Berlin, September 10th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) — September 11th, 2001, started early because it was supposed to be a photography day. A German friend and I had decided to meet in D.C. at 5:30 a.m. in order to shoot the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall and everything else we would find. The Sun was supposed to rise at 6:45 a.m., but had it known what was going to happen, it would have refrained from showing itself above the United States East Coast.
Coming from neighboring Virginia, I took the Interstate 395. When I drove by the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia at 5:15 a.m., I hardly saw the impressive building since it was still pitch dark. At this point, the flight that would hit it some four hours later was still an hour away from check-in. It would take off from Dulles International Airport three hours and five minutes after this moment.
My late dog Natalie, a Corgi mix I had picked up in Croatia six years earlier, was pleasantly surprised about the early walk we took in D.C., from the parking spot we easily found to Lincoln Memorial. My Bavarian pal whom I had met at a camera store in Arlington a few weeks earlier already waited for us. It was a truly beautiful day, at that point. It would turn into a day of horror soon. Many wars are expected. This one was not.
Minutes to Live
The first people who must have noticed something was very wrong were on American Airlines flight 11. When it was hijacked at 8:14 a.m. in the skies over Massachusetts, its passengers had 32 minutes to live. Imagining the horror and fear they must have felt when they saw Manhattan come closer and closer is probably impossible. Just seconds before their plane crashed into the World Trade Center, United Airlines flight 175 was hijacked. The people on board had 18 minutes to live at that moment.
During the 17 minutes between the two crashes into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, American Airlines flight 77 was hijacked. At 9:28 a.m., the moment flight 93 was hijacked above Ohio, I was already on the phone with my radio stations while racing home to Virginia. When I drove by the Pentagon at about 9:00 a.m., the crash of flight 77 into the building was only about thirty-seven minutes away.
Unprecedented Decision
The main radio station I had reported for, for many years, “Radio Hundert,6” in Berlin, had a strong conservative tendency. Since the war against terrorism was a subject they had wanted to hear about a lot, long before 9/11, I had done a lot of research on the subject and knew Al Qaeda’s plans which had been uncovered months earlier. As intelligence agencies had found out before this terrible day, hijacking passenger aircraft and steering them into buildings was what these Islamists intended to do.
During the endless live interview the station in Germany did with me, I mentioned Al Qaeda early on, even before flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. local time. Eight minutes later, at 9:45 a.m., the airspace over the United States of America was officially shut down. This unprecedented decision was taken 14 minutes before the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, 18 minutes before United Airlines flight 93 was deliberately crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, and 43 minutes before the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m..
‘Unrestricted Solidarity’
My neighbor in Virginia was worried about her husband who worked in Washington. She could not reach him on his cell phone because the network was overburdened. Everyone tried to reach loved ones in the city. Many of them, 125 people, had just died in Arlington, including Barbara Olson, a commentator I knew from watching CNN a lot. She was killed when flight 77 hit the Pentagon. My family, my then-wife and my six-month-old daughter were in Europe on September 11th, 2001, and I was glad they were. The “old continent” was definitely safer on 9/11, and I was working almost 24/7 anyway, meaning I would not have had much time for them.
Twenty-five years later, I live in Berlin, where part of the far-left joins Islamists in supporting and even celebrating the same kind of ideology, the same kind of terrorism. The party “Die Linke” accommodates many terror supporters. In late August, several members danced to the music of a rapper who sang “Yallah Yallah intifada” and slogans like “Death to the IDF”. Their main candidate Elif Eralp wants to become Governing Mayor after the September 20th state elections. She said she was “appalled” by the incident involving the rapper, but did not do anything to curb this strong tendency in her party. Besides, it was not the first time members of “Die Linke” showed hatred towards against Israel and terror support.
The Islamist terror attacks of September 11th and October 7th are the two worst ones of the past few decades, but obviously not the only ones. In spite of all of this deadly violence, the Islamists behind them found useful idiots who will support their quest for horror and death. Some of them are running their election campaign right now and right here in Berlin. They need to be defeated at the ballot box.
