While doing research for assignments related to a college in Los Angeles, I wanted to know the origin of the term ‘occidental’. I knew from my Oxford English Dictionary that the word means that which relates to the countries of the West.
So I asked Paul Anthony Jones, author of etymological guides and The Accidental Dictionary in the United Kingdom and creator of the language website Haggard Hawks. Kindly, he answered by e-mail, starting with a comparison of the words oriental and occidental, which he wrote has to do with the sun: “[E]tymologically orient comes from the Latin for ‘rise’ or ‘begin’, occident from the Latin for ‘set’ (or ‘fall down’). It’s the association between the location of rising and setting sun that permanently attached the words to the east and west…That gives the words some interesting and quite unexpected cousins. Orient is related to abort and origin, and probably even orchestra somewhere along the line. Occident, in the sense of a falling or setting, is related to incidents and coincidences, accidents, and deciduous trees, as well as all the words that end –cide, like patricide, fungicide and homicide.”
This word, occidental, is also the name of a small, private college in northeastern Los Angeles.
Alan Bliss memorializes mass murder victims of 9/11. Photo courtesy of JSBProductions
Occidental College is where an attack on a U.S. flag memorial was waged in three waves on this year’s 15th anniversary of the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attack on the United States. Alan Bliss, the sophomore pictured here who coordinated the besieged free speech exercise, tells me that he’s granting Occidental College the benefit of the doubt in protecting campus free speech despite the evidence to the contrary. The young Texan spoke with me in an exclusive interview on campus last fall. Read the story of his simple free speech exercise, its assault and destruction and the college’s appeasing response in my article here.
Occidental College is located in LA’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, where a wine lounge recently hosted a pair of Occidental professors for an enjoyable lesson on the Greek god Dionysus (read the article here), in which they discussed Plato, Aristotle, sparagmos, Alexander the Great, and why Dionysus is best regarded as more complex than the god of wine. The club’s lounge is owned by an Occidental graduate who chooses to host art exhibits, readings and lectures and other exercises of free speech at his Colorado Wine Company, located on Colorado Boulevard, a few miles from the hillside college.
As I ponder the word occidental as emanating from the setting sun and meaning that which pertains to the West, I must note that the college which sustained, and arguably minimizes, a siege against the freedom of speech, is where Barack Obama, the nation’s 44th president, Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice-presidential nominee, Ben Affleck and director Terry Gilliam (Brazil) once studied. That this credible institution of higher education now claims (as a college spokesman told me for this article) that the school “doesn’t have the resources” to protect a student’s exercise of free speech—and, instead, seeks to coddle and appease its attackers—underscores the precarious state of the First Amendment.
Today, the 45th president vowed to strip citizenship of or imprison anyone exercising the right to free expression by burning a flag. More than before, the absolute right to express oneself, whether by burning or planting a flag, is crucial to the future of the West.
Last night’s discussion at LA’s Hammer Museum, a Hammer Forum program titled “9/11: the Saudi Connection”, brought an invigorating exchange of ideas and projections and a powerful call to action.
The program, moderated by local public radio’s Ian Masters, who rightly pointed out in his introduction that Islam is not the exclusive source of religious fundamentalism, featured former CIA operative and CNN security analyst Robert Baer and former U.S. Senator and former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham. Baer and Graham have written books about Islamic terrorism, the September 11, 2001attack and Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of acts of war against the West.
Baer, who has been to Saudi Arabia, called the dictatorship—which everyone kept calling a “kingdom”—”a country in peril.” As he does on cable news shows, Baer sees Saudi Arabia’s demise as imminent due to a “herd mentality” which has become embedded in the country, which, he added and emphasized, “cannot stand for long”. In a short speech, Baer made reference to the fact that, for all practical purposes, Syria and Iraq no longer exist as functional states run by governments (as I recognized about Iraq earlier this year). For the same reasons, he explained, Saudi Arabia’s origins as an artificial country formed in tribes in 1932 preclude its continued existence.
Baer contends that the Middle East is driven by tribalism, not ideology. He sees tribalism as the larger threat to the West. In the contest between Shiite and Sunni Moslems, Baer counts four Sunni-dominated Mideast capitals which have recently been lost to Shiite Moslems: Baghdad, Beirut, Sunna and Damascus, which he sees as fueling discord and war in the region, leading to the fall of Saudi Arabia and displacement of as many as 120 million Arabs fleeing into the West.
Baer’s assessment is sobering. But Baer adds that he thinks Islamic terrorists are neither evil—he thinks modern Middle East problems are caused by Western “imperialism”—nor moved by ideology, i.e., fundamentalist, radical or jihadist Islam, terms he declined to use throughout the evening. In fact, he kept insisting that he’s not an apologist for Islamic jihad but, by denying the role of ideas and rationalizing Islamic terrorism, he is.
Despite this moral error, Baer’s practical and historical observations, forecasts and accounts should be taken seriously. He argues that, because Saudi Arabia depends on subsidies and being the West’s sole, main supplier of oil, the dictatorship wants the oil industry’s fracking to stop. His comments on how fracking has hurt Saudi Arabia did not go over well with the left-wing, west Los Angeles audience, but he explained why fracking—and America’s decreased dependency on Saudi oil—is relevant to the region’s stability. Additionally, during Q & A, Baer added when asked that he regards Edward Snowden as an annoyance, though he admits that indiscriminate mass surveillance does not protect the United States. In short, Baer’s projection that Saudi Arabia’s days are numbered is cogent where his causal connection is not.
