IRVINE, CA--Focusing primarily on the suffering of the victims of 9/11 turns our attention inward, discouraging us from looking outward to ensure the destruction of our enemies, said Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.
"Yet," Tracinski noted, "this focus inward is precisely the pattern of the mainstream media coverage of September 11 and its one-year anniversary. The media wants us to think only of America's loss, of the suffering of the victims and the grief of their families--but not of the Islamic fundamentalists who caused that loss or the anger Americans should be feeling towards them and their friends, from Saudi Arabia to Iran to Iraq."
"By focusing on suffering but not self-assertiveness, our intellectual leadership is trying to dampen our pride and blunt our resolve to wage this war."
"September 11," Tracinski concluded, "should be the one day, every year, that we regain the sense most of our intellectuals want us to lose--our sense of America's virtue and of her power--and that we renew our resolve to use the second to defend the first."