Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

"Freedom itself was attacked this morning, and freedom will be defended"   -George W. Bush

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We were all somewhere when it happened.  Everyone remembers what they were doing on that tuesday morning at 8:46 am and at 9:03 am when the World Trade Center towers fell to the ground and made the whole world stop.  I remember I was in 5th grade at the time, just getting ready for lunch around 10:45 am when my vice principal got on the loud speaker and informed the school that the Twin Towers have just been hit by airplanes.  Not much information was given to us middle school kids or anyone for that matter but people were starting to get into panic mode.  "What if they bomb our school?" one kid said in the cafeteria.  I'll never forget the line of kids waiting to use the one pay phone we had right outside the cafeteria to call their parents who were in New York City that morning to see if they were okay.  I remember parents taking kids out of school early because of the fear they had.  All my afternoon classes after lunch we didn't do what was planned, all we did was talk about what was going on just a few miles down the road in Lower Manhattan.  Coming home from school, putting the television on, almost literally every single channel had news coverage from Manhattan attempting to explain what exactly was going on.  We were asking ourselves the who, what, when, where, why, and how can this happen to our nation?  The traumatic images and video footage of these two skyscrapers falling to the ground was one of the most powerful images that anyone in my generation has ever seen.  We had just whitened one of the worst attacks on our nations soil in the history of our United States...

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America's Reaction to 9/11:

Everyone wanted to know what exactly happened on the morning of September 11th, 2001.  People at first may have thought these planes hitting the towers was a complete accident, but when you see the footage of the aircrafts it clearly was not.  Now the new question on America's mind was Why did terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.?  News reporters were trying to crack down on this case, to do so they consulted with Middle East experts and diplomats, along with leaders of countries in the Middle East region (Streitmatter, 241).  The front page of the Times was of a jaw dropping photo of a fire ball exploding outward from the South World Trade Center tower and was certainly a front page photograph no one would ever forget.

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"Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York's World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both buildings into a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims" was the beginning of the lead story from Times.  Their first direct quote was from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani saying "I have a sense it's a horrendous number of lives lost, the numbers are going to be very, very, high". John Maloney, who was a security director for an Internet firm with offices inside the trade center said "I'm a combat veteran from Vietnam, and I have never saw anything like this [before]".  People kept demanding to find out who is to blame for the 3,000 deaths of innocent American citizens.  The most nearby answer for who was behind these attacks was the Times saying that this operation had led experts and officials to point the man behind this to be none other than Osama bin Laden (Streitmatter, 243).

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President Bush & The White House Answers the "Why":
President George W. Bush spoke to the nation shortly after the September 11th attacks attempting to answer the question "Why do they hate us?" Bush's answer to that question was simply "They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble". Many countries do tend to hate on America due to all the freedoms we have here.  But that doesn't give the right for terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and the Taliban to hijack planes and kill U.S. citizens and create a nationwide panic.  President Bush in his speeches did not specifically name any nations or individual people (bin Laden) being held responsible for the attacks.  All he would convey was "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime". After President Bush had success convincing the public that the 9/11 attacks were by the terrorists being the evil ones and America being the good ones, Bush now was ready to justify the idea of America soon going into war with Iraq (Streitmatter, 249). Then on March 19, 2003 the war with Iraq Would soon begin which president Bush stating that "We will accept no outcome but victory"...  

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America would still stand strong and forever still be known as the "Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave" even during these hard times of tragedy and war.

Are Jews the Ones to Blame? Coughlin Thinks YES

http://martyrobertsblog.com/WordPress/tag/anti-semitism/

So much hate for one group of people...

Our world today is filled with so much hate.  One group after another is being blamed for issues that they clearly cannot be proven to being responsible for. I've been born and raised Jewish, went to Hebrew School as a kid, had a bar mitzvah when I was 13, and still celebrate the Jewish holidays with my family.  Following the Jewish religion hasn't really altered my views on life, I feel like i'm just like everyone else.  But society does not tend to think that Jews are like everyone else.  The theories such as Jews are good with money, Jews once had horns growing out of their heads, and Jews are evil human beings all can never possibly be proven true.  Instead the media uses Anti-Semitism to portray the way of these "power hungry" people. Anti-Semitism is defined as discrimination against or prejudice or hostility towards Jews.  Anti-Semitism first came into American society during the 1930s and 1940s during the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.  A poll taken in 1942 asking which groups of people were the largest threat to our American way of life, the top 3 results were Germans, Japanese, and the Jews (Streitmatter, 126).  How could Jews be the 3rd highest result during this time period?  We have one man to thank for this, the most influential Anti-Semetic spokesman in America, Father Charles Coughlin.

