Editor,
On Sept. 11, 2001, within 148 minutes, 2,973 people died.
Today, 1,825 days later, about 2,660 Americans in Iraq, 330 Americans in Afghanistan and about 41,650 Iraqis have died. I know to each family and friend these are more than just numbers. To television networks, they're ratings. To everyone else, it just makes us cross our fingers or pray a little more for one reason or another.
Whether a person is for the war or against it, everyone undeniably considers all of the soldiers heroes. That's where the similarities get scarce.
As said by President Bush, these missions were meant to free the people of those countries. The heroes that went there signed up voluntarily, as well. However, many people who are for the war utterly hate the Iraqis and Afghans but don't mind sacrificing American soldiers to free them. This is hypocrisy.
I wonder if survivors of other tragedies and genocides might think the number of deaths is small. Those who lost someone sure don't think so.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
It's too bad Sean Hannity's followers don't see the deaths of non-Americans in such respect.
Hannity is a figure who champions the remembrance of Sept. 11 as if he really values those innocent souls. He accuses others of talking irresponsibly when they criticize his circle but won't think twice before saying "9/11" to justify just about anything. To him, as long as it's not an American, it's OK. He doesn't acknowledge the at least 40,000 people killed by Americans since Sept. 11, nor the thousands of victims of rape, molestation, DWI deaths or anything else.
He tries to make terrorism the biggest concern to Americans, though it pales in comparison to any other crime. I guess he thinks terror is much more important than helping women have more options in order to reduce abortions, to which millions of unborn Americans have been lost since Sept. 11. He never says anything that shows value for human life when speaking about the at least 300 Lebanese children that died, because they were not American, nor were they killed by terrorists. He doesn't urge his listeners to actually care about anything going on in the world but terrorism.
I can agree with the blind warmonger Hannity on one thing - we need to invade Iran and destroy its nuclear program, because nukes are responsible for the deaths of 214,000 innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ahmad Musleh
UNM student
