A personal reminiscence and some lessons from these 22 years of history. I had moved to California a year ago when the deadliest terrorist attack in American history took place. (The next day, September 12, I was booked on a flight from San Francisco to New York to attend a The Economist weekly conference with Carlo de Benedetti to be held in one of the Twin Towers.) San Francisco , a stronghold of the radical left since the 1960s, was transformed within a few hours on September 11, 2001. I saw the Stars and Stripes flags appearing from the windows of every house. In national mourning, the city symbol of progressives and pacifists discovered itself as a patriot. The division between the two Americas was lifted, the tragedy made us forget the ideological differences, we all clung to the flag together. It was a moving and amazing sight for me: I came from a rather cynical and disillusioned Europe. The heroes of the moment were the New York firefighters and police officers who were digging at the risk of their lives in the rubble of the Twin Towers.
San Francisco soon returned to its former self. Other flags, other banners, other slogans: The left square mobilized against George W. Bush’s America, against the special anti-terror laws (Patriot Act), against the invasion of Iraq that began in January 2003. More Than a Flag With In the ocean processions paraded in California and many other American cities, beneath the Stars and Stripes emerged the caricature portrait of a Bush transformed into Adolf Hitler. As with the conflict in Vietnam, the “anti-Americanism” of the American left for the war in Iraq had inviolable reasons. The Bush administration lied to the nation and the world about the ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented false evidence to the United Nations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In July 2003, the suspension of civil rights at Guantánamo Special Prison began (a scandal that continues to this day). Photos of the torture of prisoners in Abu Graib went around the world. As in Vietnam in the 1960s, America trampled on its values during war.
However, if one only recalls the events following the attack on Baghdad in 2003, one forgets a crucial background. For part of American society, condemnation of the United States – and of the West as a whole – had begun much earlier: on the same tragic day of September 11, 2001.
To understand when the premises of the “conspiracy theories” that powered the Trump era, then the pandemic and the vaccination campaign were laid, we have to go back to that date. With a difference. During Trumpism, the fake news factory saw right-wing inspiration take hold. After the Twin Towers attack, however, it was a segment of the global left – its most radical currents – that eventually became mesmerized by talk of conspiracies and conspiracies. We understand why. The aggressor – al-Qaeda – came from the camp of the “good guys” or at least the “victims”, in Manichaeism of the dogmatic left: i.e. from the Arab-Islamic world, counted by definition among the oppressed on earth. The attacked – Bush’s America or New York/Wall Street as the capital of global finance or the Pentagon in Washington – stood at the head of the historic enemies of the left, that is, the evil empire, the culprits of all suffering on a planetary scale.
Since on 9/11 it was the supposed “weak” who attacked the hated superpower and shed innocent blood by massacring three thousand defenseless citizens, there were two cases for the more extremist and partisan component of the left. Or one had the courage to applaud Osama Bin Laden, to celebrate the massacre as a triumph of justice: so did many Palestinians and various Arab crowds who flocked to their countries’ squares. Or they could find a more wondrous solution to save their souls: by pretending the horror was actually planned by the Americans themselves, perhaps in conjunction with their Israeli allies. This is how the CIA and Mossad orchestrated 9/11 theories emerged, theories that endure to this day. It is the macabre shortcut of magical thinking that absolves the executioner and puts the victim on trial. It is the perversion against which Oriana Fallaci reacted with her memorable articles of denunciation in the Corriere.
The notion that there was post-9/11 pro-American sentiment that Bush subsequently squandered is pure fiction. That feeling never existed, or perhaps only for a few hours, when the Paris newspaper Le Monde ran its front page, “We Are All Americans.” Transient solidarity. Envy of America, resentment of its strength, hatred of its success have been constants for decades, especially since victory in the Cold War briefly made it the sole superpower.
Bill Clinton was the most multilateralist president imaginable, but al Qaeda began preparations for 9/11 during his presidency. Clinton asked for forgiveness for black slavery and her failure to save Rwanda. In the 1990s, America intervened militarily three times to save Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, all Muslim nations. And in the case of the last two, there was no benefit to the United States. Bin Laden launched his declaration of war on America in 1996, at the height of Clinton’s good internationalism. The escalation of attacks against America – from the first attack on the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, which miraculously killed “only” six and wounded a thousand, to the ship USS Cole – coincided with Clinton’s two terms as President . The Twin Towers massacre began at a time when America was being ruled by a leader who was actively working to give the Palestinians a state.
