On September 11th, synagogue presents "good" Arabs to diaspora Jews and press

Arab group, Sharaka, with Israeli leader Noam Meirov on left, Rabbi Erez Sherman in center

Bridges Built on Remembrance: Sharaka's Message of Middle Eastern Reconciliation on September 11th

On September 11, 2025—24 years after the terrorist attacks that transformed American consciousness about jihadist imperialism — Sinai Temple in Los Angeles hosted an evening that would have seemed inconceivable to many in 2001. The Conservative Jewish synagogue welcomed Sharaka, an initiative bringing together Arab Muslims, Christians, and Israeli Jews in dialogue about peace and cooperation in the Middle East.

The Context of September 11th Programming

Rabbi Erez Sherman opened the evening by acknowledging the significance of the date, recalling his experience as a Columbia University student watching ash-covered fire trucks return to their stations on that September day in 2001. The temple's annual tradition of honoring the Los Angeles Fire Department preceded the main program, creating a framework that explicitly connected American sacrifice with Middle Eastern reconciliation efforts.

The choice to host this particular dialogue on September 11th was deliberate. As Rabbi Sherman noted, the prospect of commemorating this date "with a dialogue and a panel of Muslims, Jews, and Christians from the Abraham Accords countries" would have seemed like fantasy two decades ago. The programming represented both remembrance of tragedy and a assertion that constructive engagement, rather than perpetual conflict, offers the path forward.

Sharaka's Mission and Methodology

Sharaka, meaning "partnership" in Arabic, emerged from the 2020 Abraham Accords with a specific theory: government-to-government peace agreements fail without people-to-people connections. Noam Meirov, the organization's managing director, explained that previous Arab-Israeli peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan had not translated into comfortable civilian interactions or genuine normalization.

The organization operates on multiple fronts: bringing impactful leaders from Abraham Accords countries to Israel, conducting Holocaust education programs in the Arab world, and engaging with university campuses where anti-Israel sentiment often flourishes. Their approach deliberately targets influential individuals—mayors, business leaders, academics—who can amplify moderate messages within their home communities.

Video of Sharaka Arab program at Sinai Temple on September 11, 2025

Personal Narratives of Transformation

Fatima Al-Harbi: From Curiosity to Advocacy

Fatima Al-Harbi's journey from Bahrain illustrates the complex dynamics Sharaka seeks to address. Raised in a relatively tolerant environment where Jews and Christians were indigenous community members, she nonetheless absorbed broader Arab media narratives portraying Israelis as enemies. Her first visit to Israel shattered these preconceptions when a Jewish stranger welcomed her warmly in Tel Aviv, recognizing her as being from an Abraham Accords country.

Her subsequent social media documentation of positive interactions—praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque without harassment, being welcomed at the Western Wall—generated significant backlash at home. However, it also enabled her to serve as what she calls "a bridge" between communities, ultimately leading her to publish a children's book promoting interfaith understanding.

Yousef's Moroccan Perspective

Youssef Elazhari, the representative from Morocco, described a different dynamic, noting that Morocco's Jewish history provided some immunity from "Arabic propaganda" that demonized Israel. However, his decision to visit Israel still resulted in accusations of being a "Mossad agent" upon his return.

Yousef's most significant contribution may be his theological reframing of Muslim-Jewish relations. He directly challenged hadith traditions that prophesy end-times warfare between Muslims and Jews, instead pointing to Quranic verses that promise the land of Israel to Jewish people. This approach—using Islamic scripture to support rather than oppose Jewish claims—represents a fundamental shift in religious argumentation.

The Egyptian Academic's Discovery

Hisam's story reflects the power of direct experience over media narratives. As an Egyptian studying in American universities, he encountered Jewish students who spoke Arabic, studied Islam, and traveled extensively in Arab countries—knowledge that contrasted sharply with his own ignorance about Jewish life and Israeli society.

His "secret" study year in Israel exposed him to the country's ethnic and religious diversity: Russian immigrants, Moroccan Jews, Egyptian Jews, Arab citizens, Christian Arabs, and American immigrants. This complexity challenged simplistic enemy narratives while his academic success there—becoming the first Egyptian valedictorian at Tel Aviv University—demonstrated possibilities for constructive engagement.

Addressing Religious and Ideological Dimensions

The evening's most substantive discussion occurred when audience members raised questions about Islamic texts and their relationship to Jewish-Muslim relations. Yousef acknowledged that certain hadith traditions do contain problematic content about Jewish-Muslim conflict, but he argued for distinguishing between Quranic authority and later traditions.

