‘Praise Allah’? No, Leave Him Out of It

I stand with my toes at the window of the Library Tower building, 70 floors above downtown Los Angeles, and stare into the drop.

The height buckles my legs, and my heart rises in my chest. From up here, with airliners circling the basin, Sept. 11 is unimaginable. I came up here after watching the video of Osama bin Laden gloating about that day.

To the southwest I can make out the USC campus, where a 25-year-old dental student named Prasana Kalahasthi hanged herself after her husband was killed in a jet that exploded into the World Trade Center.

Directly below, people on the street are mere suggestions of themselves, and cars are game board markers. It is not quite possible to get settled with the idea that people leaped to their deaths from this height in New York, pawing the air in descent.

Former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner looks out the window of his law office on the 70th floor. He says he read a story about two children who looked up from the street in New York, saw people falling to their deaths, and thought the birds were on fire.

He looks down and says:

“I can’t comprehend jumping into the void like that. But with the fire at your back and jet fuel exploding, who knows?”

The Library Tower is the tallest building west of the Mississippi, and I wanted this thread of a link to the people whose incineration Bin Laden was celebrating. The tower, which used to be the eighth-tallest building in the country, is now the sixth.

On the video, Bin Laden smiled and laughed like the devil himself. He described how the death and destruction at the World Trade Center towers had exceeded his expectations.

“We calculated in advance the number of casualties . . .” Bin Laden said to a coterie of followers who included a Saudi sheik.

“Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is what we had hoped for.”

And the sheik responded even more grotesquely:

“Allah be praised.”

About 3,000 civilians were murdered in New York on Sept. 11, and several hundred more near Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania.

What kind of animal thanks God?

“I know people are talking about the video, but I don’t think I’m going to be watching it,” Dick McCloskey told me by phone from his home in South Bend, Ind., his wife Anne at his side. “We’re still just trying to come to grips with reality.”

The McCloskeys lost a 25-year-old daughter, Katie, who was sitting roughly where the first plane knifed into the tower. I met Mr. McCloskey as he walked the streets of New York with photos of Katie, searching for a miracle.

He implored me on that day, in the face of such unspeakable madness and grief, to “say good things.”

After watching the Bin Laden video, I don’t have a single good thing to say about idolatrous fanatics and freaks who hate, divide and kill in the name of religion.

Allah had nothing to do with Sept. 11. Human bodies were crushed and cremated. People leaped out the window at 1,000 feet, and no god of Osama bin Laden or Jerry Falwell had anything to do with it.

“After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center,” Bin Laden said on the video. “The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.”

”. . . Everyone was very joyous and saying, ‘Allah is great, Allah is great,’ ” said the sheik. “ ‘We are thankful to Allah,’ ‘Praise Allah.’ And I was happy for the happiness of my brothers . . . Thank Allah. Allah is great, praise be to Allah.”

If Allah is great in this way, he would bring Bin Laden and the sheik to me here on the 70th floor of this tower, where I would tie them together by their beards and give a push.

And then I would be happy for the happiness of my brothers.

Praise be to Allah.

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at Steve.Lopez@latimes.com.

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The McCloskey family has established a college scholarship in tribute to their daughter. Donations can be made to the Katie McCloskey Memorial Scholarship Fund and mailed to the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, P.O. Box 837, South Bend, IN 46624.