ABSTRACT
The sheer scale of the 11 September attack made it seem earth shattering to us at the time. The world witnessed the attack in real time, and the vividness of the images of the planes hitting, and the towers collapsing both in slow motion and with incredible rapidity, made it in fact an event that changed the world. The attack hit the world’s hegemonic power on a hitherto unknown scale. The richest and greatest city was the victim of a handful of young men who had decided to sacrifice their own lives and those of thousands of innocent victims. The fact that 11 September outdid Hollywood symbolized in many ways how the event had an impact on the global society and culture. Not even the world’s leading factory of fiction had come up with such imagination and images, which made the event in a way unthinkable.3 This was ‘the most violent event ever to be shown instantaneously on television, which invoked a world of speed, instantaneity, copresence’,4 as well as a global threat. Though America, and its citizens, was the foremost target of the attack, the victims represented the global dimension of this terrorist attack: Britons, Germans, Japanese, Chileans, South Africans, Arabs and many others were among them. The 11 September terrorist attack claimed the largest number of victims of any single act. Its extraordinary symbolic power
was augmented by the media; it spread fear among an entire nation; and it provoked a war in reaction.