His theological position—that the Quran itself supports Jewish claims to the land of Israel and that Muslim recognition of this represents fulfillment of prophecy—directly challenges both traditional Islamic anti-Zionism and assumptions about inherent religious conflict. However, he also admitted that advancing such arguments publicly in Morocco nearly resulted in imprisonment, illustrating the risks these moderate voices face.

The Question of Authenticity and Representation

Critical observers might question whether Sharaka's speakers represent genuine grassroots sentiment or merely exceptional individuals whose views don't reflect broader Arab and Muslim populations. The speakers themselves addressed this concern directly, with Fatima asserting that "the majority of Muslims and Arabs living in our countries are like us" but remain silent due to social and political pressures.

The organization's methodology of targeting influential individuals rather than conducting mass outreach suggests recognition that changing elite opinion may be more effective than attempting to shift popular sentiment directly. Their success in bringing hundreds of Moroccans to Holocaust education programs and their social media reach to "tens of thousands" of regional followers indicates some broader resonance.

Security and Strategic Considerations

The presentation occurred against the backdrop of ongoing regional conflicts, including the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and subsequent warfare. Israeli speaker Noam, who responded to those attacks as a reservist, framed Sharaka's work explicitly as strategic response to terrorism: "the only real revenge or real victory" against Hamas's goal of canceling the Abraham Accords' expansion would be achieving more peace agreements.

This framing positions moderate Arab voices not as naive peaceniks but as strategic partners in confronting shared enemies. The speakers consistently characterized groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis as obstacles to both Israeli security and Arab progress, suggesting alignment rather than contradiction between security concerns and peace-building efforts.

Historical Context and September 11th Connections

The timing of this dialogue on September 11th raises questions about appropriateness and messaging. The speakers explicitly connected their Middle Eastern experiences to American trauma, with Noam Meirov noting that 9/11 showed Americans "something that is very similar to what we have to like this eternal war that we are feeling" in the Middle East.

This framing positions the attacks as part of broader extremist ideology that threatens both American and moderate Middle Eastern interests. The speakers argued that the same terrorist mindset that attacked America continues to impede regional progress, making American-Middle Eastern cooperation essential for confronting shared threats.

Challenges and Limitations

Several limitations emerge from this presentation. First, the speakers' safety concerns—with some facing imprisonment or death threats—highlight how exceptional their positions may be within their home societies. Second, their focus on elite outreach may not address deeper popular sentiments that fuel conflict. Third, the Abraham Accords' limited scope (excluding Palestinians) means their model may not address the core issues that generate regional tension.

Additionally, the speakers' emphasis on ignorance rather than ideology as the root of anti-Israel sentiment may underestimate more fundamental religious and political disagreements. While ignorance certainly plays a role, attributing all hostility to misunderstanding may oversimplify complex historical grievances and competing national narratives.

Conclusion: Promise and Peril of People-to-People Peace

The Sharaka presentation at Sinai Temple represented both remarkable progress and persistent challenges in Middle Eastern relations. The very existence of Arab Muslims and Christians willing to publicly advocate for Jewish-Muslim cooperation, particularly on September 11th, demonstrates significant shifts since 2001.

However, the speakers' acknowledgment of personal risks, government constraints, and popular resistance illustrates how fragile these developments remain. Their work represents a crucial test case for whether people-to-people connections can indeed create sustainable peace where government agreements have previously failed.

The September 11th timing, rather than being inappropriate, may actually highlight the stakes involved. If moderate voices like those in Sharaka can build bridges across the religious and ethnic divides that extremists seek to exploit, their success could honor the memory of 9/11 victims by demonstrating that dialogue and cooperation offer better paths forward than perpetual conflict and suspicion.

Whether such efforts can scale beyond exceptional individuals to broader populations remains the crucial question for Middle Eastern peace and non-Muslim security interests alike.

"9/13" - Thwart an imperialism that's again conquering the West via anti-Semitism

Islamists hijack jets as missiles into NYC
World Trade Center towers 9/11/01

How do Western societies, (who on Sept 11th used to believe "Never Forget") or North American Jews, (who profess "Never Again") fail to see and fight the connection in today's times? Germany's National Socialists rose to power by scapegoating Jews and stoking religious and ethnic supremacy among Aryan Christians. Upon the Nazi defeat, Egypt repatriated  Goebbels' propagandists to advance pan-Muslim power by combine Muslim theology's Jew-hatred with a socio-political hatred for the Jewish expansion in Palestine. Unified by anti-Zionism, the Islamist global revolution spread to the reaches of Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. 

