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Thoughts on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

One 9/11 is enough.

by
David Solway

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September 11, 2011 - 12:14 am
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As should be evident to anyone who is not in denial and is willing to credit the evidence mounting by the day, the West is now under siege. Paradoxically, it appears to be increasingly at the mercy not only of radical Islam, but of its own anomie and its blatant philistinism. Indeed the former preys relentlessly upon the latter as it does upon the ineluctable corollary of cultural weakness, the presumably tolerant and progressive ethos of so-called “liberal” thinking. “Something stirs in the East, a sleepless malice” says one of the characters in The Lord of the Rings. What stirs in the West, however, is a growing tendency to fall asleep, a kind of spiritual encephalitis generating an epidemic of lethargy before reality and accompanied by various spastic maneuvers intended to disguise the truth.

Reasonable people can have little sympathy with the feverish pack of journalists, academics, and intellectuals who believe that 9/11 was payback for America’s supposed colonial iniquities and who argue that the reaction of the Islamic world is understandable. Their number is legion but a few instances of such chicanery will serve to fill out the picture.

On September 16, just five days after the carnage visited upon an unprepared America, Edward Said published a Comment in The Observer in which, while professing concern for the dead and injured, he went on to deprecate an American “superpower almost constantly at war…all over the Islamic world,” its “ignorance of Islam that takes new forms every day,” and “the influence of oil, defence and Zionist lobbies.” Advising his readers to avoid fictive constructions that only complicate the issue — this from Said! — he placed 9/11 in the context of “the Iraqi people’s suffering under US-imposed sanctions” and, of course, the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories,” concluding that the “roots of terror” lay in “injustice.” No one seemed to notice that this was the rhetoric of the ideological scavenger, picking over the carcasses to feed his hatred and fatten his agenda.

Similarly, in an article titled “The Spirit of Terrorism” for Le Monde of November 2, 2001, the cynosure of the postmodern Left, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, wrote of the “prodigious jubilation of seeing this global superpower destroyed”; he went on to explain that “this is the one which, in its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence that is innate the world over.” His colleague Jacques Derrida, a fixture on the American university circuit, refers to the date 9/11 as a “telegram of metonymy” which merely “points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify.” Or in plain language, we are too dumb not to deserve what we got coming.

As for the sheer madness of Noam Chomsky’s predictable ramblings faulting the U.S. for its ostensibly genocidal campaigns, these have already been deconstructed in many different places and can be shunted aside as nothing more than the intellectual refuse he unfailingly produces. Nevertheless, his absurd maunderings have been disproportionately influential.

These are only a mere handful of such righteous denunciations of the American hegemon and the ongoing whitewash of Islam as either a “religion of peace” or, conversely, as the faith of a much maligned and suffering people taking legitimate revenge on their tormentors. The beat continues even to this day, a decade later, as our “progressive” elites, typified by such pro-Islamic stalwarts as Jimmy Carter, John Esposito, Michael Moore, Faiz Shakir, and innumerable others, insist on laundering such radical organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood, re-interpreting jihad as an inner struggle waged in the soul of the believer, and deploring (a non-existent) “Islamophobia” for which they hold anybody and everybody responsible except the terrorists themselves.

Even the American president is complicit. The Obama administration’s attempt to elutriate the meaning of 9/11 by calling terrorist acts “man-caused disasters,” scrubbing allusions to Islamic terrorism in its official documents, and treating the observance of 9/11 not as a day of memory and reflection but as a “day of service” promoting Obama’s pet projects, as enumerated in his weekly address of August 27, namely, “clean energy, energy efficiency, health care,” etc., are, according to Matthew Vadum, author of Subversion Inc., part of an effort “to suck the meaning out of 9/11.” Obama’s purpose, says Vadum, is “to dumb down the nation and turn [a] solemn annual commemoration” into something that “glosses over both the horrors of that day and the evil intentions of the Islamofascist barbarians who made them happen.”

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