The Lessons of 9/11: Still Unlearned. We are still what Osama bin Laden called a “weak horse.”
FrontpageMag Bruce Thornton (h/t Peter) Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.
This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
This ahistorical orthodoxy had been explicitly rejected 30 years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the traditional Islamic universalist goals of the Iranian Revolution: “We shall export our revolution to the world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds throughout the world, there will be jihad.” Nor was Khomeini an outlier among Muslims. Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, similarly said that his designs for transforming Egypt into an Islamic state ruled by sharia law would be a “springboard for universal expansion ‘until the entire world will chant the name of the Prophet.’”
This sacred ambition was also the purpose of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, whose terrorism was a front in the cosmic battle, as he put it, between “two separate camps––one of faith, where is no hypocrisy, and one of infidelity.” The struggle, he added later, could never be resolved short of absolute victory, for “it is one of creed.” His declaration of war against the U.S likewise was traditional Islamic practice, as historian Efraim Karsh points out: “Declaring a holy war against the infidel has been a standard practice of countless imperial rulers and aspirants since the rise of Islam. Nor does bin Laden’s perception of jihad as a predominantly military effort to facilitate the creation of the worldwide Islamic umma differ in any way from traditional Islamic thinking.”
For example, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, one of the greatest Islamic historians and philosophers, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” Despite this long tradition codified in the Koran, Hadith, and writers like Khaldun, our State Department continues to follow the “nothing to do with Islam” canard in their thinking about jihadist terror.
Oblivious to this traditional religious imperative, during the Nineties the Clinton administration didn’t take seriously enough the string of al Qaeda’s anti-American rhetoric he backed up with violent attacks on our military and diplomatic personnel. Instead, the Clinton team treated them as criminal matters, or heretical distortions of Islam by renegade Muslims, rather than as salvos in a jihad that climaxed in 9/11.
On the other hand, the George Bush administration, after its swift punishment of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, changed the goals of those conflicts into a misguided, naïve effort to democratize peoples whose creed and its supreme law, Koranic-based sharia, are incompatible with liberal democracy and its cargo of religious tolerance, sex equality, unalienable rights, and separation of church and state. The latter was particularly myopic, given that, as Karsh writes, Islam “was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers.” Muhammad could thus “cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura.”
This mistake by Bush’s foreign policy team was in part the fruit of the wrong lessons taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which arrogantly encouraged the primacy of the Western liberal “rules-based internal order” as the master political paradigm for the whole world. And this hubristic mentality persisted all the way to Joe Biden’s skedaddle from Afghanistan last year, where the U.S. had sponsored seminars on women’s liberation for Afghan males.
The next lesson still unlearned is the Western penchant for prizing materialist causes, including our own original sins of imperialism and colonialism, for the dysfunctions of other countries. This habit is often a sort of implied ethnocentrism that reinforces Western superiority by denying other cultures any agency for pursuing their own goals and distinct motivations. Hence after 9/11 all sorts of excuses for jihadist violence were proposed: from the lack of democratic freedoms and economic development, to young males’ lack of access to women and, of course, the colonialist depredations of the West against the Muslim world.
Yet this ethnocentric condescending dismissal of a civilization that for a 1000 years dominated the West––and still occupies half the old Roman Empire––is ahistorical and insulting to Muslim. In fact, Efraim Karsh observes, “Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate. Great-power influences, however potent, have played a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the region’s political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility. Even at the weakest point in their modern history, during the First World War and in its immediate wake, Middle Eastern actors were not hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active participants in the restructuring of their region.”
And how absurd is it for the West to parade its guilt over colonialism and imperialism before a civilization that created one of history’s greatest colonial empires, and whose descendants to this day still occupy large tracts of territory once part of the Christian West? As Karsh reminds us, from the beginning Muslim armies “acted in a typically imperialist fashion . . . subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth and labor.”
Moreover, whereas the Western colonial powers abandoned colonialism and continue to provide aid to their ex-colonies, Muslims still inhabit and rule most of the territories they conquered centuries ago: all of North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey had been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, i.e. proto-Western, for as long as nearly 3000 years before Islam even existed.
