John Solomon, senior journalist and founder of Just The News, said on Monday that it’s hard to compare the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol building to 9/11, but that there were parallels in the impact felt.
“It’s hard to compare one attack to the other, certainly in terms of loss of life and destruction, the 9/11 was far more devastating,” Solomon, the former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times told Jan Jekielek, host of The Epoch Times’ American Thoughts Leaders program.
After the Capitol building was stormed on Jan. 6, Democrat leaders including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and mainstream media called the incident a “terrorist attack” and the people involved in the incident “domestic terrorists.”
Solomon eye-witnessed the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, and thinks there’s a big difference between the storming Capitol build and the 9/11 tragedy that resulted in over 3,000 deaths, the fall of multiple buildings, and half the Pentagon blowing up.
“I think there’s a difference in the scope of loss of human life, of damage.
“But the idea that one of the most important icons of democracy, the House of the people was so easily violated, has a lot of parallels, we wanted to know, how could it be that the Pentagon and the Twin Towers can be taken down by a bunch of guys in an airplane? I think people want to know: ‘how did this happen?’” Solomon added.
As a life-time conservative journalist, Solomon said he believes that no matter which side of the political aisle one is on, Americans would easily feel shocked to see the Capitol being attacked, and the “fervor to prevent a further attack” is similar to 9/11.
Pelosi called the incident on Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and used the incident to impeach President Trump.
But Solomon and his media called it a riot, since “there had to be some effort that the intent and the purpose of this invasion of the Capitol was to overthrow the government. And I don’t see that being the case at this moment.”
Solomon said there are many questions regarding the Jan. 6 incident, but he knows one fact: top Pentagon officials had asked the Capitol police chief on Jan. 4 if they needed help. Although the police chief said he liked the idea, he was told the “powers that be didn’t like the optics of having soldiers in the Capitol.”
“We just don’t know what Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell knew and what they [said].”
Solomon said with 28,000 troops now in the capital city, “That’s five to seven times what is left in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the U.S. troops, so we have one of the largest deployments of U.S. troops in American history to an American city. The city is on lockdown.”
Solomon said there is now a high degree of confidence that people in Washington are “in as good a security posture as we could ever be, if anyone were to try something” and that alone is enough to “ward off” any serious violence around Inauguration Day.