Today, anti-Christian Americanism and anti-Jewish Israelism has years of global spread by Al-Jazeera, A.P., Reuters, and Muslim news outlets. So what happened to concerns of Never Forget and Never Again when it comes to Judeo-Christian societies importing Islamic supremacist-raised immigrants from societies raised to hate "the infidel" and "the Zionist Jews?"

"9/13" by Daniel Greenfield in "Sultan Knish," Sept 11,'22

"As another 9/11 anniversary arrives, we are not in 9/10, a world before the fall of the towers, nor 9/12, the world that was born in the aftermath of the attacks, rather we are in 9/13.

In 9/13, years have passed without significant Islamic terrorist attacks taking place on American soil. In past surveys, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.

In 9/13, culture wars, COVID, pronouns and other concerns have vastly eclipsed not only the barbaric mass murder of thousands, but the recognition that we are at war. And that war is far from over.

America’s Islamic population is growing. The open border doesn’t just bring in drug dealers and gang members, but massive numbers of people from the Muslim world. The Afghan airlift and visas will probably end up importing at least a quarter of a million as family reunification kicks in. Our national demographics are being transformed - with the same eventual outcome as Europe.

9/13 is all about forgetting . . .  After WWI, most people were done with world wars. But world wars weren’t done with them. ... the Jihad isn’t some nationalistic European grudge match. It’s a thousand-year assault on the rest of the world that will not stop just because we’ve decided to move on.  Article continues:

Middle-Eastern Muslim immigrants to America march through L.A against Israel and her supporters.
In the ensuing days, some protesters hunted Jewish civilians to attack (May, 2021)

Last May 2021, in reaction to the anti-Semitism exhibited in Islamo-Marxists' anti-Israel demonstrations in New York and Los Angeles  (whose vitriol matched that in European cities), Daniel Greenfield explained that Jewish-Americans should stop (not enable) immigration of Muslims into North America. 

"Stop Jew-Hate: End Islamist Immigration" by Daniel Greenfield 26 May'21 Frontpage Magazine:

In 2015, The Atlantic ran a cover story titled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” In 2021, the question is whether it’s time for the Jews to leave New York and Los Angeles. ...  Most stories about antisemitism in Europe reference the Swedish city whose Jewish population dropped from 3,000 to barely 800. Current estimates are that Malmo will have no Jews left by the end of the decade as its population flees Muslim mob violence, firebombings, and random assaults: including 100 aimed at its sole rabbi. “Anti-Semitism in Malmö reveals flaws in Swedish immigration system.” There are equally big flaws in our immigration system and too many Jewish groups have wasted time on outreach - instead of working toward immigration-reform to stop the ‘Malmoization’ of New York and LA.  

(May 21, 2021) Investigations are underway in New York and Los Angeles after antisemitic attacks earlier this week. In New York, a man was attacked during dueling rallies over the violence in the Middle East. In Los Angeles, Jewish diners were attacked at a restaurant. Jeff Pegues has the story.

The collapse of a liberal middle class into dueling Marxist and Fascist youth mobs is mainstreaming antisemitism in America the way that it already has in Europe. But the heavy lifting will still be done by young men whose parents came here from Iraq, Pakistan, or Gaza that we’ve seen assaulting random Jewish people in New York and Los Angeles. The cries of “Kill Jews, Free Palestine” are not a horrid aberration: they’re the new normal. The one thing that could have stopped this and perhaps still might would be for American Jews to be willing to say the unspeakable: that some people belong in this country and others don’t. The idea that immigration should be a mutual social contract instead of a suicide pact is profoundly alien to everything that millions of Americans, Jews and Christians, have absorbed over the years. Beyond the Christian churches and HIAS which lobby to resettle more Islamists in America, much of the country is wedded to the idea that we must take anyone who comes. But when we take anyone who comes, then we’re the ones who get taken for a ride.

While our streets are filled with the homeless and unemployed Americans are dying of drug overdoses at record rates, churches and temples lecture their parishioners on their moral duty to bring more Iraqis, Syrians, and Pakistanis to America.