Nor is this ancient history: Muslim Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus, which it invaded and has illegally occupied and colonized since 1974, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots; destroying, looting, and vandalizing more than 550 churches; and refusing to this day to inform the Greeks about the fate of over 2000 of their compatriots who disappeared during the invasion. Bullying Israel over its “occupation” of the lands their ancestors inhabited 3000 years ago reveals the West’s shameful sacrifice of history and justice in order to pursue its own economic and ideological interests.
Finally, our ignorance of history and self-loathing global virtue-signaling have done nothing but communicate our weakness and civilizational failure of nerve. And this is another ignored lesson of 9/11. The attack was the consequence of our serial appeasement of jihadism, and our sorry history of retreats from Saigon, Beirut, and Mogadishu, that damaged our prestige and convinced Osama bin Laden that we are a “weak horse”––just as our shameful abandonment of Afghanistan last year and groveling negotiations with Iran’s theocrats have paved the way for a jihadist regime to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
And when they do, the dangerous world that threatens us will be the most important unlearned lesson of 9/11.
Pentagon officials warn that both ISIS-K and al-Qaeda have the “intent” to launch attacks on the West within the next two years.
Az gal says
9/11 is just a continuation of Islamic world conquest. Sept 11 is the same day Islam arrived at the gates of Vienna.
Daniel Erbstoesser says
That what is comming our way will be much much worse than this unholy day. The unholy have filled our free countries with those terrorists and they see no reason to stop the import so get ready to defend yourself then they will not do a thing for you or your country.
Linda Rivera's says
Obama puppet Biden and their entire anti-freedom, America-hater, Destroy America, Government of Traitors crave not just another 9/11.
They crave MANY 9/11’s
Linda Rivera's says
Obama is a Muslim. China Biden is Obama’s puppet.
As a Muslim, America-hater, Obama’s goal is for the free nation of America and all non-Muslim nations to be conquered in obedience to Warlord Mohammad, Mohammad’s Quran and Mohammad’s God of DEATH, DESTRUCTION and MASS GENOCIDE of NON-Muslims.
The God of ETERNAL DARKNESS
Obama Admits He Is A Muslim
Harald G. Martin says
I BELIEVE that ISLAM is one of the most dangerous things facing the world today (among the others such as WEF) However, I prefer to get to the truth of what really happened. I9 Muslims without any flying skill did NOT take out the towers… It was the classic INSIDE JOB…the information is vast…but here’s a start to get folks to ask questions:
BareNakedIslam says
Well, guess I should have posted a note today saying 9/11 conspiracy whack jobs get banned here.
eshetchayil says
Dr. Judy Woods. Where Did The Towers Go?
Daniel Erbstoesser says
These flying terrorists learned to fly in germany and yes they had the licence for small planes. Germany is the headquarters from any islam terrorclub then in germany all of the terror orgs sit and live off of us and that gives them time to plan nice things for us at our own expense. Man are we not good…or are we dumber than shit…
Dubi says
The Unlearned Lessons of 9/11
by Ruthie Blum
A short memory may be helpful as a coping mechanism, but it is deadly in matters of foreign policy.
September 11, 2022 | Topics: America, War on Terror
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A view of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers after they were hit by Al Qaeda terrorist-flown planes, Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: Michael Foran/Wikimedia Commons.
A view of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers after they were hit by Al Qaeda terrorist-flown planes, Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: Michael Foran/Wikimedia Commons.
(JNS) Sunday marks the twenty-first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The magnitude of the audacious assault on key symbols of American greatness and power—the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia—was so extreme that it was likened to an apocalypse.
Footage of the Twin Towers toppling, with some desperate office workers opting to die by jumping out of windows, rather than remain with the thousands of others who met their painful end inside the crumbling inferno, kept being compared to scenes from a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster.
