Why they attacked us

"Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home; an evil fate."

- the Koran, Sura 9

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

- Omar M. Ahmad, board chairman of CAIR

The latest al Qaeda video states more explicitly than ever what was obvious to some of us from the beginning. The reason the Islamist terrorists hate us is that we are not Muslim. They hate us because we don't put bags over our women's heads and lock them indoors. They hate us because we allow gays to live. They hate us because we like to choose our own religion. And because we eat ham sandwiches. This is hard to wrap our heads around, because it makes no freaking sense. So we cast about for other explanation. Could we have have offended them somehow? Other than by eating ham sandwiches, that is.

We need to remember this. There have been an awful lot of lies spread around 9-11. I don't mean just the obviously loony conspiracy theories. These are nothing to worry about because hardly anyone will believe them anyway. No, a dangerous lie is a lie that the more impressionable - but not totally insane - sort might actually believe, if you repeat it often enough and loudly enough. For instance, the lie that they attacked us because of all the things we evil imperialists did tho them. We started it, the Jihadis claim. And the hate-sick Left are glad to second this. In fact, they lost no time. I vividly remember the outpouring of hate on Kuro5hin on September 12, 2001. The European posters said, in as many words, that we had it coming and it served us right. And they're still saying it. (Forget the squandered goodwill. It was just momentary official politeness. No sincerity to it at all.)

Well, as long as we're bringing up history, let's look at the whole history. Osama bin Laden mentioned the Crusades and the "tragedy of Andalusia," meaning the reconquest of Spain by Spaniards. That's a lot further back than they'd like us to look. So let's look back further still.

When the Prophet's corpse was barely cold, Muslims, having dispensed with Coptics in Egypt and various other nations in their part of the world, began to conquer Christian lands in Europe. This was the Jihad. (Jihad, by the way, is what would be a Crusade if a westerner or Christian undertook it against Muslims.) They finally met their match at Tours. But that was only the beginning.

In the 11th century, Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land came under attack from the Seljuk Turks. In self defense, Christendom undertook the First Crusade. That's right. Muslims started the Crusades.

And so it went. Various Muslim empires sought to conquer all they could. Their non-Muslim victims were given a choice - either convert or suffer second class status and the systematic exploitation known as dhimmitude. (Much of the more recent rhetoric omits the dhimmitude option. It's convert or die.) They conquered the decadent Byzantine Empire, and advanced well into what is now eastern Europe. But they never quite wiped out the West. And what was left of the West responded to the challenge, growing stronger and tougher.

The high water mark for Islamic empire was the 1683 siege of Vienna. Europe banded together and drove off the attackers. From that point on it was a slow decline for Islamic civilization. The Barbary Pirates made a nuisance of themselves, as did the remnants of the Moguls, but that was pretty much it for a few centuries.

The West was perfectly happy to let the Ottoman Empire alone. But then, in World War I, that doddering civilization chose the wrong side. As punishment, the victors carved it up into little pieces. Iraq, by the way, was one of those pieces. Then the victors - unwisely - decided to set up all these pieces as sovereign nation states. There was an anti-imperial fever raging at the time. The British Empire couldn't ditch its holdings fast enough. Not that it bought them any good will. Quite the opposite.

Around this same time period, the West discovered vast oil reserves throughout the Arab world, and helped develop them, making the upper strata of Arab society very, very rich. As a show of gratitude, these governments nationalized the oil fields, and denounced the economic imperialists who had made this wealth possible.

In 1948, the few Jews living in Palestine were given their ancestral land back as their own state. Many other Jews that had survived the Holocaust came to join them. Since the land had few inhabitants, there was plenty of room, but because Arabs hate Jews, it didn't matter how much room there was to spare. Israel had a tough time of it, but survived.

In Egypt, Sayyid Qutb did for Islam what Kierkegaard had done for Christianity: he declared it dead, and in need of resurrection. From this, he went on to call for another world war, a final Jihad to exterminate the unbelievers - that is, pretty much everybody. Qutb never managed to get this Jihad rolling himself, but many other groups caught the spirit of his... er, thought.

In 1972, in Munich, the sore losers among the Muslim world discovered a new way of coping with their ongoing humiliation: murder. The age of Islamist terrorism had begun. Since then, it's been escalating terror attacks, and tepid, passive-aggressive responses from various U.S. Presidents, culminating in 9-11.

Since 9-11, America has gotten seriously ticked off and taken the fight to the enemy. In the process, we've needed to topple any thugocracy that gives aid and comfort to the fanatics. (A lot of people don't like that. Well, get it over it. We didn't start this, but we intend to finish it. We're fed up, and we don't need to ask ourselves why. We know why.)

So, whenever anybody tells you Arabs and Muslims are angry at us because of our imperialist aggression, now you know exactly what they're talking about. They're talking about the fact that they picked a fight with us, and we had the bad grace to win, so now they want a rematch. That's our imperialist aggression. Are we all clear on that now?

Of course, not all who call themselves Muslims are this unsportsmanlike. But the ones that aren't, aren't the ones that are giving us trouble. The ones that are giving us trouble, hate us because we didn't let them conquer the world.

To put it another way, it's not about us. It's about them.

So, how do we make them feel better? Actually, there's nothing within reason we can do to appease them. Even converting won't help, because professing Muslims slaughter professing Muslims all the time. The Koran says they shouldn't (Sura 49) but they do anyway. They rationalize it by declaring other sects to be not true Muslims. And no one can belong to all the sects at the same time!

What can we do, then? Well, nothing calms a religious fanatic down quite like a bullet in the head.

Just a suggestion.

And now, a thought from another thinker:

"Anyone who lost their 'innocence' on September 11 was too naive by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor."

- Christopher Hitchens

I say:

Occasionally Hitchens is wrong; most of the time he's right. But he's never muddled. On this issue, he sees the truth clearly, and expresses it clearly.


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