it stands for. On the 11th September Americans learned that they do not live in isolation from the rest of the world and that their political and commercial actions throughout the world can have consequences on their own soil. Much to its surprise, America learned that it is not untouchable.

As a nation they now need to grieve for the dead, for the people they loved who were mercilessly taken from them. The American government has a difficult time ahead, hunting out those responsible and punishing them without resorting to knee-jerk outbursts of revenge that could merely aggravate the larger problems rather than solving them. But at some time in the future, once the pain and the anger of this unprecedented attack has began to heal, America and its western allies will have to think again about what they stand for and how they conduct themselves amongst their neighbours. The destruction of the World Trade Centre has shown us how small the world has become and how the problems between nations many miles away can all too easily spill over onto our own doorstep. It has also shown us that the governments of the world need to stop simply working for their own nations’ interests but to also consider the interests of the world as a whole. The western democracies can no longer afford to trample over their less affluent neighbours because it only takes a handful of men with pocket knives, men of will and unwavering belief in what they are doing, to commit another atrocity like the one we all witnessed in New York on our televisions. It is our responsibility to make sure that our governments do this because, as we have all witnessed, we are all touchable.