Legal Commentary

Citizens Of The World

By Big Tent Democrat

In response to Byron York's peeve at an Obama phrasing ("The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil"), Meteor Blades writes:

York's take on this not only begrudges other countries their loss, but also renders that loss a provincial, American loss. Obama is attempting, years after the fact, to remind the world of the opposite, of the universal horror of that day and the way that people from every corner of the globe - from France to Iran - stood in solidarity with New York and Washington on September 11. And, of course, by implication, how attitudes like York's within the administration squandered that sense of solidarity.

Meteor Blades and Obama speak for me here. More . .

Obama was invoking this type of thinking from the front page of Le Monde on September 12, 2001:

We Are All Americans

Jean-Marie Colombani, Le Monde (liberal), Paris, France, Sept. 12, 2001.

In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin. Indeed, just as in the gravest moments of our own history, how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity? How can we not be struck at the same time by this observation: The new century has come a long way.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 24, 2008 (boomark / email).