FORT HOOD

An American, and Muslim, tragedy

BY MOHAMMAD SHAKIR

The breaking news about Fort Hood made me cringe.

Like most Muslims, I hoped the shooter would be a Smith or Jones, while some smirked and gleefully waited for a Muslim name to say, I told you so.

KARL MARX

Reality defeated communist theory

BY CARLOS MONTANER

Twenty years ago, the rubble of the Berlin Wall crashed down loudly onto Marxism and pulverized it. Something that, paradoxically, confirmed Marx's opinion about theories, which he explained in his Theses on Feuerbach: ``It is in practice that man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the worldliness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking.''

FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL

A tribute to heroes

BY TOM RIDGE and ED RENDELL

Work began this past weekend on one of America's newest national parks. The families of the people aboard Flight 93, which went down in Somerset, Pa., in the Sept. 11 attacks, will gather at the crash site today for the ceremonial groundbreaking.

VETERANS

Many ways to honor troops

BY DAVID BRODER

Acouple weeks before Veterans Day, I went down to the World War II Memorial on the Mall to join Bob and Elizabeth Dole and a group of elderly soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen from her hometown of Salisbury, N.C. They had been flown to Washington that morning to get their first view of the nation's tribute to the troops that helped defeat Hitler's forces.

NOVEMBER 9

In Germany, shattered glass and a shattered wall

BY BRIAN SIEGAL and KLAUS RANNER

The ninth day of November is laden with meaning in Germany. Two of those dates in the 20th century, 1938 and 1989, have special significance and everlasting lessons,

COMMUNISM'S END

Europe is not yet whole, free or entirely at peace

BY DANIEL HAMILTON

On Nov. 9, 1989, I found myself on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in the apartment of a dissident Lutheran pastor whose church provided safe haven for disaffected East Germans.

MEDIA ETHICS

Kurtz has a conflict

BY EDWARD WASSERMAN

Iwatch Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources media-review show most Sunday mornings on CNN. That's partly because since Fox News scrapped its weekly News Watch, it's the only regular program on national television that looks at the news media critically. That's also because Kurtz, The Washington Post's chief media writer, does a good job bringing in knowledgeable people to talk about the major traps the media fell into that week.