For some inexplicable reason, Caryl Rivers, who works with the National Organization for Women‘s Legal Defense and Education Fund, saw it necessary to write an article casting the 9/11 terrorist attacks along sexual lines.
According to Rivers,
Working women are on the front lines of what is being called ‘America’s new war.’
The terrorist Osama bin laden has said that he wanted to make war on all American males, but it seems that women are, more than ever before, in the lie of fire. No longer do they have a special status that protects them — if they ever really did.
What the hell is wrong with Rivers? Bin Laden and other Islamic extremists have made it clear that they are out to kill Americans whether they are men, women, or children. But would the 9/11 attacks have been any less horrific if only men had died?
In fact, Rivers seems to think that the terrorist act was specifically intended to kill women, claiming that, “…in the terrorist war against the United States, women are being blindly attacked as engines of American life and commerce. Seven employees of the TJX retail company died aboard one flight out of Boston because they were traveling on business. In the World Trade Center, we do not know exactly how many working women perished, but the number will be saddening.”
What I find saddening is this obsessive feminist need to reduce every issue to rather parochial men vs. women distinctions. The reality is that based on current information, most of the victims of the 9/11 attack were men.
The Associated press conducted an analysis of 3,000 people listed as missing or dead and found that 75 percent of the victims were men, whose average age was only 40.
Following the Rivers model, this should be the point where this article would go on about men’s contributions to society and how bin Laden is targeting men qua men, but that exercise is absurd regardless of sex. Bin Laden hates Americans, hates our liberal democratic society, and wants to terrorize us — he’s not assembling some manifesto about sexual politics in the United States.
Sources:
WTC victims were mostly young men. John Kelly, Associated Press, October 26, 2001.