Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks

For those of us who vividly remember September 11, 2001, it is difficult to believe that 25 years have passed since that horrific, historic day when 19 Muslim hijackers took control of four airplanes; the hijackers crashed two of the airplanes into the World Trade Center and one of the airplanes into the Pentagon before passengers on the fourth airplane made sure that it crashed in an open field instead of hitting its designated target, most likely the U.S. Capitol building. That morning, I was at my parents' house when the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center. For a fleeting moment, it was possible to believe--or at least hope--that this was a terrible accident, but after the second airplane crashed into the World Trade Center 17 minutes later we knew that we were under attack. I will never forget one of the TV talking heads saying something to the effect that we will have to spend millions of dollars to investigate this attack and find out who is behind it. I ruefully said to my parents, "They can save that money or send it to me, because I know the answer: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Osama bin Laden."

My point was less about my intelligence and more about the willful stupidity of our leaders and our media members. Just eight years earlier, Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, causing extensive damage while injuring over 1000 people and killing six people, an attack that should have been foreseen and prevented if the U.S. government had thoroughly investigated the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, as I explained in "Our War is With the Jews": Main PLO Faction Admits the Truth:

[Y]ears later (after the 9/11 attacks) "a Congressional investigation revealed that bin Laden had paid the legal fees of El Sayed Nosair, the man who murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990. Failing to distinguish between good and evil prevented U.S. authorities from fully investigating the Kahane murder and discovering the connections between Nosair, Omar Abdel-Rahman (the 'blind Sheikh') and bin Laden's al Qaeda; at the time, Kahane's murder was blithely dismissed by the media and by the U.S. government as a radical Arab killing a prominent Jewish figure but we now know that this crime was the first terrorist act committed on American soil by the group that eventually attacked the World Trade Center in 1993: bin Laden's confederates failed to bring down the Twin Towers that time but the next group that bin Laden sent succeeded eight years later. The idea that Kahane and bin Laden are equally radical and equally dangerous is an example of the pernicious, fallacious thinking that Vladimir Nabokov called 'poshlost.' There are not two equally valid sides regarding Kahane and bin Laden; Kahane proposed political solutions (with which one is free to agree or disagree), while bin Laden proposed (and delivered) mass murder around the globe; it is impossible to act correctly without making correct distinctions."

The failure of Western governments to sufficiently confront the nations and groups that foment Islamic terrorism has repeatedly led to suffering. Instead of defeating her enemies, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Soon after, Gazans elected Hamas to power. On October 7, 2023, Hamas conducted a mass casualty terrorist attack in Israel during which more than 1200 people--mostly Jews--were killed, more than 3400 people were injured, and over 250 people were taken into Gaza as hostages. Proportional to population size, Israel's casualties on that day were the equivalent of more than 10 times the casualties that the U.S. suffered on 9/11. 

Too many media outlets focus on so-called "Islamophobia" instead of reporting about the openly declared jihad that is being waged by Islamists against the West. It is painful to see the large numbers of young people who have been seduced by the toxic marriage of Leftist political and economic ideas with Islamism.  

It may seem unpleasant to some people to speak of killing one's enemies, but I began Violence, Non-Violent Non-Cooperation, and Human Nature by noting that violence is "an inescapable reality of life": 

Violence is an inescapable reality of life. It is not possible to survive without committing violence and, indeed, one's ability to survive is directly proportional to one's capacity to both withstand and deliver violence. If you doubt this premise then just consider how you obtain food, water and shelter: none of those essential commodities can be procured without committing violence against other life forms, from tiny microbes to large plants and animals. Killing is an essential part of living.

Non-violence is an aspirational ideal for human beings interacting with other human beings, but elevating non-violence as the highest ideal can sometimes endanger the most innocent and vulnerable among us. The truth of that seemingly paradoxical statement can be seen by closely examining the concept of non-violent non-cooperation. Mahatma Gandhi's campaign of non-violent non-cooperation is credited with ending the British Empire's rule over his native India. Gandhi instructed his followers to not fight the British militarily, but to refuse to cooperate with the British through boycotts and other measures. Gandhi's goal was to highlight the inequities inherent in British control over the Indian people. Gandhi did not view the British as inherently evil; rather, he sought to expose the evil inherent in colonial rule, and thus exercise moral suasion over British society to end such colonial rule.

