September 11 ... 1922

In the first few hours of the 9-11 tragedy eight years ago I was at work, with a cluster of my coworkers surrounding my cubicle listening to an Internet feed of the news reports coming out of WNYC, the National Public Radio station in New York.

I was a computer geek and had figured out how to configure Firefox to bypass the "net nanny" software that prevented everyone else from listening to the reports on their machines running Internet Explorer.

So I was a minor "hero" that day when we were all so starved for information, at least until WNYC went off the air for some reason or other. Then everyone sort of drifted off to their own desks wondering why we had been attacked, but I, Mister Analytical, was struck by the question "Why Sept 11?"

A bit of research on the Internets yielded this intriguing historical fact: On September 11, 1922, the British Mandate of Palestine was instituted, which provided, among other things, for a homeland for the Jewish people, to be carved out of land currently being occupied by Palestinians.

And we all know what happened with that plan.

So here it is, eight years after our 9-11, and I don't believe anyone has yet made that connection. I remember telling my buddy Larry about the odd "coincidence" of the date, and told him that he'd "heard it here first".

And apparently last. Maybe it was just a coincidence after all. I mean there are only 365 days in the average year, so a lot of historical stuff has to take up a day that's already been historical.

For example, see this page, which gives a generous paragraph to several other historical incidents that occurred on September 11.

If the hijackers had waited one more year, it would have made a nice round 80 years -- I'll bet then the media would have picked up on it and spread it far and wide, since we as human beings like being able to put patterns on things that have no pattern.

Not to mention that the Muslim World even uses a different calendar, which means that the handy correspondence between dates that I see doesn't really happen with the Muslims.

Oh, well. It was an interesting theory while it lasted.