11-Sep-06: Oprah's 9/11 Lesson... But There's Something Missing Here

You can overdo a good thing.

For years psychologists have been exhorting parents to criticise the misbehavior, not the offending child. "I hate what you did," but never "I hate you."

But when the "misbehavior" is a terror attack and nobody's child was involved, isn't it stretching things a bit to remember, grieve and draw lessons without mentioning the perpetrators?

Today we watched Oprah Winfrey do just that.

Oprah was hosting the widow of a victim of 9/11. The woman has not been able to function fully as a mother to her three children since her husband perished in the Twin Towers. She has drowned her sorrow in a shopping addiction.

Here are a few of Oprah's comments:

"You said nobody remembers 9/11 anymore. But that's not true. I think about the victims almost every day. While I am brushing my teeth and putting on my shoes I think: "They did this. They got ready that morning confident they'd come home at the end of the day." Then I go out and try to live my life to the fullest. That's why they died. So that we can have this wake-up call. Their sacrifices should teach us about our own lives." 

She told the widow that she owes it to her husband to rise out of her depression... "And live. And live. And live."

We were left wondering: Wake up call to do what? What exactly is the lesson? To live life to the fullest? Is that it?

Oprah, along with so many other Americans, views this terror attack as a natural disaster, an act of G-d, minus perpetrators.

Her sterilized take on 9/11 teaches us nothing about fundamentalist Islamism, nothing about its threats to Western civilization, nothing about foiling the attacks that terrorist cells throughout the world are planning at this very moment.