[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 17190]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         THE BATTLE OF AMERICA

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ADAM B. SCHIFF

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 14, 2001

  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, a secondary blast at the Pentagon rocked my 
building as I prepared to leave for the Capitol. I walked down East 
Capitol while people streamed out of the House Office Buildings and 
passed me on the street. The Capitol Hill police were cordoning off the 
area, sirens wailing in the background; no one was permitted further 
entry and Members of Congress were barred from their own offices. 
Another hijacked plan was in the air and one presumed destination was 
another target in the Capitol.
  The Members of Congress, gathering at police headquarters to be 
briefed and set up makeshift offices, recalled Pearl Harbor. I thought 
of the Battle of Britain and Hitler's indiscriminate bombings of 
London. Churchill's words still so powerfully resonant. ``He hopes by 
killing large numbers of civilians and women and children that he will 
terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city . . . . 
Little does he know the spirit of the British nation or the tough fiber 
of the Londoners . . . who have been bred to value freedom far above 
their lives.''
  So true of America. Little do these petty tyrants and murderers know 
the spirit of the American people or the tough fiber of the New 
Yorkers, our defense workers, or the civilians who may have spared 
further casualties by taking down the hijackers and their own plane 
above Pennsylvania.
  Firefighters and police officers by the hundreds rushing into the 
collapsing wreckage of the World Trade Center to rescue the victims, 
many, God bless them, so many, losing their lives in the process. One 
firefighter, inured and lying in the hospital, telling the Governor of 
New York: ``What d'ya expect? We're New Yorkers.'' God, they make me 
proud.
  American doctors, nurses, search and rescue teams from all over the 
country, by car, bus and train, using any means to come to the wounded 
and offer their help. Citizens all over the country lining up to donate 
blood, so much blood, in lines up to four hours long. Children outside 
the federal building in Oklahoma, site of another terrorist attack, 
putting their Teddy Bears in a box to be sent to the children in New 
York--now orphaned. ``We just want them to know they will be all 
right,'' an Oklahoma boys says as he drops his bear in the box.
  The face of this tyrant is new, and yet not so new. Like Hitler, he 
abhors a free society and democratic institutions. He is willing to 
kill innocent men, women and children to further his perverse aims; 
there are no means too inhuman, no tactic too appalling to further his 
ends. He thinks we are weak, because we do not tell our citizens what 
to think, how to act, whom to worship. Because we tolerate dissent. He 
does not realize this is our strength. And he has awoken the sleeping 
giant.
  ``What he has done,'' as Churchill had said, ``is to kindle a fire in 
[American] hearts here and all over the world which will glow long 
after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused in [New York, 
Washington and Pennsylvania] have been removed.''
  What these petty tyrants do not understand, have never understood, is 
that for all our rough-and-tumble public discourse, we are one people, 
acting under one President, and capable of greater single-mindedness of 
purpose in times of adversity than any repressive regime. These acts of 
terror will not divide us. All Americans--young, old, Democrats, 
Republicans, men, women, Christians, Moslems and Jews--are united 
against the common foe.
  We will not be turned against each other. We will not tolerate acts 
of violence against Moslem Americans, many of whom lost their lives, 
serve as police and firefighters in the rescue effort, and all of whom 
are equally repelled at these atrocities. We will not relinquish our 
freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, nor sacrifice our precious 
right of privacy or way of life. ``The price of freedom is high, and 
Americans have always paid it,'' President Kennedy said. We pay it 
still.
  This is the Battle of America. The enemy may be new, but the fight 
has always been the same. Our government, our democracy is predicated 
on basic human freedoms, on the right of the governed to control their 
own national destiny. The civil war tested whether any nation so 
conceived could long endure. We have endured. We will go on, with 
growing confidence that we can fight terrorism wherever we find it, and 
strengthened by the conviction that the generation of Americans now 
being tested will not falter or flag.

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