A lot of people will never wake up by Lawrence Auster

Regarding the report that an aide to Prime Minister Brown says that one in 11 Muslims in Britain pro-actively supports suicide bombers, Jeff in England writes: "If this doesn't wake people up I don't know what will short of another terrorist attack."

To which I replied:

It's old hat. A year ago a poll said that 12 percent of Muslims in Britain support terrorism, so one out of 11 is less than that.

It doesn't matter. Nothing will make people change but actual disasters, and one or two or three disasters won't do it. There's no point in even thinking about it or hoping or wondering what will "wake people up."

It is built into human nature not to see a threat, but to think that everything's ok. Nothing will change this.

And here is something that will underscore my point. Several hundred people above the impact point in the South Tower of the World Trade Center died, because AFTER the North Tower had been hit by an airliner, and flames and smoke were gushing out and scores of people were leaping to their death from a thousand feet up in the air, the people in the South Tower, looking at this apocalypse unfold a few yards from their own windows, thought that they should remain in their offices and do a normal day's work (a normal day's work with people leaping to their death outside their windows!), rather than leave the building as fast as they could. So when the South Tower was hit by the second plane, 17 minutes after the North Tower was hit by the first plane, almost all the people still alive in the upper stories of the South Tower were trapped and they died when the building collapsed 56 minutes later. And this was the World Trade Center, which just eight years earlier had been hit by a terrorist bomb aimed at toppling one tower into the other and killing tens of thousands of people. Yes, there was a PA announcement telling people that the building was "secure" and that they should stay in their offices. But why did they heed that announcment, when the Ultimate Disaster was already occurring? And these aren't slugs we're talking about. These were intelligent, high-end people, working in investment banking, people like Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath (two of the four people to escape alive from above the impact point in the South Tower).

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