by Jason Thomas, Spectator Australia
Twenty-five years on, if the 9/11 terrorist attack by al-Qaeda happened today, the response in Australia and countries such as the United Kingdom would be a master-class in institutional cowardice. Through the mind-warping phenomenon of moral manoeuvrability, the attack would turn terrorists into victims and victims into oppressors, spawning a new generation of activists, sympathisers and supporters. We would be told it is us, not them.
On 11 September 2001 nearly 3,000 people were murdered in coordinated Islamist attacks planned and celebrated by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Then, just as my grandfather’s generation did during the second world war, the West named the enemy without apology: salafi-jihadi ideology, the networks that incubated it, and the doctrine of a religious-revolutionary movement that justified mass slaughter of civilians. Governments acted with resolve and public opinion was unambiguous. Sympathy for the dead outweighed being labelled a racist and Islamophobia had never been invented.
Today the same images – planes into towers, people jumping, the collapse into a tidal wave of dust – would trigger a different narrative. Within hours, politicians would issue carefully calibrated statements describing the cause as ‘complex’. Opposition voices warning that the ideological networks within our suburbs remains intact would be dismissed. The dead would be mourned selectively while their murderers’ actions contextualised. Warnings would immediately shift to ‘Islamophobia’, ‘hate speech’, ‘community tensions’ and ‘Nazis’. Mainstream media would run packages on ‘minority anxiety’ and the danger of a backlash no one had contemplated. Opposition politicians would demand inquiries into security failures while insisting that ‘root causes’ – Western foreign policy, poverty and ‘marginalisation’ – must be treated as co-equal factors.
There is a fair chance it would be blamed on Israel.
Read also: The Twin Towers, Twenty-Five Years On by Peter Mullen, Right Times