Praise for heroes, respect for victims

In public events and private thoughts, Centre County residents paid homage Monday to the victims of the attacks on the United States five years ago.

They recalled the Sept. 11, 2001, moment when they first heard that America was under siege, and they were urged to remember the victims without reliving the fear wrought by terrorists.

“They want to rule us by fear,” U.S. Rep. John Peterson, R-Pleasantville, told a small gathering in front of the Old Main administrative building on the Penn State campus. “Islamic radicals want to destroy the freedom of religion that America was founded on.”

The congressman paid tribute to National Guardsmen from Pennsylvania, saying 16,000 of the 19,000 Guardsmen have been deployed abroad and 34 have been killed in Iraq.

He praised the courage of the 40 passengers who wrested control of United Flight 93 from terrorists and brought the airliner down before it could reach the nation’s capital.

“They decided they were not going to let that plane hit Washington,” Peterson said. “It could have hit me.”

Peterson and others at the memorial service, sponsored by Republican Party organizations, refrained from politicizing Sept. 11 for the most part. No one mentioned President Bush.

‘Appeasement’ argument

But Peterson did argue that “appeasement” would be an unwise strategy and, without mentioning former President Clinton by name, faulted the Clinton administration for not reacting forcefully enough to smaller terror attacks that preceded Sept. 11, 2001, such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

“We didn’t react to that,” Peterson said. “When you do not react to those kinds of acts, you embolden the enemy.”

Brig. Gen. William Waff, deputy commanding general of the Army Reserve’s 99th Regional Readiness Command, based in Coraopolis, referred not to the war in Iraq but to a more general “war on terror” that he compared with the American Revolutionary War.

“In a very real sense,” he said, “we are in a revolutionary war for the very freedoms America represents.”

A short walk away from the Old Main steps, Penn State’s Jewish student organization, the Chabad House, set up tables at College Avenue and South Allen Street and invited passersby to pledge an act of goodness and kindness in honor of Sept. 11 victims.

The group strung up a line at the university gate and used clothespins to hang up the pledges, achieving a visual interest. “I will help friends and family members through hard times,” one note said.

Rabbi Nosson Meretsky, Chabad director, estimated that the group elicited 500 goodwill pledges by day’s end.

“We are defying darkness with light,” Meretsky said.

‘Abortion is an everyday 9/11’

Some private thoughts about the 5-year anniversary of Sept. 11 were intruded upon by a York-area anti-abortion group, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property.

The group of eight young men from Spring Grove demonstrated at the corners of College Avenue and Allen Street, invoking Sept. 11 as they shouted anti-abortion messages, including: “Abortion is an everyday 9/11.”

Penn State sophomore Kara Zinger, 18, was approached on the sidewalk by group member Cesar Franco, originally from Sacramento, Calif., who told her that “you know it’s murder, right — you’re basically killing a baby.”

Zinger brushed off Franco, walked on and said in an interview afterward that “I just felt so invaded — so accosted.”

Another Penn State student, junior Elissa Wolf, 20, shouted back at the anti-abortion demonstrators that, “if America controls a woman’s body, America treats women as property — my body, my choice.”

Wolf said later the anti-abortion group’s Sept. 11 analogy upset her.

“It’s very disrespectful,” she said. “This is absolutely not the day to do this.”