Gandhi's ideal of non-violent non-cooperation worked in India because Britain, while flawed, was a nation built on the rule of law. Similarly, when Dr. Martin Luther King adopted Gandhi's principles as cornerstones for the Civil Rights Movement in America, he operated under the basic assumption that non-violent non-cooperation would force the American people to see the evil inherent in Jim Crow laws/segregation, and thus exercise moral suasion over American society to end Jim Crow laws/segregation. Britain and America did not seek to annihilate the Indian and Black people respectively, and thus it was possible to awaken the collective consciences of those countries to the injustices inherent in the way those countries treated Indian and Black people respectively. 

Non-violent non-cooperation can be very effective in open, democratic countries that have racist laws and/or racist subcultures. Non-violent non-cooperation is much less likely to be effective in closed, non-democratic countries that consider mass extermination to be an acceptable policy choice. Failing to distinguish between open, democratic countries, and closed, non-democratic countries is to engage in what Vladimir Nabokov termed "poshlost," for which he gave the following explanation: "Poshlost speaks in such concepts as 'America is no better than Russia' or 'We all share in Germany's guilt.' ...Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost."  

Western civilization is involved in a war that it did not choose--but must win--versus people and nations who do not value life or place any importance on the protection of human rights; these people and nations proudly chant, "We love death more than you love life."

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush declared, "Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." It took nearly 10 years to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but the U.S. finally accomplished that necessary task, and the U.S. along with her allies must continue to eliminate not just terrorist leaders but the rank and file members of terrorist groups who seek to destroy our society. This mission requires clear thinking that distinguishes good from evil, the kind of thinking that is the opposite of the Leftist ideology that challenges the foundational concepts of Western civilization, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.

The painful lesson of 9/11 can be summarized by an ancient piece of Jewish wisdom that is quite fitting to quote on the eve of Rosh Hashanah: "Anyone who has pity on the cruel, will show cruelty to the merciful." The self-proclaimed "progressives" who pretend that they care so much about Gazan civilians are siding with the very people who elected Hamas and who stormed into Israel side by side with Hamas terrorists, and they are making common cause with Iran while slandering both the U.S. and Israel; by having pity on the cruel, such people are not only being cruel to the people who are most in need of protection but are endangering the very survival of Western civilization. If you doubt that, then just consider how many Jews around the world need armed protection to publicly observe Judaism. Jews are being openly hunted while Leftists cheer--and if you think that the hunting will stop with the Jews, then you have not only failed to learn the lesson of 9/11 but you have failed to understand the difference between Western values and the Leftist/Islamist ideology seeking to destroy the West.

Yeats' Warning About the "Passionate Intensity" of True Believers

In his poem "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats warned, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." The sad profundity of this couplet is regularly on display in our troubled world, perhaps best encapsulated in Hamas' warning to Israel, "We love death more than you love life." The Hamas true believers are so passionate about their cause--the annihilation of the Jewish State as a prelude to making the non-Muslim world submit to Islam--that they are not only willing but eager to kill and be killed for it; meanwhile, after every outrage committed by Hamas--and by other terrorist groups--there is a vocal segment of the Western world that responds by asking, "How have we wronged these people?" Blaming the victim is neither a sound psychological approach nor the basis for a strong foreign policy. The sane response to extremist, uncompromising genocidal murderers is to do anything possible to stop them, as the West belatedly figured out regarding Nazi Germany.

In A Poet's Apocalyptic Vision, David Lehman describes how Yeats' poem is a "chilling statement of our condition" that "extrapolates a fearful vision from the moral anarchy of the present." Lehman adds that Yeats' powerful couplet "retains its authority as an observation and a warning. We may think of the absence of backbone with which certain right-minded individuals met the threats of National Socialism in the 1930s and of Islamist terrorism in the new century. Both dogmas demand of their followers a 'passionate intensity' capable of overwhelming all other considerations."

Perhaps the fastest way to offend someone in our world dominated by "political correctness" is to speak truth to power. Many people do not want to hear the truth, especially if the truth contradicts their deeply held beliefs. For instance, while it is sometimes true that there are two sides to a story it is also sometimes true that one side is simply right and the other side is simply wrong. It is not politically correct to speak of good and evil anymore but that does not mean that there is no such thing as good and evil.

The 9/11 attacks did not happen because of America's foreign policy decisions (which is not to say that all of those decision are beyond reproach) and those attacks were not the desperate but understandable actions of downtrodden people. The truth is that the 9/11 attacks were acts of unspeakable evil committed in the name of a backwards-thinking ideology that is determined to force the rest of the world to submit or die; some people spoke that truth in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and those people were deemed bigots, because the supposedly politically correct thing to do is to try to figure out what rational motivation caused the attackers to kill so many innocent people. The problem is that there was no rational motivation; there is no reasoning with people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. If you try to reason with such people then you are only delaying the inevitable battle until the conditions of that battle are less favorable for you. Confronting Hitler in 1933 would have been easier than confronting him in 1936. By 1939, there was no longer a choice: Hitler had to be confronted and he had exploited six years of naive appeasement to build Germany into a world class military power.

