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September 11, 2002
A YEAR LATER, CHRONICLES PROVED RIGHT AGAIN
As you are force-fed, today and throughout this week, an unending sequence of
non-news, psycho-babble, and solemn musical interludes on your
local NPR
station, while TV screens give you yet another video replay and yet another
talking head pontificating on the meaning of it all, we offer a
shelter from
the proceedings. On this day of remembrance we'll refrain from commentary, and
merely repeat what we had to say in the first week
after the event.
Only hours after the attack Thomas Fleming asked ("Terrorists Target
America") if anyone in Washington would wake up to the danger they have
created by humiliating Muslims in the Middle East and, simultaneously,
giving them easy access to the United States, where they are building their
mosques and agitating against any public expression of Christian faith:
Such a response is unlikely. What will our government do
in the weeks to come? . . . It is important to keep in mind that in America,
every disaster will be used as a pretext for more stupid
government programs. Despite the obvious fact that this kind of terrorist
attack, which we have been predicting, could not have
been stopped by the President's Missile Defense program, the Republicans will
certainly claim that American security interests demand
immediate funding. Predictably, Democratic leftists will blame the openness of
our society and call for more stringent controls on guns
and travel. This attack should cinch the argument for national identity cards
and strengthen the hand of those who don't think we have
enough police check points.
Two days after the attacks, on September 13, Srdja Trifkovic pointed out
("America's Black September") that already at the time of the first WTC,
attack in 1993, it had become obvious that radical Islam had a firm foothold
within the Muslim diaspora in the United States—but in the meantime
the
demographic deluge of the followers of Islam had continued unabated:
Its adherents' murderous extremism, manifested on
September 11, should spell the end of another kind of extremism: the stubborn
insistence of the ruling establishment on treating each
and every newcomer as equally meltable in the pot. They let millions of people
into this country every year without seriously asking
them who they are and why they are here. The federal government's refusal to
implement a rational immigration policy costs lives. Its
refusal to accept that certain ethnic and cultural traits make some groups more
(or less) readily assimilable into America than others
has rendered our country incapable of considering reality. An obvious lesson of
September 11 is that it is necessary to curtail
immigration from the Islamic world, which fuels diasporas in both North America
and
Europe that allow terrorists to remain anonymous and
untraceable.
Trifkovic also predicted that the Palestinians would be the chief and
immediate losers from the attacks' fallout, just as the public sympathy for the
Palestinians had been rising in the West:
As Arab teenagers are shot in the streets for throwing
stones, Israel has been losing the public relations battle. This is likely to
change. The impression that we are now in the same boat
with Israel is mistaken, but it will be promoted nevertheless . . . The peace
process will remain stalled, and ever more stringent
Israeli counter-measures will be approved. The need for a new American policy in
the Middle East will be blurred, at least temporarily . .
. The creative response to it is to avoid the perception of a permanent bias in
Middle Eastern affairs that breeds anti-Americanism and
Islamic fundamentalism. But above all it is necessary to rethink the U.S. policy
in the Middle East. American national interests in the
Middle East are primarily economic: It is vitally important to the United States
to
have permanent access to secure and affordable sources
of energy. It is not vitally important to the U.S. whose flag flies over the
Dome on the Rock. We need a stable peace in the Middle
East that should be based on a scrupulously even-handed treatment of the
conflicting parties' claims and aspirations. The
desirability of any possible solution must be assessed from the point of clearly
defined
American geopolitical, economic, and diplomatic
interests.
In addition, Trifkovic also predicted that the mind-boggling failure of the
U.S. "intelligence community" to anticipate and prevent the attacks would
be
used by the proponents of further centralization of the power of the government:
Those proponents of perpetual war for perpetual peace will
demand expanded controls over the Internet, obligatory e-mail decoding
devices, and more satellites that monitor us from the
skies. But those attacks prove yet again that there is no substitute for human
assessments based on a thorough understanding of the
particular social, cultural, or historical milieu of the attackers. Human
intelligence assets are needed, not more electronic
gadgetry, to identify, target, and then destroy the individuals and
organizations
that can, and therefore will strike again.