But 9/11 and the occasional terror attack in a major city are just the appetizers of Islamist demographic colonization. The next stage, mob violence by what the European press carefully calls “angry youths”, is now underway in New York and Los Angeles. It won’t stop there. The era of the “lone wolf” Jihadi hasn’t ended yet, but the future of Islamic terror in America will be group attacks, like those in Bataclan in Paris, and more routine riots and mass assaults abetted by their leftist allies.

Jews in New York City are the easiest targets, but as the Swedes or the French could tell you, or the Poles and the Czechs, it rarely ends there.

Muslim violence isn’t a response to oppression or persecution. It’s a supremacist theological mission to colonize and subjugate non-Muslims as numerous Jihadis have told us at their trials. We chose not to take them at their word.

Israel is not the issue. Just as Mohammed cartoons, a teddy bear with the wrong name, or false reports of a desecrated Koran were not the real issues at the heart of other Muslim rampages.

Where is the movement to close the Democrat open-border policy - which permits in immigrants from countries other than Central America, such as Venezuela, where Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards  Corps (IGRC) has a strong military relationship? In August, they announced simulated war games (along with Russia and China) in Venezuela. 

At the 9/11 Memorial Garden Park 5-years ago, writer Daniel Greenfield addressed the issue of 9/11 commemorations omitting educating about the cause of the Islamic imperialist crusade against the West.

"The war continues, the war goes on, and as each September 11th passes we become less cognizant of the original attacks and of the causes of those attacks. 

People are forgetting the history. they're forgetting just why this happened and what this all meant. We are forgetting the stories of the heroes but we're also forgetting that we were attacked because we are a free people. Because we choose to believe that we can actually elect our own leaders. That we can actually allow everyone to practice their own religion and that we can actually allow people freedom of speech and yes that does include drawing Muhammad cartoons.

We've forgotten all that and in the process we are forgetting the reason why we are a threat to the terrorists. We are not a threat to the terrorists because we have large bombers or because we have missiles and tanks. There are other countries including countries in the Middle East that have those.

What threatens the Islamic terrorists - and it is indeed an Islamic terrorist - is our culture our way of life and the fact that we do not obey them. That we do not worship as they do. And that we believe that we have the right and the responsibility and the power to be what we are.

This is a cultural war it is a civilizational clash. The terrorist attacks, even the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11th, were just a worst-case scenario. Even as Islamic migration continues to flood into this country, the Islamic population of this country has dramatically increased. Instead of reducing the population of Islamic settlers since September 11th, we have dramatically increased both them and their policy and their influence. Keith Ellison was formerly with the Nation of Islam (and is now is affiliated with Islamist organizations such as CAIR) is now the second in command of the DNC (currently seeking re-election as Attorney General of Minnesota). 

Barack Hussein Obama, a man who described the Islamic call to prayer (which includes the very prettiest sound on Earth, that was heard by the passengers on Flight 93) became the president of the United States. And so we are still commemorating a war that does not end, we are commemorating a tragedy that has never been resolved, the war continues the struggle goes on and we must go on with it." 

 

'Why on Sept 12, 2001, and even 20-years later, still - it's not over'- Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, editor of The Point on Frontpage Magazine and SultanKnish.com (and an orthodox Jew) assesses how Western societies have not evolved to recognize Islamism - and defend their people against Islamist imperialism since Sept 11, 2001.

"It's Not Over" - Sultan Knish, Sept 12, 2012 

“In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate,” a terrorist declares on the Flight 93 cockpit recording. That’s followed by the sounds of the terrorists assaulting a passenger.“Please don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “Oh God.”

As the passengers rush the cabin, a Muslim terrorist proclaims, “In the name of Allah.”

1

As New York firefighters struggle up the South Tower with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs trying to save lives until the very last moment, the Flight 93 passengers push toward the cockpit. The Islamic hijackers call out, “Allahu Akbar.”

(Mr. Greenfield discussed this and related ideas at Beverly Hills' 9/11 Memorial Garden after the Fire Dept of L.A.'s 9/11/17 Memorial Ceremony).

 

Mohammed Atta had advised his fellow terrorists that when the fighting begins, “Shout, 'Allahu Akbar,' because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” He quoted the Koran’s command that Muslim holy warriors terrorize non-believers by beheading them and urged them to follow Mohammed’s approach, “Take prisoners and kill them.”

The 9/11 ringleader quoted the Koran again. “No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood.”

