Ideas of cultural relativism have made the West hesitant to confront Islamism.
Ten years and a trillion dollars later, we are more vulnerable to our enemy’s machinations than we were on that sunny September morning of 2001 when evil rained hell from the skies.
The jihadi terrorists’ 9/11 attack on the United States shook human civilization to its core. We in the West who lived a life of privilege and entitlement, who felt invincible, were made to feel as vulnerable as the ordinary inhabitants of the Third World. The colossal amounts of money spent to defend our lifestyle and values were not enough to stop 19 Arab men armed with mere paper cutters from bringing a superpower, a nation of 300 million, to its knees.
The reaction of the U.S. and its NATO allies was swift and powerful, but ineffective. Bungled operations in Afghanistan, where billions of dollars were wasted, allowed Osama bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs, as well as Mullah Omar and his Taliban, to escape to Pakistan. While the Pakistani military gave sanctuary to the enemies of the U.S., the Americans gave billions of dollars more to the Pakistanis, who then spent that money to sustain and promote jihadi operations around the world. As if the fiasco in Afghanistan was not enough, the West invaded Iraq and managed to hand the country over to the U.S.’s worst enemy, Iran.
Read about the 9/11 colouring book controversy here.
In a war that has pitted the 21st century against the 12th, tens of thousands of young men and women have died, or have been maimed, fighting the international jihad, but have little to account for it.
The month of September marks not just the anniversary of the 9/11 assault on freedom, democracy, and individual liberty, but is also the anniversary of another attack on these cherished principles by a far stronger enemy with similar fantasies of world domination: It was in September 1939 that Hitler’s feared Wehrmacht attacked Poland, triggering the Second World War – a war in which nearly 50 million people died to defeat Nazi Germany, and, with it, the doctrine of Aryan Supremacy that sought to enslave the rest of humanity.
The difference between the two September wars is stark, and the contrast of the outcomes is mindboggling. While the German Nazis and their allies boasted a technologically advanced society with the largest armies ever deployed, the 9/11 attackers were a ragtag group of Islamist jihadis, imbibed with the love of death and a contempt for life’s little pleasures.
As their movement withers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists are holding one last Toronto blowout. Read what National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has to say about it here.
For all the strength, determination, and militancy of the German Nazis, Italian fascists, and Japanese militarists, it took less than six years for the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. to inflict a decisive and humiliating defeat on the enemy. What began on Sept. 1, 1939 ended on Aug. 15, 1945, with the comprehensive defeat of those who sought world domination.
Contrast that with the events following the attack in September 2001. Ten years later, the Islamist ideology that was at the root of 9/11 is stronger than ever before. The question is, why were we able to defeat Nazism, but have failed to put a dent in Islamism?
Why is it that, instead of retreating under the relentless war on terrorism, the Islamists have become more influential than ever in the U.S.?
Imagine White House officials hobnobbing with American Nazis during the Second World War. It is incomprehensible. Yet, former U.S. president George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama have both bent over backward to accommodate purveyors of Islamism.
Can you imagine former president Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing a group of Nazis in an attempt to “reach out” to them? No. Yet we barely shrugged our shoulders when Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood to his now-infamous speech in Cairo in 2009, which was directed to Muslims of the world. He could’ve gone and spoken in Indonesia, which is the country with the largest Islamic population, and, incidentally, is also where he grew up. But, instead, he made a conscious decision to go out of his way to greet those who consider the U.S. their enemy.
While we in the West understood the phenomenon of Nazism and ideologies of racial supremacy, we didn’t have a clue about the societies of Islamdom, and still do not. While the fight against Hitler was fought without any guilt, the war on terrorism is riddled with white liberal guilt where leaders of the West apologize for our civilization, which has brought universal human rights, gender equality, and citizenship based on human-created laws, not inherited race or religion.
A new art exhibit in Ottawa commemorates the Canadian response to 9/11. Read about it here.
While Charlie Chaplin could make movies mocking Hitler and Nazism, no one today can mock jihadi Islamists without risking allegations of racism and discrimination. So powerful is the Islamist propaganda and presence in the West that now, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the narrative suggests it was not the U.S. that was the victim of an attack by Muslims, but the other way around.
Just prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the executive director of the Canadian Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote a statement listing “positive developments” that have come about as a result of this catastrophe, and highlighting “greater interfaith” dialogue as the top accomplishment. He also reminded his audience that, “it is also vital to be vigilant and acknowledge that challenges remain.”
What are those challenges? One would expect him to indentify the primary challenge as jihad-inspired Islamists’ continued attacks on Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Instead, the CAIR official suggested the opposite. He wrote: “Among those, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric continues unabated here in Canada, Europe, the U.S., and in many parts of the world. … [T]he assault on privacy rights and civil liberties continues.”
The CAIR official did not condemn either the 9/11 attack or the doctrine of armed jihad that inspired the 9/11 jihadi terrorists. Nor did he speak out against Islamists’ ongoing attempts to sneak Sharia Law into the public domain.
Instead of rallying around the values that the West stands for, the Second Global Conference on World’s Religions After 9/11, which was hosted by McGill University in Montreal on Sept. 7, seemed to be dominated by Islamists. If the Islamists were successful in persuading attendees of their message, then such non-Muslim religious leaders as the Dalai Lama, and clerics and scholars of religious studies, will endorse the odious document that the Muslim Brotherhood is promoting, which aims to curtail any criticism of Islam by claiming it as a violation of human rights.
While the West sleeps, the Islamists cloaked in their self-promoted label of “moderation” ensure we fight the jihad as paper tigers. Leading the Islamist charge is Tariq Ramadan, who spoke at the interfaith fest in Montreal. Ramadan reflects the new sophisticated arm of the worldwide Islamist movement, which sees the West as the right place to wage a cultural and intellectual jihad. He is the darling of the world Islamist establishment, but camouflages his Islamist agenda by way of ambivalent doublespeak.
If we in the West do not wake up to the threat posed by Islamism, then, 10 years from today, we will still be engaged in the so-called war on terrorism that has made the U.S.’s corporate sector immensely profitable, but has left the country near bankruptcy – in terms of both money and ideas.
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Source: the Mark
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