the ideology which he said sparked the tragedy. It came as the terror network Al Qaeda tried to overshadow the ceremonies by airing a videotape warning that US allies, Israel and the Gulf Arab states, would be the next target of a terrorist attack. The tape was to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks. Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri condemned United Nations forces in Lebanon as ‘enemies of Islam’.
Undeterred diplomats were among those attending the memorial service at the St. Catherine the Great Martyr of the Orthodox Church in Moscow on Monday, September 11. "A complete resurrection of love must be our response to the evil of terrorism," Archimandrite Zaccheus said in remarks published by Russia’s Interfax news agency.
Thousands of people have fallen victim to terrorists, who carried out their evil deeds "for the sake of ideology and false understanding of religious ideals," he added. Terrorists "keep sowing chaos in people’s lives," he said.
DEFEATING IDEOLOGY
Thousands of miles away, in the United States, American President George W. Bush, a self declared born-again Christian, seemed to agree in separate comments. He said the only way to protect the nation from the terrorist threat is to "defeat an ideology of hate with an ideology of hope."
President Bush and wife, Laura, laid a memorial wreath in a pool of water at ground zero. "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon," he said there on September 11, 2001. Bush told NBC network’s Today Show that those words captured the emotions of the day.
"That was not a planned speech. It just came out," the president explained. "There was smoke, and there was haze. The emotions were unbelievable. There were tears in peoples’ eyes, there were hugging, there was exhaustion, and there was anger."
NO ENVISION
The president said there was no way to envision at that time that, five years later, 150,000 US troops would be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he stressed the determination needed to wage the war on terror was already evident.
"I knew that we were going to have to be a nation of resolve, and I knew that we were dealing with cold-blooded killers, the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a long period of time," he explained.
While Russia and the United States have often disagreed on how to wage the war on terror, there were no signs of disagreements during the memorial service in Moscow. A bell installed to the memory of the terrorist attack victims tolled five times after the service at St. Catherine the Great Martyr Church, Russian media reported.
Ambassadors and representatives of the United States, Serbia, Greece, Israel, Hungary, Norway and Spain reportedly attended the service. (With BosNewsLife Monitoring and reports from Russia and the United States).
