A call from a friend in Paris woke me up at 9:30 that morning in my apt on 16th St and 3rd Avenue. He told me what happened. Then when I tried to call my brother at the construction company in Brooklyn he worked at I couldn't get through. He had taken the last PATH train, which arrived at the WTC station at 8:48 from NJ to Manhattan before the attacks to go to a jobsite on Chambers St. He walked between the towers after the first plane but before the second one. He then saw the second plane hit from the jobsite, and followed a mass of people walking over the Brooklyn Bridge. For three hours we couldn't get through to his company and his wife was getting frantic. I used a callback service with a number in Seattle to get through and verify he was alive and full of soot from the towers. He came to my apt that evening to shower and we went out to dinner to a Chinese restaurant with my other brother who had an apt on 69th St and lived mostly in Amsterdam. It was a rare meeting of all three of us. A paradoxical mix of extraordinary events and the completely ordinary.
The next day I went by a firehouse and put a $100 bill in the collection box. I tear up to this day at the thought of what those guys did.
On the day the Afghan war started I flew from Milan to Chicago for an incentive travel show. There was a crowd of antiwar demo protesters passing through the station. My reaction was, "my city was just bombed and you're protesting against us!?" That was also the day of the plane crash at Linate Airport I was supposed to fly out of and I had to take another flight from Malpensa. It was like catastrophe was following me across the ocean.
At the travel show I deliberately went to the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, (prewar) Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria booths and handed out copies of this prescient August 2001 article by the Italian Jewish journalist Fiamma Nirenstein: https://www.commentary.org/articles/fiamma-nirenstein/how-suicide-bombers-are-made/ and told them all to read, share and learn from it.
At the Jordan stand the tourist board official told me, "you can't do this at a business event. I'll call the mgt and have you removed." I told her, go ahead, do it! Imagine the headline, "Arab Tourist Board Get NY Jew Thrown Out of Tourism Trade Show" She calmed down instantly.
Nirenstein's answer and prescient forecast: the rivers of virulent paranoid conspiracist Jew hatred coursing through the Muslim world will have violent consequences far beyond just Jews. And so it has, from 9/11 to Bali to Madrid's 3/11 to London's 7/7 to German Xmas markets, to Bataclan to Charlie Hebdo. The rest of the world has learned what it's like to be Jewish facing down a jihadi death and martyrdom cult.
