ANTI-SEMITISM
The Hidden Roots of 9/11
By Robert S. Wistrich


www.haaretz.com

The Islamic terrorists who shattered the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 11th September two years ago laid out a potentially terrifying road-map for the 21st century. They demonstrated that highly motivated radical groups driven by a nihilism, an ideology of Jihad and an insidious death cult which transmutes mass murder into revolutionary virtue, are capable of shaking the pillars of civilization. Perhaps the ultimate blasphemy is that this bloody deed was proclaimed in the name of Allah, his Prophet Muhammad and the Holy Koran. To quote Hamas' weekly, Al-Risa'la, in Gaza, on 13 September, 2001: "Allah has answered our prayers."

The fashionable explanations in the predominantly secular West for such suicide terrorism, which we have been hearing ever since 9/11, relate to poverty, oppression, despair and/or religious delirium. These all clearly miss the point. The young Saudis who provided most of the suicide bombers were certainly not impoverished and they had never lived under foreign occupation. They were well-educated, familiar with the West and in their own way, sophisticated. By ignoring their ideology, one is simply guaranteeing that the war against terror will fail to achieve what must surely be one of its most important objectives, to win the hearts and minds of more moderate Muslims.

The 11th of September was, of course, a blow against America and its symbolic citadels of power: Wall Street and the Pentagon. But the violent anti-Americanism which the mass murder expressed was also strongly colored by antisemitism, largely suppressed at the time by the Western media and downplayed ever since. Even in Israel there is insufficient awareness - despite the suicide bombings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad - of how closely linked terror, "holy war" and genocidal antisemitism have really become.

For Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian mastermind of 9/11, it was self-evident that the Jews control the global media, international finance and the politics of the infidel West. In his eyes, they were to blame for the American crusade against Saddam Hussein, the Russian war in Chechnya, the world-wide assault on Islam, permissive morals and decadent "Westernization" in his native Egypt. The dream of Atta and many other Islamists was to create a Muslim theocracy from the Nile to the Euphrates, "liberated" from any Jewish presence. To achieve this goal, the Al-Qaida fanatics based in Hamburg struck at New York City, the "center of world Jewry" and the "Jewish-controlled" international financial system. In this ideological sense, they showed themselves to be direct heirs of Hitler and his genocidal mind-set. The failure of so many people, including Americans, Jews and Israelis, to grasp this crucial fact about the motivations for 9/11 is a stunning example of how little has been learned from history.

Jihadist ideology, nihilist bloodlust, the influence of a paranoid antisemitic world-view and a powerful sense of mission derived from the self-intoxication of indoctrinated suicide warriors, propelled the 9/11 bombers. Bin Laden had already convinced them that America was a paper tiger and that Islam represented the irresistible wave of the future. After all, had not the mujahideen helped to bring down the mighty Soviet Union only a decade earlier, by defeating the Red Army in Afghanistan?

There were also more mundane factors at work. The suicide bombers orchestrated their own deaths and those of hundreds of innocent civilians for a prime-time world-wide television audience. They aimed for hugely spectacular effect and maximum publicity (even if they would not live to see it), and they succeeded brilliantly. The bombers who came after, have seen the horrible moment replayed over and over, absorbing the lesson only too well. The psychological and media impact of 9/11 has already proven to be a huge inspiration for all future acts of terrorism.

The success of Al-Qaida has indeed encouraged Islamists around the world to believe that suicide terrorism is a method that really works, a cost-effective way of waging asymmetrical war against more powerful armies, like those of the U.S., India or Israel.

Despite the impressive American military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, Al-Qaida is not down or out, any more than the Hamas and other Palestinian groups have been eliminated. Nor have the Palestinian terrorist atrocities led to a more empathetic understanding of Israel's security predicament any more that it has increased sympathy for America. On the contrary, since 9/11, the demonization of the U.S. and Israel as well as the tendency to blame both for Palestinian terrorism has significantly grown. So too, has the rank antisemitism which already two years ago pointed the finger at the Mossad and "the Jews" for allegedly planning the 9/11 massacre. Such anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, directly descended from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, have also inspired the Hamas murderers and their spiritual leaders like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. This is a war that cannot be won without tearing up Islamist antisemitic hatred at the roots and exposing the lethal character of Jihad for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

Robert S. Wistrich is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem

- posted by Izak @ 3:28 AM