The shockwaves at home and abroad were compounded by the fact that the United States had been insulated from combat on its soil (other than during the Civil War of 1861-1865) and from Islamist terrorism. In the space of some two hours on that fateful morning, Americans were shaken out of the blissfully false sense of security that was responsible for initial news reports of a possible aviation accident.
We Israelis, on the other hand, understood from the first minute that this was no mishap. Though just as horrified and taken aback as everyone else by the scope and location of the mass murder, we were not surprised by its onset.
The Jewish state was in the throes of a suicide-bombing war, which came to be called the Second Intifada, launched exactly a year earlier by the Palestinian Authority. It was the result of repeated capitulation to the demands of arch-terrorist PLO chief Yasser Arafat. The more Israel groveled, the more empowered the Nobel Peace Prize laureate became.
As I described at the time, for the 12 months before 9/11, we had been spending our days trying to calculate which buses might blow up on our way to work or our kids’ route to school; which café, restaurant or discotheque was too risky to frequent; and what unattended bags, backpacks or sidelong glances from certain dubious characters were suspicious.
Yes, heads were literally rolling in seas of Jewish blood on the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, and would continue to do so for a total of nearly four and a half years. And this was just a taste of the ongoing attempt to annihilate Israel since its establishment in 1948. It was also proof, if any were needed by those of us who bemoaned the disastrous Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, that diplomacy with Islamist political ideologues not only doesn’t work, but fans their flames.
The subsequent Camp David Summit between then-US President Bill Clinton, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, and Arafat in July 2000, was the immediate precursor to, cause of and excuse for the latter’s call for a fresh round of Jew-slaughtering. It was par, then, for Palestinians to celebrate on 9/11, which many of them did with great fanfare.
While a short memory may be helpful as a coping mechanism, it is deadly in matters of foreign policy. Barack Obama’s entry into the White House in 2009 was a perfect example.
His first order of business was to renounce American exceptionalism and conduct “outreach” to the radical Muslim world. Islamists took this to mean that Uncle Sam, the “Great Satan,” had been brought to his knees, thanks to their efforts. They weren’t entirely wrong.
Obama’s proceeding to invest serious energy in begging the greatest state sponsor of terrorism to negotiate a nuclear deal only served to strengthen the resolve of the ayatollahs to achieve military and religious hegemony over the “infidels.”
By the time that the mullah-led regime finally “agreed” in 2015 to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it had finagled the terms to its benefit. The removal of sanctions and billions of dollars in cash that it received were just what it needed to infuse life into its centrifuges and fill the coffers of its terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, adopted the opposite approach. It wasn’t merely that he ended up exiting the JCPOA in 2018 (after being shown by then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the trove of documents that the Mossad had retrieved from a warehouse in Tehran, which illustrated Iranian violations). He also started a “maximum pressure” campaign of increased sanctions.
Cutting off the money supply was necessary, both for slowing down the nuclear program and for curbing the cash flow to terrorists. Just when this endeavor was beginning to have an effect, Joe Biden took over the reins in the Oval Office and reversed course—right back to that of the days when he was Obama’s second-in-command; and with many of the same colleagues.
Iran’s response has been predictable: upping its conditions for deigning to be courted by the P5+1. It has the luxury to do this, while waiting for a new influx of multi-billions, due to the circumvention of sanctions by many countries and/or corporations within them.
Meanwhile and as a result, Tehran-financed terrorism against Israelis has been escalating. So, too, have vapid claims by Team Biden about its commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. Oh, and equally meaningless statements relating to Israel’s right to defend itself.
See: Lapid Calls Out Biden’s Duplicity Over Iran Nuclear Deal
So far, the only thing keeping a lid on the next JCPOA is Iranian intransigence. As was the case when Obama was “leading from behind,” Tehran is holding all the cards. In the words of the late Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
On the anniversary of 9/11, let us remember why not to find that the least bit amusing.
Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’”
Condor 18 says
Conquest is always their goal. It’s only a matter of where and when they will strike in America.
Kathleen Woods says
The Democraps impeach Trump for nothing but the trojan horse named Joey gets away with TREASON for what the damn DNC is doing to our country. FRN GURRRRRR