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For those of us who were in New York City that horrific day, the 9/11 terrorist attacks are never very far away.
This abomination occurred 25 years ago Friday.
A kid’s ball game, a smiling cop or a fire truck racing past. It’s the little things that bring back the monstrousity of that dark day.
Life was good. Then it wasn’t
On 9/11, I was employed as a feature writer for the New York Post , just off a spectacular weekend in the city. Jones Beach, the last Bohemian beer garden in the city, and a multitude of other blessings that were on offer because I lived in New York. I was alive and life was good.
And then it wasn’t.
Until last week, I hadn’t planned to write about 9/11. I thought I had said everything I could possibly say without hitting a trifecta of repetition.
Basem Boshra changed my mind.
He is one of the late-career media fonctionaires at CBC News who are granted improbably windy titles. Boshra is — cough, cough — the now infamous CBC Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust. Think of it as an honorarium for folks in lockstep with the Canadian media hive mind.
Don’t refer to the 9/11 attacks as terrorism
He recently issued an edict for his minions that made news around the world: “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
My friend and colleague Warren Kinsella got hold of the memo, and suddenly a little-known news bureaucrat was big news.
Boshra’s bureaucratic paean to the network’s obvious terrorist sympathies is part and parcel of a revisionist approach to, well, everything the state broadcaster touches. CBC has fully embraced the faculty lounge oppressor versus the oppressed ethos that permeates the media landscape.
And on Thursday, the increasingly activist Canadian Press wire service chimed in with a tale entitled: “25 years since 9/11, Canada is not further ahead on tackling Islamophobia: advocates.” Never mind the hero firefighters who died that day; what about the Canadian left’s pet demographic?
This is all part of a chilling revisionism based on vibes emanating from academia.
I didn’t see him at the dozens of funerals
Of course, to my knowledge, Boshra was not in attendance at the dozens of funerals I covered for cops, firefighters, EMTs, line cooks, stockbrokers, janitors and everyday people of all colours and creeds.
To my knowledge, Boshra was not in New York City the bleak following day. That day I was sent to write a feature on the thousands of grieving people in desperate search of their missing loved ones. Under the weeping rain, I knew in my heart there was little hope.
Those were the most difficult hours of my three-decade career. In the pouring rain, I spoke to dozens of men, women and children looking for wives, husbands, moms, dads, lovers, or a best friend. They forced personal family photos of the missing upon me.
Two years ago, I wrote: “Their stories were numbing. But it was the pictures they came armed with that were worse: vignettes of lives lived – and lost. Dads playing catch with sons they’d never see graduate, moms holding babies, honeymoon photos, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries.
‘A collage of sorrow’
“Together, they formed a collage of sorrow I still think about daily and am certain will never completely leave me.”
For the survivors, their previous lives were finished, obliterated by Islamic terrorists (sorry, Basem).
The shoe bomber? Not a terrorist.
Bin Laden? Let’s call him a freedom fighter.
As far as I know, Basem Boshra was not in Erie, Penn., on Christmas Eve of that awful year. I was, along with famed Post photographer Steve Hirsch.
We spent the day and early evening with Kellie Lee, her toddler and her newborn baby girl. She was newly widowed and had returned to her hometown to live — and grieve — with her parents.
Heartache on Christmas Eve
Her husband, Dan, was a carpenter for the Backstreet Boys and flying home for the birth of their daughter. He never made it. He was on American Airlines Flight 11, the hijacked jet that slammed into the North Tower killing all on board. Kellie gave birth two days later.
And around 7 p.m., after I had filed it, after the kids had been put to bed in anticipation of Santa Claus’s arrival, and after some shared tears, we left Erie. We drove because of the post 9/11 airport chaos.
We said little in the nine-hour drive through the Pennsylvania countryside, each in our own thoughts. Like soldiers on leave, Hirsch and I were back in the war zone.
The story was the Post’s Page 1 on Christmas Day.
Four years ago I wrote that Canada had learned absolutely nothing from that day and we remain obtuse victims of our own peculiar faculty lounge aesthetic.
‘Terrorism with a chaser of murder’
It had been a perfect September day, the kind you only ever really get in New York. That day was shattered by lunatics with hate in their hearts.
“In a lot of ways, 9/11 and the days that followed are like a slide-show that plays continually in my mind. To ponder the complete horror is to drive you mad,” I wrote in 2023.
The CBC’s illustrious … what’s he called? .. Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust, Basem Boshra, is having none of that foolishness.
Why would he? You see, in his mind, it wasn’t terrorism. At CBC and the Canadian Press, that is the prevailing mindset.
The rest of us know exactly what it was: Terrorism with a chaser of cold-blooded murder.
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun