Yesterday marked the seventeenth anniversary of the murderous Islamic attacks that took the lives of thousands of innocent Americans and others in what has become known as the 9/11 attacks. The attacks on New York and Washington and the attack that was thwarted by the heroic passengers of United Flight 93 marked a new wave of a very old hostility that would come from the followers of the ideology of Islam.
I recall sitting at my desk in London and seeing the story evolve live online and it was totally unlike any similar terror attack or international tragedy that I’d experienced primarily because it was being shown live online across the world. I saw how the story transmogrified over the day from one about a light aircraft hitting one of the towers, to the full horrific revelation that this was a deliberate attack on the USA and the West from those inspired and driven by Islam.
We should never forget the innocents who died in the 9/11 attacks and neither should we forget who murdered them, although there are a multitude of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who would very much like us to forget the nature of the perpetrators. For these politicians, speaking the truth about 9/11 by saying ‘Islam did it’ is a step too far for them. The political classes, including former US President George W Bush, were and are locked in the fallacy that the 9/11 attacks and the multitude of other Islamic attacks we’ve suffered from since 9/11 are the work of ‘a tiny minority of extremists’ or ‘Islam is peace’. I can understand that in order to protect innocent Muslim individuals from vigilante violence George W Bush went a bit easy on Islam, but in the long term this statement was a great mistake. President Bush’s statement about Islam being peaceful was a noble lie uttered to protect those who had nothing to do with terrorism and may even have been contributors to the US culture and economy. However like many other noble lies it has had grievous effects. President Bush failed to distinguish between Islam the ideology and Muslims, not a small number of whom are coerced into Islam or who are decent people not because of Islam but in spite of it and to a large extent let Islam off the hook. The former President’s erroneous statement has inspired others in the political sphere to lie about the nature of Islam when faced with Islam-inspired atrocities and the aftermath of them, such as Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May.
The 9/11 attacks were an assault not just on America but on the entirety of non-Islamic culture by Muslims using as justification the words of the Koran and the Hadith. 9/11 was the day that the world saw that Islam is, at its theological heart, a death cult. Unfortunately although the ordinary citizens of various countries in the world may have seen Islam’s true face on 9/11 many of our politicians have not done so. In the 17 years that have elapsed since the post-9/11 world came into being many Western politicians have tried to appease Islam in order to buy peace, a policy that plainly has not worked.
Appeasement has brought more terrorism, Islam-inspired rape gangs and has the worrying potential to bring civil unrest both from Muslims whose real or imagined grievances are not being taken seriously or from the majority population who are sick to the back teeth of Islam’s undue influence on their nations and the governing classes of these nations. The politicians didn’t learn the lesson that the 1930’s should have taught them, which is that appeasing small scale tyrants like Mussolini when he invaded Ethiopia can have the affect of bringing a greater danger in its wake. So we have seen in the post-9/11 world with politicians falling over themselves to speak the lie that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and the wages for this appeasement are more death, more terror, more rape and more destruction. I sometimes wonder if the post-9/11 world would have been better had the West had a concerted and united fight against an ideology that has plagued first Christendom and then the Free West in various guises for 1400 years? Maybe a more robust response to Islam in the immediate post-9/11 period may have been more effective at dealing with this dangerous ideology than the softly-softly approach taken by the political classes in Western nations? Would we be living with the current high level of terror threat or with the Islam inspired crime and anti social behaviour that many places experience if religious profiling had been put in place or questionable mosques in the West had been investigated and closed down or if we’d placed restrictions on Muslims and on the activity of Islam? Such a policy would have undoubtably caused trouble, but would it be any worse than the trouble that appeasement and the reaction to such appeasement is taking us? I think not. We could have been living in a different world, one where the enemy ideology is seen as such and where the proponents of this enemy ideology are not whispering honeyed lies in the ears of our politicians.
Of course, the number of Muslims who will actively commit or prepare for acts of terror is indeed small, but the cultural and theological values imposed on Muslims by Islam create not just this admittedly tiny number of murderers, but also a much greater number of people who will turn a blind eye to terror plots or extremism. There are even more Muslims who hold views about women, gays and religious minorities that contribute to a culture of extremism and which place many Muslims at odds with the cultures of gender equity, personal freedoms and religious pluralism that have grown up in the West and which are the result of unique cultural and historical circumstances. Because of the stark differences between the cultures that have evolved in the West and the cultures of Islam, we have to treat Islam honestly. We cannot, for example, ignore the fact that Islam creates bad people at a rate unmatched by any other major faith and although we should take steps to ensure that individual Muslims who have bugger all to do with extremism of even dawa are protected from harm, we should not treat Islam the same way or protect this ideology from challenge or criticism. It is right and proper that we treat the innocent individual fairly, but it is utter madness to continue to deny the true nature of Islam or mask this ideology with lies such as ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.
Islam was not peaceful on 9/11, just as it was not peaceful during so much of its history. Although the history of all nations and people’s are stained with blood, the Islamic world has been particularly so. The marked difference between Islam and the West, is that Islam has created cultures and nations that are still bestial in their nature even though the rest of the world has become civilised and moved on from such things as religious violence, slavery, stoning adulterers and extreme misogyny.
We must honour those who died or who were injured in the 9/11 attacks which were a monstrous assault on both the United States and the civilised West, by remembering them. However, we must also remember to never forget that it was Islam that caused these deaths and injuries and that appeasement of this ideology has not and will not bring a lasting peace to the world. The best memorial in my view to those who suffered on 9/11 would be a world where Islamic violence and Islamic crime and destruction was a distant memory and not a current threat, but for that to happen Islam must not be appeased but instead be often criticised and sometimes robustly confronted by the states that have a duty to protect its citizens or subjects.
Seventeen years have passed since the tragedy of 9/11 and we still live with the problems caused by the ideology of Islam, maybe it’s time for a different approach to this issue than the ones that have been tried by our politicians and have failed so often before?