The Rise of Charles Coughlin

Charles Coughlin was born in an Irish family in Ontario, Canada in 1891. As Coughlin got older he moved to the states in Detroit and started broadcasting weekly sermons at a local radio station.  Coughlin gained his popularity through his "golden voice" and was also described by some as being "warm, inviting, mellow, rich, vibrant, and electric" (Streitmatter, 129).  He now started having listeners and followers in the millions, around 15 million people would listen to his weekly broadcasts and would sometimes reach as high as 45 million viewers, which was over a third of the country's population. Through the radio as well as print, Coughlin always had the same message, that "Jews were evil, money hungry conspirators who had infiltrated American life and destroyed every value that Christian people had sacred" (Streitmatter, 127).  Having nearly 15 million people listening to what you have to say over radio and print will make viewers and listeners believe anything that Coughlin would speak of be true. In Cleveland during a 1936 presidential campaign Coughlin was preaching and referring Jews as "money-changers" and "traffickers in gold" making the stereotype that Jews were put on this Earth to acquire massive amounts of wealth.  One man's words are attempting to change the views for a whole country, does this remind you of someone?

Coughlin Defends The Nazis With Communism

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One unforgettable broadcast Coughlin made back in 1938, he was defending the Nazis persecution of the Jewish people.  According to Coughlin, it was the Jews who first introduced the idea of Communism into Russia which would propel the German people to create the idea of Naziism as an attempt to save Germany from Communism.  Coughlins exact words he told his listeners were "[Communism] was a product not of Russia, but of a group of Jews who dominated the destinies of Russia" and repeated the word "communism" over a dozen times to get his point across (Streitmatter, 134).  Where is he getting this information?  Who are his sources? Or is this just one of Coughlin's many theories that he believes are true and backs it up with his powerful influence over his listeners? So not only are the Jews being blamed for the economic issues in America, they're being held responsible for the creation of Communism.  After this speech defending Nazis and their ideas of persecution of the Jewish people, Coughlin's fan base grew stronger and stronger with support from 6,000 New Yorkers gathering around the studio he speaks from in support.  Coughlin was now being compared to the man himself, Adolf Hitler which he was fond of being recognized to such a powerful human being.  Coughlin admired Hitler and mentioned him as "savior of peace and civilization" due to Hitler opposing Communism as well.  He'd reached a new low in my eyes, being the biggest advocate to a man whose goals were to exterminate entire races of people.

Before reading this chapter in Mightier Than the Sword I just assumed that Anti-Semitism and hatred towards the Jewish people only came from Hitler and Nazi Germany.  But when you realize that it starts having an affect in America by a man living in the United States, especially a man like Charles Coughlin who was so powerful and inspiring with his words and voice as well as probably one of Adolf Hitler's strongest supporters makes you stop to think that if he did in fact change the mind of the American people that Jews needed to go, our world today would be an entirely different place.  Even in today's world after 9/11 we still look differently at people who are of Middle Eastern decent.  Our world is full of so much hate towards others it just gets addicting.  Even after the fall of Hitler and Nazi Germany Jews are still one of the top hated people worldwide.  We can't put the blame on one person or group because we would be just as sinful as Charles Coughlin was. 

 

How Abolition Removed Slavery From United States

Hardships of Slavery will never be forgotten...
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Throughout the 1800s due to economic developments, the United States was divided into two sections, the North and the South.  The North was beginning to industrialize with innovations such as creating factories while the South was remaining more agricultural with producing such products like cotton and tobacco.  The cheapest way the south could produce massive amounts of these crops were to rely on slave labor in order to build profit.  Not all citizens were in favor of slavery, in fact Abolitionists were focusing to persuade Americans that "slavery was a sin that couldn't be allowed to exist" (Streitmatter, 26).  Could Abolitionists change the mind of a divided nation that slavery should be abolished?