If Western leaders are unwilling or able to learn from the political and historical lesson of how Hitler duped Chamberlain at Munich, then they should heed the poetic words that Yeats wrote after World War I before it becomes necessary for the 21st century Yeats to make similar declarations after World War III.

"The Shah Always Falls" or why Right Makes Might

Fredric Smoler's 2003 American Heritage magazine interview with Ralph Peters titled "The Shah Always Falls" provides an excellent, detailed explanation of the flaws behind so-called "real politik" thinking. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" may superficially sound logical and prudent--until Osama bin Laden decides that defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan is a worthy prelude to taking down the World Trade Center. Peters is right that no matter how powerful he may seem, the Shah (or Saddam Hussein or any other despot) "always falls" and therefore policy decisions should be made based on what is right and what is true to our values as opposed to what seems to be expedient. The whole interview is worth reading but here are some particularly relevant quotes from Peters:

Overvaluing stability is a heritage of the Cold War, over the course of which we rationalized our support of some very cruel regimes and we deposed elected governments we didn't like. You could justify it in terms of the greater struggle. But you can't justify it now.

What I wrote was that the shah always falls in the end, Saddam always turns on you, and the Saudis always betray you. If we support evil, the longterm price is almost always too high. And now we don’t have to. Since 1989, or '91, depending on how you want to date it, we've been the only superpower. We haven't thought about what we've been doing.

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In countries where there’s a struggle going on for the soul and future of Islam, the jury's still out. I'm actually increasingly optimistic. But I do believe the last couple of centuries demonstrate that cultures that oppress women, that don't have freedom of information, that don't value secular education, that have one dominant religion that infects the state and has power over the state, and whose basic unit of social organization is a clan, tribe, or extended family are just not going to compete with the West and especially with the United States. So I'm extremely pessimistic about the old Islamic heartland.

I personally feel that we've made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world's Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that’s absolutely true is that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi money, spent to support their grotesquely repressive version of one of the world’s great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world.

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Freedom of information originates in two things, the movable type printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter benefits everybody, irrespective of his or her religion, because it breaks down the idea of there being just one path to the truth. The printing press makes the Reformation possible, because suddenly the one true church can no longer contain heretical movements. Information travels faster than it can be suppressed. And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in the one path to the truth, you can't have science.

In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg's invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulûgh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying. There are myriad factors in the Islamic decline, but the decline itself has been irreversible. Muslims never turn it around; they never have their reformation that breaks down the one true path. You're either Sunni or Shiah, or perhaps a Sufi offshoot cult. And the reason Indonesia has a chance is that it’s never signed up for one path.

*****

Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy.

Moral Clarity and the Death of Osama bin Laden

"Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."--President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress following the 9/11 Attacks

When I learned that Osama bin Laden had finally been killed I immediately thought of President George W. Bush's clarion call to action; President Bush has become a polarizing figure who is regarded with great esteem in some quarters and with great revulsion in others but he spoke truth to power in the wake of the worst terrorist attack ever committed on American soil: the people who did this attack are evil, they are our enemies and their leaders must either be brought to justice or have justice brought to them.

It is not fashionable to speak of good and evil; those words are considered to be inflexible, hardline and reactionary--but the simple, powerful truth is that good and evil exist, that evil people act with tremendous force and unrelenting cruelty and that evil must be answered with tremendous force.

What the United States should have done in Iraq and Afghanistan--and what the United States should do now in Libya and other countries run by despotic, evil regimes--cannot be simply answered in soundbites and superficial rhetoric; these are questions of both strategy (whether or not to act militarily) and tactics (how to deploy the military most effectively if the decision is made to act militarily). It is certainly possible to question or critique President Bush's strategy and/or tactics--but the most valuable service that President Bush provided is that he strongly framed the 9/11 attacks in the proper moral context: the attacks were committed by evil men who took orders from evil men and those evil men must be brought to justice or have justice brought to them.

