Today is the 25th commemoration of the 9/11 attacks that changed our lives forever. For all we know today, it could very well have been the start of a new hundred-year war, much like the religious wars that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages.
Even if we had not lived through the recent period since October 7, 2023, it would have been necessary to reflect on what we haven’t learned and what needs to be done. The attacks on Israel by one Islamist faction, Hamas, and the victory of another in Afghanistan, the Taliban, bring into stark relief the dangerous mindset of many in Western policy-making and the refusal to come to grips with grim realities.
We have not heeded the warning of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington that Islamism’s aggression against the free world would be a “clash of civilizations” and that too many in the West would try to find excuses for wrong-headed policies or engage in moral and political equivalency. We must heed his warning and heed it fast.
The allied coalition’s intervention in Afghanistan should have had one purpose and one purpose only: the total annihilation of Al-Qaeda, the entity that attacked the West, not only in New York on 9/11 but in London, Paris, Madrid and so many other centres of civilization. And that annihilation should have included not only Al-Qaeda but the cohorts like the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and indeed Iran that gave it sustenance and support. The Coalition mission should have had just one goal: total war.
Instead, the allies not only hampered their troops with rules of engagement that limited military actions where civilians may have been harmed — a noble caution though, not followed by the coalition’s enemies — but also decided to engage in nation-building. Both those decisions doomed much of the effort from the start. The first resulted in a ten-year-long search to kill bin Laden. The second led directly to the fall of Afghanistan back into Taliban hands. As Huntington also warned, not every culture or civilization is capable of accepting or desiring freedom. Not all cultures are equal. And the modern academic hallucination that every culture has a right to be wrong is infantile and dangerous. Worse still, it stunts our courage to loathe. For in this world there is such a thing as total evil. We must stop the moral equivalency that intellectually — through media and policy — almost makes the free world enablers of the Islamists. It is time to learn that lesson and revive our courage to loathe.
We are witnessing the danger of this mindset of equivalency as Israel was, and is, defending itself from attacks on multiple fronts from Hamas to Hezbollah from Houthis to Iran. Much of the world’s media and Western governments attack Israel for lack of “restraint” and “proportionality”, inciting antisemitism as they do so. By what cowardice do free nations call for restraint by a sister democracy fighting against an enemy that values death over life — by its own words — and whose only single, stated goal is a second Holocaust of Jews? And why should Jews trust a world that enabled the slaughter of six million just over 80 years ago?
Islamists don’t seek hegemony and destruction of the free for anything we have done. They seek it because our example is a threat to their stated goal of restoring a Caliphate and total domination over their own people and those in the free world. Instead of seeking excuses for the behaviour of the Islamists, if we revived our courage to loathe, we could also rouse our courage to act. It is time to start seeing clearly. There can be no meeting of the minds with barbarians.
Twenty-five years ago, a new manifestation of an old evil was loosed upon the world. It is meant to impose tyranny on the minds of all people and exact submission through fear. The deep moral and political significance of 9/11 will continue to affect all aspects of our lives for years.
From New York to New Delhi, the critical feature of Islamism is that it has brought the clash of civilizations into stark relief. The Islamist heirs of the 9/11 killers have emptied the category of the innocent. They claim butchery as their right, slaughter as their legacy. Yet too often we still see statesmen rushing about to make bargains. Journalists and academics constructing elaborative apologias on behalf of killers. The undeniable is denied. The indefensible is defended. The intolerable is tolerated. We must stop being confused, frightened, defensive, and merely weakly indignant. In the face of the Islamist axis. The least we must do is to marshal our resolve to revive the courage to loathe. It is only the first step to victory, but victory there will be.
Image courtesy of the author
