Jeffrey Goldberg posts this on the Atlantic site:

Christine Lee Hanson, who was two years old and on her way to Disneyland with her parents when they died together aboard United Airlines Flight 175, springs to mind as a perfect example of the sort of person al Qaeda made its enemy. Imagine, for a moment, you are Marwan al-Shehhi, the lead hijacker of Flight 175. You see Christine Hanson among the passengers on the plane you had just hijacked -- a two-year-old child, seated on her father's lap -- and you fly the plane carrying this child into the South Tower of the World Trade Center anyway.

http://www.theatlant...g-of-9-11/244120/

I wrote to Goldberg this afternoon:

A precious lisping little toddler, slain by a murderous Islamist who has determined to carry out an act of war (as Marwan al-Shehhi certainly perceived it—specialists in international law may certainly contend the question)…is that not just dreadful? And he actually might have seen her precious little pudgy cheeks, and still gone ahead and killed scores of scores of innocents.

As moral counterweight to this pitiless character we have Brad Broadshoulders, who pilots a Stealth bomber, Peter Pureheart, who controls a Predator drone from Langley, Steve Strongheart, who programs cruise missiles, and Dirk Granite, who calls in airstrikes upon suspected Taliban positions in the Korangal Valley. Not a single one of these sterling characters has ever knowingly slain a toddler. But guess what: when we speak of children killed, the toll of those wiped out by the 9/11 hijackers is negligible measured against the number exterminated (and the greater number maimed) by Our Brave Boys in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past ten years, deaths that have sown dragons' seeds of bitter foes. Can you really imagine that, just because our side kills infants wholesale without actually seeing them first, we are somehow rendered more virtuous than the monsters who might have glimpsed the darling little visages of their victims? Cripes, how greasily sentimental. You condemn a fanatic without a word of reproach to the technicians who exterminate noncombatants in job lots because the former is motivated by hatred and the latter is “chust following orders.”

This has long been a sore point with me, how the good old U S of A imagines that it can kill any number of children and noncombatants without any moral obloquy attending these murders because, of course, they're merely collateral damage and not intended, and accordingly a hundred brown children killed by a cruise missile count as nothing beside the truncated life of an American infant vaporized by a bestial hijacker, which crime by contrast cries to heaven. Give me a fucking break.

cordially,