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President Barack Obama gave the final order to execute the mission that resulted in Osama bin Laden's death but that act of justice would not have been possible without President Bush's clarion call or without the military and intelligence structures that President Bush put into place. It is interesting to speculate about why bin Laden was able to avoid justice for so long only to be taken down suddenly and relatively easily; this is reminiscent of how the Unabomber got away with his crimes until his own brother turned him in to the authorities. I suspect that at least some of the people who were sheltering bin Laden decided that the terror mastermind had become more of a burden than an asset. I am not taking anything away from U.S. intelligence and I certainly am not taking anything away from the brave Special Forces' unit that brought justice to bin Laden but I think that without information from someone close to bin Laden the United States might have spent many more years looking for bin Laden in empty caves in Afghanistan.

Speaking of those caves, if it is true that the United States has given upwards of $10 billion to Pakistan over the past decade to fund anti-terrorism efforts then the United States is due a refund--and more--in light of the obvious fact that the Pakistani government gave aid and comfort to Public Enemy Number One. It is outrageous that bin Laden lived for years in a well-secured mansion in Pakistan while American soldiers fought and died in Afghanistan trying to find bin Laden in the mountains and other rough terrain; Pakistan should issue death and/or disability payments to every U.S. soldier who was killed or injured in Afghanistan.

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In a seemingly unrelated--and yet very related--recent story, CBS reporter Lara Logan was recently brutally assaulted, sexually violated and nearly killed by a mob attack in Egypt; she was in the country to report on the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. Two things struck me about Logan's account of her harrowing ordeal: (1) The crowd attacked her because they thought that she was an Israeli and/or a Jew; (2) Logan said that until this happened to her she never realized how prevalent brutality against women is in Egypt.

What does this have to do with bin Laden? President Bush spoke truth to power about bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban, using "old fashioned" concepts about good and evil; everything is not relative and there are not always two sides to every story: sometimes there is just right and wrong, good and evil. After the 9/11 attacks, a Congressional investigation revealed that bin Laden had paid the legal fees of El Sayed Nosair, the man who murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990. Failing to distinguish between good and evil prevented U.S. authorities from fully investigating the Kahane murder and discovering the connections between Nosair, Omar Abdel-Rahman (the "blind Sheikh") and bin Laden's al Qaeda; at the time, Kahane's murder was blithely dismissed by the media and by the U.S. government as a radical Arab killing a prominent Jewish figure but we now know that this crime was the first terrorist act committed on American soil by the group that eventually attacked the World Trade Center in 1993: bin Laden's confederates failed to bring down the Twin Towers that time but the next group that bin Laden sent succeeded eight years later. The idea that Kahane and bin Laden are equally radical and equally dangerous is an example of the pernicious, fallacious thinking that Vladimir Nabokov called "poshlost." There are not two equally valid sides regarding Kahane and bin Laden; Kahane proposed political solutions (with which one is free to agree or disagree), while bin Laden proposed (and delivered) mass murder around the globe; it is impossible to act correctly without making correct distinctions.

The Egyptian crowd nearly killed Logan merely because they thought that she was Israeli and/or Jewish; this is a powerful testimony to how much hatred has been instilled in the Arab/Muslim world against Israelis and against Jews: Arab and Muslim dictators do not have the ability and/or inclination to improve the lot of their people but these dictators have discovered that scapegoating Israelis and Jews is a great way to distract their citizens from the real causes of their countries' economic, scientific and political backwardness. Many Israeli and/or Jewish men, women and children have been killed by people whose minds are poisoned by hate, people who think and act just like the ones who attacked Logan precisely because they assumed that she was Israeli and/or Jewish (to cite just one example, in October 2000 two Israelis took a wrong turn into Ramallah and were literally ripped apart limb from limb). If Logan truly does not know about such attacks or about the virulent nature of this hatred then this is likely because she has bought into a narrative (very popular in the mainstream media) that teaches that there is not good and evil but rather two (or more) equally valid narratives; it is this kind of thinking that reacts to the 9/11 attacks by assuming--or even declaring--that some supposedly legitimate grievances explain and/or justify killing innocent civilians just because they are Americans (or Israelis or Jews). The Western media far too often covers up the racism, antisemitism and misogyny that is prevalent in the Arab and Islamic world because the media's preferred narrative is that Israel is persecuting Arabs, not the other way around--an odd (which is to say false) narrative when one realizes that the Arab/Muslim population of Israel has been steadily increasing for decades while the minority populations of Arab/Muslim countries have been steadily declining and face constant persecution.

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It is powerfully symbolic that the U.S. carried out President Bush's vow to bring bin Laden to justice or bring justice to bin Laden but it will require clear thinking and decisive action to ultimately defeat al Qaeda and other groups/nations that are motivated by evil ideologies and that act with tremendous violence and unrelenting cruelty--and clear thinking must start with understanding the distinction between good and evil.