United, Stood As 9/11 Responders Toiled and Families Searched
5.55am DC and NYC
After around 39 hours in Hanoi, and 2.5 days in Delhi since Friday for G20 Summit, Air Force One has left Vietnam and is heading for Anchorage Alaska, where Biden will join service members at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. For the 1st time, President of the United States abroad, not on U.S. soil during the 9/11 annual commemoration, at least not fully 1-day in U.S. soil.
New York City had cordoned off blocks of Lower Manhattan, and the crowd in the streets around us seemed to number in the thousands. We saw people wave American flags, Yankees caps, and hand-lettered signs: "OUR HEROES," "WE WILL NEVER FORGET," and "I LOVE NEW YORK MORE THAN EVER."
Another kind of crowd surrounded us, too. They were faces on sheets of paper, taped up on storefronts and streetlamps, of people shown in photos from weddings, birthday parties and summer barbecues, on signs that asked, "Have you seen this person? She is my wife" or "He is our father" or, "She is our neighbor," all of them adding, "Last seen, morning of September 11, 2001. Please call. Please help."
Yankee keep a dazzling diversity of humanity — a living artwork of New York, of America, brought together in pain, pride and often prayer, on a street near where the city had an aching, smoking wound.
Days ago, in a historic first, the Islamic call to prayer, known as the adhan, resonated through the loudspeaker of one of New York's largest mosques on Friday.
Many Muslims attending Friday prayers at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York (ICCNY) in Manhattan recorded the moments with their mobile phones.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams announced that New York City will permit the adhan to be broadcast at designated times every Friday and during the holy month of Ramadan.
"For too long, there has been confusion about which communities were not allowed to amplify their calls to prayer," Adams said at a news conference attended by representatives from various mosque associations and Muslim foundations.
"Today, we are cutting red tape and saying clearly that mosques and houses of worship are free to amplify their call to prayer on Fridays and during Ramadan without a permit necessary," he added.
Under the new guidance, a mosque or masjid can broadcast adhan every Friday between 12.30 p.m. and 1.30 p.m. as well as before the fast-breaking meal, of iftar, every evening during the fasting month of Ramadan.
Leaders from the Muslim community expressed gratitude to the mayor and other officials.
Trucks would pull up to the barricades, carrying workers in dark, heavy emergency gear, and in the blue helmets of police, black helmets of firefighters, the yellow, white and silver helmets of street, sanitation, and construction crews.
The crowds cheered and clapped as they rolled into ground zero to search for those few who might still be alive and to dig out, with reverent and respectful hands, those many more who were now among the wreckage that smoldered there.
And when their trucks rolled out, after 10 and 12 hours of grueling work in a nightmare landscape, their faces looked dark, soiled and drawn. People called out, "thank you," and "bless you."
The 9/11 hijackers might have thought they would strike at the heart of America's financial and military power. In Delhi - G20 Summit, andshake by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US President Joe Biden and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Muhammed Bin Salman, at PGII & India Middle East Europe connectivity corridor launch event, after the president sustained a backlash last year for fist-bumping the crown prince, who U.S. intelligence believes ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Multiple wars of aggression waged by the U.S. dwarfed the casualties of the 911 attacks on New York in 2001. Brown University study shows "4.5-4.7 million and counting" deaths, direct and indirect, from these 21st century wars.
"78% of [Arabs] believe that the biggest source of threat and instability in the region is the US", which is "no coincidence" given that "the US [spent] $5-7 trillion on wars that have resulted in the death of millions of Arabs and Muslims", latest survey by AL JAZEERA.
Then, gigantic desire by PIF (Saudi’s SWF Public Investment Fund) shake the golf business. The PGA's Revolutionary Defense of Saudi Arabia. Merger LIV / PGA, awkwardly, same minutes when Secretary of State Blinken meeting (2 hours 20 minutes) with Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) in Jeddah.
Whether it's NFL players kneeling to protest racial inequality, or the PGA selling itself to a murderous Saudi despot, both sports leagues have made some controversial political statements. All respect to the vast majority of golfers on the tour for opposing LIV all along. And really all respect to athletes on both the PGA and NFL for being much more aware and thoughtful than athletes are portrayed as being. How many of the liberals complaining about the golf merger even know what the L in LIV stands for?
The leaders’ latest interaction came in New Delhi, India, as they announced their respective countries’ participation in an international infrastructure and economic partnership to promote the new India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.
“This is a game-changing regional investment,” Biden said at the event, as he thanked the world leaders flanking him. Biden is expected to meet with bin Salman during the G20 summit, which runs through Sunday.
Khashoggi was an opinion journalist for the Post who often wrote columns critical of the Saudi government. In 2018, after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, he was found dismembered. The CIA, under the Trump administration, released a report that found bin Salman ordered the killing.
Following Biden’s July 2022 meeting with MBS at Al Salam Royal Palace in Jeddah, which the president was partly using to raise U.S. energy priorities, Biden laughed off a reporter’s question about the fist-bump greeting between them.
Fred Ryan, The Washington Post’s publisher at the time, called the interaction “shameful.”
The continuing relationship between the two leaders has drawn fire from critics of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, which includes heavy religious restrictions, state-sanctioned torture and media repression.
Saudi Arabia and Russia both extended voluntary cuts to oil production through the end of the year on Tuesday, which drove a sharp spike in oil barrel prices to a peak not seen since last November. That tension could play into the 2024 U.S. presidential election if the cuts continue, given that energy policy and oil prices have been a dominant theme in political attacks of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy.
At the G20 event, Biden and bin Salman sat alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The economic partnership is seen as a counterweight to a Chinese-led infrastructure project, the New Silk Road, which stretches across Europe, Africa and Asia. Li Qiang, China’s premier and the country’s emissary at the summit, was not part of the G20 event.
“We aim to usher in a new era of connectivity with a railway, linked through ports connecting Europe, the Middle East, and Asia,” the White House said in a release. “The United States underscores our unwavering commitment to pursuing transformative regional investments and working to build out this corridor together with our partners.”
In time, the country's fissures opened back up and deepened. Those moments in which so many saw America's astounding diversity and unity as an answer to those who took the twin towers from the skyline.
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