Two decades on, the West’s cultural fault-line is exposed by September 11th's remains

by Melanie Phillips in JNS.org Sept 9, 2021

For the West, there are no “forever wars.” Its wars are either won or lost; there are victors and vanquished. For Islamic extremists, war is indeed forever; defeat is only temporary.

Few of us, if any, will ever forget those terrible images of the 9/11 attacks on America. Twenty years on, it’s painfully clear that many Westerners still don’t grasp the full nature and scope of what they witnessed when the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan fell.

On that dreadful day, the West was brought face to face with the fundamentalist strain dominant in the Islamic world. This involves the promotion of jihad, or holy war, against the non-Islamic world and those Muslims who the fundamentalists think aren’t Islamic enough.

The West, particularly Britain and America, had mostly ignored the fact that this war had already been under way against itself for at least a decade.

In the 1980s, Western-backed mujahideen ran the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The British and Americans ignored warnings that those fighters were Islamic fundamentalists who would now be galvanized to follow their defeat of the Soviet empire by attempting to defeat what they saw as the Western one. The rise of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were the result.

But the West had also ignored the mounting evidence of a cultural onslaught against it that had been waged by both Sunni and Shia Islam for years.

Britain seemed oblivious to the fact that, during the 1980s, Muslim immigrants had brought with them institutions dominated by the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that had been imported into Pakistan and Bangladesh from Saudi Arabia. With a growing domestic constituency of fundamentalists who were being either ignored or indulged, Britain was sleepwalking into Islamization.

In 1989, the British writer Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, for insulting Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. He was forced to live in hiding for years, with his book publicly burned on British streets.

Yet few grasped that this was far more than an attack on a writer. It was an attempt to force the West to submit to Islamic values. And the emergence of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran itself galvanized in turn the Sunni world to jihad.

After 9/11, however, the West told itself that jihadi fundamentalism was a “perversion” of Islam. This is dishonest. While many Western Muslims endorse human rights and deplore the atrocities perpetrated in the name of their religion, jihadi excesses are nevertheless rooted solidly in Islamic religious texts. Sept. 11 was an act of Islamic holy war.

Those who cannot even bring themselves to name the enemy that is waging war upon them will be defeated by it. That’s why the claim of “Islamophobia” is so troubling.

For while real prejudice against Muslims is wrong, “Islamophobia” was invented by the holy warriors of the Muslim Brotherhood to silence any adverse comment of Islam. It was a religious obligation to impose a Muslim law of blasphemy. By enlisting against “Islamophobia,” the West has effectively bent its knee to Islam—whose very name means submission.

Even today, Britain has not outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, ignoring the way its sponsorship of myriad groups and institutions has embedded the jihad into British and Western society.

In 2004, The Washington Post reported that American Muslim Brotherhood supporters made up “the US Islamic community’s most organized force” by running hundreds of mosques and business ventures, promoting civic activities and setting up organizations to promote Islam.

Yet documents unearthed during the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood in America was involved in weapons training, counter-espionage against the FBI and CIA, and “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

No less perversely, the West has continually denied that the Arab and Muslim war against Israel is rooted in Islamic holy war (a blindness shared by Israel itself, which chooses to deal with this war of annihilation on more manageable nationalistic rather than religious grounds). It has similarly ignored the anti-Semitism that courses through the Islamic world, even though leading Islamists have acknowledged that their fear and hatred of the Jews lie behind their war on the West and modernity.

The 9/11 terror attacks didn’t just reveal the West’s blindness over Islamization. They also exposed its cultural and civilizational fault line that had been opening up since early in the 20th century.

British isolationism is rooted in the carnage of the First World War. In America, the avoidance of what Thomas Jefferson called “entangling alliances” goes back to the founding fathers.

Appeasement-minded Britain and America woke up to the threat from Hitler almost too late—and too late to prevent the Holocaust.

But after the Second World War, Western elites persuaded themselves they could actually abolish war itself. Economic ties would avoid it, international law would prevent genocide, and war itself would be replaced by negotiation and “peace processes.”

For a while, 9/11 punctured this lethal fantasy, resulting in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to suppress their incubation of Islamic terror.

In both places, however, the West was unable and unwilling to stay the course. Public rage at the junking of the “never war” fantasy was hugely compounded by the West’s strategic error in believing that invading these countries and then helping them become democratic societies would draw their terrorist sting.

