Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

15
The Blame-America's-Ex-President-First Crowd
Six months after 9/11, the Gallup Poll of Islamic Countries found that an overwhelming
majority of those surveyed believed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
had not been the work of Arabs. Well-educated Egyptians and Saudis believed that the
Israelis were behind the murder of three thousand innocents on 9/11, in large part because of
articles in their countries' official state newspapers. One of the widely disseminated stories
was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls
telling them not to go to work that day.
To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I
used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. "Al,"
he told me, "don't go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul."
Actually, I watched the events of that awful day from Minneapolis, where I was visiting my
mom. Mom's in a nursing home, so I was staying at a hotel. That morning, as I grabbed some
coffee, I noticed people huddled around a TV A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Must
have been a commuter plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something. Then the second
plane hit. It was sickening. Then came the Pentagon. We were under attack.
Somehow, I got through to my wife in Manhattan. She was fine, at home on the Upper
West Side, about five miles north of the Trade Center. My son was at school on the Upper
East Side. My daughter was away at college. As I watched the first tower collapse, I was
stunned. But I still couldn't register the magnitude of what was happening, even as the second
one went down.
I spent the rest of the day at the nursing home watching TV with my mom. She didn't
understand what had happened-as if any of us really did. A friend of mine watched with his
elderly mother in Queens. As he left that evening, she said to him, "At least no one was hurt."
That night, like all Americans, I just kept watching. Giuliani was masterful. Bush
seemed a little shaky.
On Wednesday, I couldn't reach my family. I desperately wanted to be home in New
York. The airport was closed, of course. But Northwest said they'd start flying on Thursday,