a crazy end to a very eventful week (month)

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/05/2011522132275789.html

I've spent the evening preparing for a short trip abroad tomorrow, and tonight, I'm thinking about what it means to be an American. It's been ten years - ten years - since the September 11th attacks. We don't know what this means yet, and only time will tell how the implications will play out, but tonight, I'm thankful to those who give their lives to make ours safer.

World Trade Center site, New York City.

From The World Is Flat:

The Arab-Muslim world is a vast, diverse civilization, encompassing over one billion people and stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and from Nigeria all the way to the suburbs of London. It is very dangerous to generalize about such a complex religious community, made up of so many different ethnicities and nationalities. [...] The question I want to explore is: What produced this violent Islamist fringe, and why has it found so much passive support in the Arab-Muslim world today- even though, I am convinced, the vast majority there do not share the violent agenda of these groups or their apocalyptic visions?

When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness that has produced Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. They do not see, and do not want to see, the openness - the freedom of thought and inquiry - that has made us powerful, the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West's economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to chance. And the fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change.