For people browsing the 9/11 tag and seeing the phrase "Freedom Fries" and not knowing Whisky Tango Foxtrot that is, from an old hag who was there: Those weren't actually directly a part of 9/11 - that didn't happen on the day or anything. The Freedom Fries thing came sometime afterward (I forget the timeframe, a few months?) when President George W. Bush pushed for a war in Iraq as part of a general "War on Terror" that looked not only to root out Al Qaeda, but to go after Iraq on the idea that they had a secret stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that the United States needed to do a pre-emtive strike war ("Shock and Awe") to keep ourselves safe. Not everyone was on board with this. I remember being fiercely anti-Iraq War even in my younger, stupider days because it didn't strike me as fair (and much more war-crimey) to do a pre-emptive strike without any actual evidence of the alleged WMDs. More Americans than you think felt this way, even some who were traditionally conservative. (This was the event that turned me from conservative to liberal / got me started toward left-leaning, actually). Anyway, one of the people not on board with U.S. foreign policy at the time was the President of France (I can't remember who it was. Chirac?) He criticized Bush and his administration over the war. Right-leaning politicians then demanded that Americans start calling French Fries "Freedom Fries" as a way of continuing to have our fries and eat them, too, while snubbing France. I am dead serious. We, as a people, were supposed to start shunning French things. To enjoy French things was seen as unpatriotic, almost as much as if you enjoyed Middle Eastern things. Yes, there was racism, and lots of it, what do you expect? It was in the vein of calling sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" back in the WWI and WWII days to divest it from Germany. Restaurants were calling their French fries "Freedom Fries" for a while. It was catchy, it was gimmicky. It didn't last. (And, by the way, there were no WMDs).
