In the course of my article on NRO today about 9/11 and the response to it, I touch on the inability (and unwillingness) of those running the West to confront the full extent of the challenge they faced.
Justifiable optimism after the Soviet collapse mutated into a teleological conviction that the way had been cleared for an ultimately irresistible ascent to a peaceful, prosperous, and more democratic world.
Militant Islam’s reworking of religious war is a phenomenon that much of the Western establishment not only finds bewildering but also continues, even after 9/11, to deny or downplay. It simply cannot be reconciled with its belief that the great ideological struggles of the past are over, and it mocks their orthodoxies about multiculturalism, immigration, and the interplay between the two.
9/11 was a powerful demonstration that notions of happy universalism were bunkum. It also made clear in the most terrible fashion that the notion that the era of unbridgeable ideological divide was over was nonsense.
An important consequence of this fantasy was an unwillingness to accept that people would be so convinced of the literal truth of their religious beliefs — and, as they understood it, the duties that came with them — that they would kill others (and themselves) to impose it. That sort of thing, so conventional wisdom ran, could safely be consigned to the past. To believe that to be true revealed a faith in the malleability of human nature that would be touching were it not so lethal.
It also demonstrated a remarkable inability to think things through, to see, for example, the Iranian revolution as anything more than an aberration or, for that matter, to understand the deeper significance of the rise of nominally secular, nominally rational creeds such as communism.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who knows from her own experience a great deal about this area, tackles this topic in a massive new article for Tablet. It opens with Mohamed Atta, who flew AA 11 into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, writing his will in Hamburg in 1996. That will, Hirsi Ali goes on to say, is:
among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.
Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed both sensible and necessary. . . .
A serious 25-year stocktaking has to recover the fact that not every culture in the world is compatible with ours. Particularly when one is looking at absorbing millions of people into democratic societies shaped by Western values that developed over thousands of years and remain culturally unique, one is looking at a civilizational task that would appear to require a great deal of muscle. Founding that effort on deliberate ignorance and well-meaning lies is a sure road to disaster.