JOEY KURTZMAN,
Sir, - On the first anniversary of a day in which 3,000 people of myriad faiths and nationalities were crushed or burned alive, your columnist Vincent Browne had this to ask: "What is so special about the 3,000 lives lost in the Twin Towers, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon?" Is this really supposed to pass as political analysis?
Clearly, if you were to ask the people who supported, executed or praised last year's attacks, nothing was "so special" about those 3,000 lives. They were not in any way meaningful, valuable, or worth preserving.
Nevertheless, yesterday many people here in Ireland, in the US and elsewhere commemorated the dead of that September day as if they did mean something, as if they were "so special," and the pathologically insensitive and vaguely bigoted scolding of some European columnists will hardly dissuade us from that opinion.
Honouring the lives and mourning the loss of the "9-11" victims is in no way, as Browne goes on to contend, "a message of disrespect for those Afghans and others who were killed", any more than the ceremonies were "a message of disrespect" for the vastly larger number of Americans who died of car accidents or heart disease in the past year.
A funeral is not an act of dismissal of others who have died. When we remember the men who died in the 1916 Easter Rising, is this disrespectful of the countless young men who were dying on the battlefields of continental Europe at the time? When we remember Bobby Sands and the other hunger-strikers, are we racist for not also remembering the more than 10,000 Syrian villagers of Hama who were killed by Syrian President Hafez al-Assad while the hunger strike was taking place? Presumably Mr Browne believes so.
The death of every Afghan civilian was a tragedy. I've yet to meet an American who disputes this. But Wednesday was September 11th, and we honoured those who died on that date a year before. That's how memorial services work, and we need offer no apologies for it. - Yours, etc.,
JOEY KURTZMAN,
Trinity Square,
Townsend Street,
Dublin 2.