After 9/11, Denial is Not a Strategy: An Interview with David Beamer

by Jerry Gordon (September 2011)

On this tenth anniversary of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, we spoke with David Beamer, father of Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of Flight 93. The younger Beamer along with many of the 40 passengers and crew attacked their Jihadi skyjackers, thereby dooming the plane, but sparing countless lives and unknown trauma in our nation’s Capitol, the ultimate target of these Islamic radicals. 


To the cry of “Let’s Roll,” Todd Beamer and his fellow Flight 93 passengers initiated what his father David calls the first counter-attack on 9/11. All within an elapsed time of less than 30 minutes after seizure of the aircraft. The 9/11 episode aboard Flight 93 was memorialized in a Universal Studios production, that David Beamer considers a faithful re-telling of the realities aboard the hijacked plane and the actions of his son Todd and other valiant passengers and crew.  

The elder Beamer was in a business meeting in Palo Alto, California that fateful day, when the events aboard Flight 93 concluded in a struggle forcing the plane with its passengers, crew and Islamic Jihadi attackers to crash in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The crash site is now the last of three memorials to the fallen on 9/11.  The Pentagon Memorial was completed and dedicated in 2008, while the Memorial in Lower Manhattan, at the former site of the World Trade Center, will be dedicated on this tenth anniversary. 


David Beamer did not get definitive word of the fate of his son and the other passengers and crew on Flight 93 until later that week.  Because virtually no air traffic was allowed in the days following 9/11, the elder Beamer and a business partner drove across the US to Todd’s home in New Jersey to prepare for a Memorial service that weekend. The irony was that Todd Beamer and his wife Lisa were not expected back from a trip to Italy until the following week.

In the decade following the events of 9/11 that struck down his son and thousands of others, David Beamer has become an articulate opponent of the Islamic Jihad doctrine, its proponents here in America and the politically correct attitude toward fundamentalist Islam espoused by both the Bush and Obama Administrations in Washington. He has appeared in frequent media interviews, hearings before Congress and public presentations across the US. I chanced to hear and meet him at two such occasions in Florida paired with an American Israeli father, a former IDF special operations officer, Tuly Wultz, who lost his son, Daniel to a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2006 while on a visit to Israel.

We were fortunate to interview David Beamer in partial commemoration of 9/11.

Watch this FoxNews YouTube Video interview with David Beamer. 

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