A similar thing happened when Brussels was fatally hit by Islamist terrorist attacks on March 22, 2016: 32 citizens were killed at Zaventem Airport and in the Maelbeek underground station. Rash and ignorant analyzes immediately appeared in many western media. Many commentators wrote that behind Belgian jihadism was the “ghettoization” of Islamic immigrants, so the West was always to blame.
It was the sequel to the film that was shown after the attack on the Twin Towers. “What did we do to provoke them, how did we inflict this punishment on ourselves?” One of the reasons for the jihadist violence in 2016 was that the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels was labeled a ghetto, especially by journalists who had never been there before. Ghetto? It is not this word that describes Molenbeek, Brussels or Belgium today. One of jihadism’s greatest scholars, Frenchman Olivier Roy, was among the first to denounce the analytical error. He immediately pointed out to us that the majority of terrorists are rich, lower-middle-class kids who slid into crime before finding an alibi in religious fanaticism. Belgian social assistance is one of the most generous and also includes foreigners. Molenbeek is home to second or third generation North Africans who have become lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers and parliamentarians. Anything but ghetto.
Exploitation, marginalization, social distress? Talk show gurus use these formulas as passe-partouts out of intellectual laziness. But what Islamists hate about the West is neither capitalist exploitation nor social inequality; What they denounce is the secular state that puts all religions on the same level; free expression; duty exemption; female emancipation; the fact that women can study and work, dress however they want, and marry whomever they want.
The crucial background of 9/11 that we didn’t want to understand was the turning point of Islam in the crucial and terrible year 1979. Even before jihad and the terrorist cells appeared. The change took place in part of the Islamic community at a time when Belgium and all of Europe were improving: they were becoming less racist and much more open to the cultures of origin, languages and customs of the Maghreb world. At the same time, a growing section of Islamic immigration was changing its attitude towards us. An important step in this reversal coincides with Khomeini’s “revolution” in Iran (1979), the establishment of a Shia theocracy that denounces the West as a decadent, immoral, corrupt, and sinful civilization. In parallel, that same year saw an obscurantist turn in Saudi Arabia, where the monarchy, fearing ending up like the Shah of Persia, responded to Khomeini’s challenge by allying itself with the more reactionary Wahhabi clergy; From that moment on, Riyadh began using streams of petrodollars to finance mosques and madrasas where hatred of the West is preached. Since these years, some of the Muslim immigrants indoctrinated by fundamentalism have begun to think that their civilization is superior, that they have nothing to learn, that they even need to avoid any contamination with us. There was also a feeling of resentment towards the West, fueled by the ruling classes. The leaders of North Africa and the Arab world who plundered the resources of their people fueled a narrative that attributed all misery to the colonial legacy, Western imperialism.
This victimhood has been embraced by many of us who have internalized the obsession with the sins of colonialism. Western colonialism ended in this part of the world at least 75 years ago. The two energy crises of the 1970s began a massive transfer of wealth to the Middle East. Streams of petrodollars have enriched some of the most predatory and corrupt ruling classes on the planet. Instead of investing in education and modernization – as did Singapore and South Korea, which were much poorer than the Arab countries in the 1950s – the very rich of the Arab world have invested in fundamentalism, which sows hatred against the West as the ideological glue of theirs Might. And many of us continued to call them victims.
In recent years, Islamist terrorism has fortunately declined in America and Europe. One explanation is that we have learned to protect ourselves better, unfortunately at great cost (just think of the difference between an airport in 2023 and one in 2000); We still have to look for another one in Riyadh. Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, has begun to strip power and economic resources from the most backward and savage section of his clergy. The situation of Saudi women is improving, the country wants to open up to tourism, there are signs that MbSs Arabia wants to become a great Dubai. It remains an authoritarian regime, as the murder of opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows. Dubai also has an authoritarian political system. However, the lack of democracy does not exclude the secularization of society. Furthermore, if the Saudi money behind the jihadist forces disappears, the threat that peaked on September 11th 22 years ago will weaken for the West.
However, bombings and massacres continue to occur in Islamic countries. It happens that we hear a supposed expert explain that it is always our fault, even when it comes to feuds between Shias and Sunnis that have been going on since the Prophet’s death in 632 AD.