The author concluded that at the fundamental level September 11 shows that
the real and present danger is with us now, and will remain with us
for as
long as the United States remains committed to the concept of unrestrained
projection of power everywhere in the world:
It is amazing that no mainstream commentator stated the
obvious: people who wish America ill are not merely "jealous of its power and
wealth," they are deeply resentful of what they perceive
as Washington's bullying, arrogance, criminality even. "Benevolent global
hegemony" will entangle America in more wars and more
lies, and result in more innocent victims at home and abroad. It is
unconnected to this country's interests, at odds with its
tradition, and contrary to the wishes of the vast majority of its people. The
paramount lesson of this American tragedy is that the
threat to America exists because of the policy of global hegemony pursued
from Washington. Designating "threats to national
security" must follow the clear determination of a country's national interests.
If
those interests are assumed to include the ability to
project power everywhere and all the time, then indeed the threat is also
unlimited and permanent.
Thomas Fleming cautioned in "The Pornography of Compassion" (September 18,
2002) that we should not speak so glibly of "terrorism" without
reflecting
on the obvious fact that throughout history, most terrorism has been carried out
by governments and not by private conspiracies:
The politicians and the commentators say they are shocked
and outraged by this callous disregard of human life. But these same
people, not long ago, were justifying the U.S. bombing of
civilians in Iraq and Yugoslavia and the U.S. embargo of Iraq that has killed
over 1.5 million non-combatants, and to make matters
worse, prominent politicians are calling for a no-holds barred attack on
nations—including their women and children—that harbor
terrorists . . . You can't have it both ways. If generic human life is precious,
that means the lives of Iraqis and Serbs and Afghans are
precious, not just the lives of Americans.
The thousands of Americans who died so terribly in the WTC and the Pentagon,
Fleming went on, are important to us not merely because they are
generically
human but because they are American, even though they were working in a symbol
of a global system that seeks not to transcend but
to destroy all petty
loyalties to nations and religions. The larger threats, he concluded, are
represented by insurgent Islam and by an American
leadership that views
other nations and traditions as only so much land to be homesteaded:
Any coherent strategy would include: 1) a courageous PR
demonstration by American political leaders going to New York and facing
possible assassination, coupled with an immediate return
to normalcy; 2) a crackdown on Muslims entering the country and a review of
all non-citizens in America whose countries of origin are
the source of Islamic terrorism—this includes Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia and not just Iraq and Afghanistan; 3) a tough new
policy in the Middle East forcing the Sharon administration to withdraw all
Israeli settlers from occupied lands and return to
Israel's original borders; 4) a swift and violent response against the
terrorists and
their state sponsors—but only once we have
actually determined the facts. What we will do, in fact, will be the opposite.
We will rush
to the support of Israel without doing
anything about the threat of Muslims resident in the United States; we will
refuse to impose a
policy of ethnic profiling, but we
will strip ordinary Americans of their civil liberties; and we will probably
kill thousands of civilians who
had nothing to do with
the attacks. Welcome to the Bush family's New World Order.
If we are to be an empire, Fleming concluded, so be it; but in the
cost-benefit calculation of empires the death of thousands of our
fellow-citizens
will count for nothing. Needless to say, his predictions
proved to be depressingly accurate. Saudi citizens are still allowed into the
United States
without visas, Israel is allowed by Washington to pursue more
intransigent policies than ever before, and the response against the terrorists
was
so effective that neither Bin Laden nor Mullah Omar have been found.
On October 3 Paul Gottfried commended President Bush's display of
determination to punish the culprits ("Reasons for Retaliation") but questioned
the ideological justification and historical parallels for his "crusade
against evil-doers":
We are the victims of terrorist attacks that we have
allowed to be organized and launched within our borders, by enemies who are
legally present in the United States. The necessary steps
to prevent a recurrence of such catastrophes may not please those in the
media and government who want to spin this war as a
crusade for multicultural values. Proper steps for dealing with the crisis would
entail carefully monitoring and restricting Third World
immigration, denying or revoking visas to Muslim political activists
concentrated at
American universities, and practicing
what the celebrants of diversity will undoubtedly call "racial profiling" at our
airports . . . Media
commentaries and government actions
suggest that our ideological fixations have not gone away because terrorists
have attacked our
cities. Avoiding such attacks in the
future and punishing those who have been determined as responsible for them
should be our
overriding national concerns, as opposed to
crusading for philosophical abstractions or for those cultural or multicultural
preferences
that journalists and politicians chose to
express. ...What is now taking place is an opportunistic alliance between
neoconservative
Jewish nationalists, seeking to settle
scores with anti-Israeli Arabs, and hypermodernists, at war with cultural and
societal differences
that cannot be squared with
present-day life in New York City.
