9/11 is not a black and white issue

Re Toll of Sept. 11 keeps climbing, year after year, Sept. 12 The title of Rosie DiManno’s article is indisputable, and the 9/11 surviving victims suffering from the after-effects of the attacks deserve our sympathy. However, radical Islam is not the sole cause of terrorism, and her cavalier dismissal of U.S. foreign policy critics as apologists speaks to her myopic belief that exculpates American imperialism in the Middle East.

In fact, even in 2015 U.S.-supported airstrikes by Saudi Arabia against the Houthi rebels in Yemen have killed close to 1,000 civilians, targeting areas deemed sympathetic to the rebels.

It is unfathomable that American weaponry still props up the autocratic theocracy of Saudi Arabia, which sent 19 of the 20 hijackers on 9/11, breeding unrest and resentment against the West. Despite the clear blowback, lessons of coddling dictators in the region are ignored, and successive U.S. presidents continue to execute this incoherent and self-defeating foreign policy. Bob Wong, Richmond Hill I don’t think that 9/11 was a CIA inside job or a Zionist conspiracy. However the evidence behind the official explanation is still implausible. Of course, it is a given that the victims of 9/11 are innocents and their killers need to be punished as severely as the criminal law allows. The alternative or oppositional significance of 9/11 is the fact that it was the first time North Americans have suffered the kind of terrorist violence common in much of the developing world. What actually surprised me about 9/11 was that it took so long for the horror to occur.

Those who would label me a terrorist booster ought to at least acknowledge the sordid and brutal record of U.S. government (CIA, Special Forces, etc.) in running roughshod over the developing world since 1945; creating enemies and bitter resentments through overt and covert military interventions and arrogant regime changes.

While a violent response to this behaviour was inevitable, why is balanced commentary on that ugly phenomenon absent from the mainstream media? Morgan Duchesney, Ottawa