On the other hand, Florida’s former Sen. Bob Graham displayed full moral clarity.
Sen. Graham, acting in this capacity as an American statesman in the best sense, called upon his memory of the 9/11 Commission’s first witness, a woman named Kristen Breitweiser, who had lost her husband Bob in the attack. He reminded the audience that Americans have an obligation to answer why? And: Did the hijackers act alone? He told the Los Angeles audience that the first two hijackers entered the United States through Los Angeles International Airport and detailed specific meetings implicating Saudi Arabia (as does my own research, first posted here). He spoke about the San Diego connection and how $50,000 for the hijackers was dispatched from the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC to a woman. He mentioned the prominent Sarasota, Florida, family and their connection to three Florida-based 9/11 hijackers and explained how the family returned to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Graham spoke of discrepancies in the FBI investigation and, once again, urged the audience to press the U.S. government to declassify and release the 9/11 report’s 28 classified pages (which he has read) detailing the attack’s financing by Saudi Arabia.
Sen. Graham named President Lincoln as a great president for insisting upon transparency in government during the Civil War, knowing it would make U.S. allies look bad and he praised Lincoln for putting the enlightenment of the American people above sparing an ally’s embarrassment. The Democrat singled out the Obama administration for criticism. He denounced American “passivity” about this 14-year-old Islamic act of war. When asked to name the best presidential candidate in terms of disclosure about the attack on September 11, 2001, Graham answered succinctly and without pause: “Rand Paul”, who supports releasing the 28 classified pages.
In a moment of rare, bipartisan unity around an intelligent idea to advance national defense, Baer agreed with Rand Paul and Bob Graham about declassifying the 28 pages and said that he, too, thinks the pages should be released. Judging by audience response, by the program’s end, most in the audience seemed to agree. Finally, Baer, whatever his flaws, expressed the perfect afterthought to Sen. Graham’s crusade to illuminate the facts of the September 11, 2001 mass murder: “Rational people must [be free to] make up their minds.”
With Saudi Arabia proposing to build 200 mosques in Germany as a “response” to the exodus from Arab states to Western Europe (reported here during the presentation), let me add: rational people haven’t much time.
Premiering on the History Channel at 6 pm ET on September 11, Rebuilding the World Trade Center is a 2-hour premiere by Belfast, Northern Ireland, artist and photographer Marcus Robinson as he films, draws and paints the rebuilding using 13 cameras in time lapse photography. Interspersed with on-camera interviews with several construction workers, the cumulative effect is sparse, haunting and, at its best, elegiac.
However, there is no mention of what necessitates a rebuilding: an act of war by those moved by Islam. There is no explanation of the four buildings which will comprise the new World Trade Center, no recap of history of the previous, fallen World Trade Center (1973-2001), which was attacked by Moslem terrorists in 1993 and destroyed by Moslem terrorists in 2001 murdering 3,000 innocents who were mostly American. Rebuilding the World Trade Center also omits any detailed tutorial in the architecture, design, construction, politics and process. The program, which airs in color with eerie music, time lapse filming of the construction and individual straight-on camera interviews with workers, assumes a great deal of foreknowledge about the project.
A concrete carpenter is the only worker to imply a reference to the act of evil which permeates this appropriately melancholy telefilm, referring to “planes hitting the Twin Towers” which could be construed as an accident if you don’t know what happened 13 years ago. Most of the workers tell their tales in affecting, occasionally powerful, segments about the challenging work of building new towers high above Manhattan. One man speaks of losing a loved one on 9/11. One worker talks about becoming an iron worker after 9/11 in order to rebuild. One talks about a relative who worked on building the original towers. The net effect is a salty slice of New York City life, complete with thick accents, attitudes and that unmistakable sense that Manhattan represents the best of everything.
For example, another concrete carpenter, Estelle St. Clair, talks about the “danger and seriousness” of her work and how what she calls the “pure joy” of seeing and shaping New York’s skyline is her highest reward. This is the best aspect of Rebuilding the World Trade Center. The paintings by Robinson punctuate the program amid what amount to exhibitions of workers’ unions’ cronyism and nepotism – the film skips an entire year – as the workers talk about the pressure of the project without any reference to dates of completion (rebuilding starts in 2006) and the cause of delays or whether the project is successful in terms of design.
As the spire is assembled, for instance, there’s no mention of its purpose. Answers are absent on why the rebuilding is taking so long, whether there have been any accidents, injuries or deaths or what New Yorkers think of the newly emerging center if they think of it at all. Sadness hangs over every piece of metal, especially for those who think America’s the greatest country ever to exist on earth and that the Twin Towers should have been rebuilt better and taller. But the variety of workers – ethnically diverse New York-area Indians, blacks, Jews and women – are a melting pot of proud, outspoken individualists and this moody if incomplete telefilm gives a glimpse of Americans who embody the best of what the enemy hates about the West and its infidels. Final scenes include shots moving and looking skyward up the building like the last scene from The Fountainhead (1949) and, when a worker speaks with awe of being able to almost see the curvature of the earth, it is impossible not to think of three thousand ghosts and their last day on earth.
Author’s Note
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