Penn & Teller's Simple Message To Terrorists

Penn & Teller give their simple message to the suicide skyjackers of September 11 in this video advocating new construction on the site of the World Trade Center, which you can watch here.

There is an emotional appeal to rebuilding the fallen World Trade Center even taller than before as a rebuke to the contemptible Islam which sought to knock them down. On the other hand, the World Trade Center was a bad idea, economically and socially, from the beginning. They cleared away a working neighborhood of businesses to make way for the WTC, which substituted a sterile plaza nobody used. It was the kind of gargantuan urban renewal project which Jane Jacobs rightfully argued was bad for the city. Ric Burns lays out the problems of the WTC in his excellent documentary, "New York."

They could never fill the WTC, either. Even at the end, many of its floors were empty. Worse yet, building so much unwanted and unneeded office space depressed the market in the entire neighborhood. Rather than stimulating the economy of lower Manhattan, the WTC depressed it. It's not clear that committing the same economic error twice would be a sound decision, when the only reward is the emotional satisfaction derived from thwarting the terrorists' goal. We should never be driven by what terrorists think. Instead of spending a couple billion dollars to reconstruct the World Trade Center to impress upon Islamist fanatics the futility of their attacks on America, that money would be better spent simply smashing our Islamist enemies like bugs where ever we find them.