From Jamie Glazov, at FrontPage Magazine, "Memories of Leftist Glee About 9/11":

I will never forget how, seventeen years ago on this day, many of the leftists around me in my neighborhood and community had very little trouble expressing their glee about Al Qaeda' strike on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

I had known some of these leftists for years, and after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 many of them bitterly lamented to me that the “alternative to capitalism” was now gone. A significant number of them retreated into a silent and sullen shell.

Then came 9/11.

Almost overnight, these individuals underwent a miraculous transformation. A bright sparkle could once again be detected in their eyes, as their revolutionary selves came out of a deep slumber. Never had I seen them so happy, so hopeful, and ready for another attempt at creating a glorious and revolutionary future. Without doubt, September 11 represented a personal -- and morbid -- vindication for them.

The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked no sympathy from these individuals. Instead, they saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with people. For my leftist acquaintances, the jihadist terror war gave promise of succeeding in a project in which Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself. “The U.S. brought this on itself,” they stated repeatedly -- and with scornful self-satisfaction.

These disturbing personal encounters I had were a microcosm of the Left’s behavior on the U.S. national scene. In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with eerie repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.

Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, the Left's intellectual guru, Noam Chomsky, exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.

Leftist academics across the country regurgitated Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions...

More.