We say, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” The Italians say, “Don’t spit in the plate you eat from.” Not only did our ignoble Islamic fundamentalist guests spit in their plates, they broke them, then turned over the table, put fire to the guesthouse, and murdered their unsuspecting hosts. Because we are an open society, we’ve allowed the enemy to live among us, enjoy the benefits of our freedoms, the efficiency of our institutions, the luxuries of our lifestyle. They took those privileges that we had the generosity to share and used them as a nest to plot our destruction.
And now, to save ourselves, and by ourselves I mean not only America, but all the civilized world, we’ll be forced to give up some of our liberties, to lower our values, to act less scrupulously, to be ourselves less civilized in order to save the civilized world.
In the early nineties international relations theorists struggled to produce a grand new theory that could describe the coming new world (dis)order after the fall of communism ended the division of the world according to economic ideologies. At first glance, the contest seems to be over with Samuel Huntington as the winner. Grossly oversimplified, the paradigm of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington postulated that the source of future world conflicts would be based on the “clash of civilizations.”
However, we must be careful to distinguish between Islam as a religion and its extremists, just as the Islamic world should remember that the first NATO intervention in history took place in Kosovo in defense of their brethren. There are many competing versions of Islam, not only orthodox thinkers, fundamentalists and extremists, but also moderate Muslims and even Secularists.
What happened on Tuesday September 11, 2001 is shocking, yes, but not surprising. It was the climax of over twenty-two years of negligence. I’m referring to 1979 when, after promoting decades of modernization and economic prosperity, the Shah was forced to leave Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph to preside over the ruins of the revolution and the establishment of an Islamic republic.
Since then we’ve allowed the cancer of extremism to infiltrate the civilized world, to grow, multiply, and metastasize niches of civilization across the globe from Marocco to Indonesia.
The inspiration for the very first article I wrote for this column back in 1995 was an incident of terrorism that had occurred in Turkey, of Islamic fundamentalists against the Alawites, the most moderate of all of the Muslims in Turkey and stark defenders of Turkey’s secular democracy. I had learned of the incident in the German press. Not a single American newspaper had reported the incident, seemingly insignificant: one of many little warnings.
It was one of so many incidences where extremism has sought for over two decades to snuff out the candles of civilization. This isn’t so much a clash of civilizations, the Islamic world against the West. Rather, it’s a question of barbarianism against the entire civilized world. (Only a few months ago we watched the same Taliban destroy statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.) The fact is hardly comforting. How many enlightened civilizations over the course of history have been brought down by barbarians? It is their perception of their own reality -- that they have nothing to lose -- that makes them so utterly dangerous.
I’m certainly not an optimist by nature and my nights are tormented by rude awakenings to the same nightmare that is afflicting all of us. However, I’m absolutely desperate to see a bright side. And bright sides indeed there are.
Never, on any matter ever, have the Europeans come to such a prompt decision as the one offering unqualified support to the United States, whether its decisions are unilateral or whether it asks its allies for participative cooperation. (Of course we’ll have to wait and see, when push comes to shove, just how unqualified and unanimous that support will be.) Particularly inspiring was Russia, our former enemy, even more prompt and forthcoming than our traditional allies. The global coalition that is forming spans the boundaries of continents, of ideologies, of religions, of civilizations. It is clear that this has become possible because the stakes are so high: Everyone has everything to lose. But if we succeed, there will certainly be a new basis upon which to build international cooperation and globalism should cease to be dirty word among the reticent.
This horror has also produced an occasion for America to rid itself of some of the worst excesses of its freedoms, like its disproportionate obsession for overdoses of violence and vulgarities. An opportunity to remove that odious politically correct hyphen that was destroying our melting pot. All of a sudden, we are no longer African-Americans, Italian-Americans, but simply Americans, and proud of it. What other nation has democracy so deeply instilled in its veins that, in a dramatic moment like the one faced by the flight that crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania rather than hit a target in our nation’s capital, its citizens find the wherewithal to vote to decide whether or not to put up a fight against the terrorists?
September 2001
Return to home page Return to list
Editors interested in subscribing to this syndicated column may request information by sending an e-mail to: giogia@giogia.com