Gottfried took note of an irony that the establishment media in the U.S. does
not want to see, or care to examine: for years the extensive neocon
wing of
that media routinely took the pro-Muslim side, outside of the obvious exception
of the Middle East. Journalists and TV commentators rallied
to Islamic
revolutionaries arrayed against Vladimir Putin and failed to notice that Islamic
restiveness was a major shared concern of the Russians
and Chinese, who face
Muslim revolutionaries on both sides of their shared borders:
Neocons happily sprang to the aid of the Muslim Albanians
against the Christian Serbs, who were trying to keep their Muslim subjects
from taking Kosovo province away. No linkage was made, or
was allowed to be made, between Muslims in Europe or Central Asia and
the Israeli problem with the Palestinians and their more
active backers. The problem is of course one of linkage, or in this case
uncoupling what is indissolubly joined together. Cheering
on a larger Muslim presence in Europe and in the U.S. and enthusiastically
supporting Muslim revolutionaries in Asia but then
turning around and insisting that we get "tough" with the enemies of Ariel
Sharon is a
stupid and hypocritical course. The global
democrats who have stressed the inappropriateness of the Nazi-stained Germans
keeping
Muslims out of their country are reaping the
fruits of their Teutonophobic fixations. Germany, with over 6 million Muslims
and with over
2,000 Mosques in a country with a declining
percentage of Christians and of a rapidly falling number of Germans, has become
the prime
European launching pad for Muslim terrorism,
against us. Those who now call for joining the Israelis in a common "democratic"
crusade
against terrorists should at least have the
decency to shut up.
Addressing The John Randolph Club a few days later Srdja Trifkovic returned
to the same theme when he pointed out that the policy makers in
Washington
had not treated Islamic fundamentalist ideology in adversarial terms until it
started attacking America:
Quite the contrary: their refusal to accept that Islam as
such is a threat to national security went hand in hand with the policy of
effectively supporting Islamic fundamentalists in pursuit
of short-term political or military objectives of the U.S. government. The
underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be
propped up, used, and if need be eventually discarded, like Diem, Noriega, the
Shah, the Contras. The Kaiser lived to regret giving
passage to Lenin on that sealed train in 1917, but in Washington the lessons of
that episode remained unknown for two decades. Quite the
contrary: having enlisted militant Islam in the destruction of communism,
the ruling establishment used it to erode the reliquiae
reliquiarum of the Christian culture in the Western world through Muslim mass
immigration . . . The underlying assumption all along has
been that the Islamic genie released at the end of the Cold War in the hills of
Afghanistan could be controlled through its eventual
reduction to yet another humanistic project in self-celebration, through its
adherents' immersion in the consumerist subculture, and
through their children's multicultural indoctrination by state education.
Decades of covert and overt support for Islamic terrorism are a foreign
policy disaster, Trifkovic concluded, detrimental to peace in all affected
regions and to American security. Its beneficiaries are Osama bin Laden and
his coreligionists:
A coherent counter-terrorist strategy must entail denying
Islam the foothold inside the West. Like communism, Islam relies on a
domestic fifth column—the Allah-worshiping Rosenbergs,
Philbys, Blunts, and Hisses—to subvert the civilized world . . . Perhaps only
one in a hundred communists was an active Soviet spy;
maybe not one in a hundred Muslim immigrants is an active bin Laden asset.
Nevertheless, managing the communist risk fifty years ago
entailed denying entry visas (let alone permanent residences or passports)
to self-avowed Party members. Doing the same now with bin
Laden's potential recruits is the key to any meaningful anti-terrorist
strategy, in conjunction with a frank, rational, and
humane system of ethno-cultural profiling. The alternative is a non-targeted,
sweepingly general clampdown on civil liberties that will
be as ineffective in curbing Islamic extremism as it will be undoubtedly
successful in making life less pleasant and less
dignified for all of us.
That was a year ago. The rest, as they say, is history.
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