The seriousness of the resulting mistakes in Iraq, in particular, seemed to confirm the influential view, in a West that had lost its belief in itself, that this arrogant and imperialistic culture had no right to tell others how to behave.

So the West failed to see that while the execution of these wars may have been deeply flawed, the necessity to defend itself against a deadly foe was all too real and had not gone away.

This loss of cultural self-belief had many causes. Secularism had eroded the biblical foundations of the West. The carnage of World War I destroyed the belief in dying for your country.

Most devastatingly of all, the Holocaust passed a shattering judgment against modernity. So in the repudiation of its foundational beliefs, the West arrived at precisely the same point as the Islamic jihadists.

Of course, Westerners never saw any similarity between themselves and Islamists locked into the seventh century and whom it dismissed as incomprehensible, crazy and worthless.

But in a mirror image, the West was busily severing the connection with its own historic values. This was compounded by an arrogant assumption that Western attitudes were universal.

The West therefore tried to impose its utopian, post-modern belief in negotiation and compromise upon a Middle East and Islamic world that saw conflict solely in terms of victory and defeat, strength and weakness.

And so the West has continued to repeat its fiascos by indulging in the same fantasies that it will end the “forever wars”—whether through the Israel-Palestine “peace process,” the Iran nuclear deal or abandoning Afghanistan, where both British and American governments are now spinning themselves the fantasy that Taliban “realists” will keep the Taliban jihadists in check.

For Islamists, war is indeed forever. For such fanatics, defeat is only ever temporary.

For the West, however, there are no “forever wars.” Its wars are either won or lost; there are victors and vanquished.

And military strength matters less than belief. The 9/11 attackers didn’t use sophisticated military hardware. They hijacked civilian aircraft and turned them into flying human bombs of enormous destructive potential.

What fuels the jihad is the power of an idea. That idea is the cult of death.

To overcome a cult of death, the West needs a belief in life. Its own life. That is the way to draw the necessary courage and resolve from this most somber anniversary; but alas, it seems the most difficult of lessons to learn.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.

Rescuers-united against terror, wildfires, and disasters- L.A.F.D & Israel

On September 11, 2013, Israelis honored and remembered the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children who died at the hands of terrorists 12 years ago.  A memorial ceremony at the site of the 9/11 Living Memorial in Jerusalem, honored the memories of the victims. 

At the Van Nuys, California fire-house (which sent its firefighters who happened to be on the East Coast in 2001) Southwest US Consul General David Siegel delivered a vase of flowers sent on behalf of the Living Memorial- to the Sherman Oaks stationhouse monument to the NYC World Trade Center and Pentagon victims.  The firefighters augment their unique monument which contains a limestone, remnant brick from The Pentagon and a steel beam from the World Trade Center- with a custom display of the names of the more than 3,000 people killed by Al Qaeda's hijacking on Sept. 11, 2001.




Asst. Chief Patrick Butler had collaborated with the Fire & Rescue Chief of Israel during a trip there.  Butler consulted with his Israeli counterpart in coping with the expansive Mr. Carmel Fire, and compared best-practices in first-response to disaster rescue- an area that Israel and earthquake-prone L.A. emergency services need to have expertise in.
World Net Daily reported in "Are Terrorists Setting U.S. Wildfires?"

In July 2012, William Scott, a former National Security Agency official and Aviation Week editor, told the American Center for Democracy that terrorists are using fire as a tactical weapon of war. Scott explained that after U.S. Navy SEALs killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, they “captured a treasure trove of material that provided some unprecedented insight into the al-Qaida plans. And one of those was a detailed campaign for starting fires throughout the [American] West... U.S. officials have pretty much determined that some of the fires that burned in California [in 2011] were ignited by al-Qaida operatives,” Scott said.

Israeli Consul General to Southwest US David Siegel spoke about Israel's shared situation in defeating the forces of Islamism- especially those with WMD - such as chemical weapons in Syria.



Battalion 10 Cmdr. Don Reyes addressed the 9/11/13 Ceremony at Fire Station 88 in Sherman Oaks with his flying cross-country to NYC with 23 others to search, rescue, and comfort the victims of Al-Qaeda's attack on the domestic United States.



Event attendees, Fran and Harold Barash, discussed that 9/11 ceremonies such as Sherman Oaks ought to do more to educate Americans to the nature of the Islamist movement which attacked  (and we still combat) with its aims to subjugate non-Muslims to its will.