Mohamed Atta, the triggerman of the 9/11 assault on America, was not motivated by a grievance against the U.S. or the West. He didn't like the culture that allowed women and men to mingle freely, but that's not what he died for.
In 1996, Atta sat down and wrote his last will and testament. According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he had absolutely no reason to think of his death. He was 27, from an affluent family, living in one of the richest nations on Earth. And yet, he gave a set of very detailed instructions for handling his body after death.
“I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and bid him farewell.
"He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried 'next to good Muslims,'" writes Ali. "His money was to be divided 'according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.'”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is what my mother used to call Catholics who left the faith: a "fallen angel." In Ali's case, she was a former Muslim who has dedicated her life to explaining the acts of Islamic terrorists — explanations rejected by secular leftists because they don't jibe with their preconceived notions of the "grievance culture."
"Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed both sensible and necessary," she writes.
"After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked 'what went wrong?' as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery," she adds.
Not since the 17th-century religious wars have people killed other people over religion. The multicultural left believed that blaming terror attacks on religious beliefs was tantamount to blaming "race." Thus, the left blithely passed over the fundamental truths of Islamic terrorism for fear of being thought of as an ordinary racist.
Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism.
The rigidity of thinking is appalling. If it doesn't fit in one of the boxes the left checks to explain terrorism, the fallback position is "white colonialism" or anything but cultural attitudes or poisonous religious teachings.
Western democracies eventually settled on a cubbyhole where religion could exist.
"Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests," Ali writes. "Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization."
They're just like us, right? There's no difference between cultures in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or anywhere else, and no society is "better" than any other. It's racist to think otherwise.
Islamic terrorism is still a threat 25 years after 9/11. And, giving in to an unexplainable madness, the Europeans decided to make it easier on the terrorists by allowing them to come to their homelands and blend in with the masses of immigrants who are helping out by refusing to assimilate and adopt Western habits.
"The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance," writes Ali. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside the gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it."
Ali suggests how we should commemorate Sept. 11, 2001.
Twenty-five years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the United States needs to do more than commemorate a past atrocity. It should undertake a serious stocktaking: not only of the threat posed by violent Islamism, but of the wider threat ecosystem that has matured around it in the quarter-century since 2001. The central reality is that Islamism was never only a matter of terrorist cells and spectacular attacks. It has also been a civilizational project rooted in the memory of the caliphate, the ambition to reorder politics, society, and law according to Islamic norms, and the long-term effort to build institutional footholds inside Western societies.
It's doubtful that the left will alter their views about Islam, terrorism, and America and the West's culpability in "creating" terrorists and not groveling to the Islamists' cockeyed vision of a caliphate. Even if we experience another mass casualty attack, the left will find a way to blame us for the atrocity.
It's far easier for them than changing their basic worldview.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats desperately try to stop it.
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