Jerusalem Post A Time to Kill
Published: September 13, 2001 Author: Amotz Asa-El
Posted on 09/13/2001 21:03:55 PDT by anapikoros
America, noted historian Daniel Boorstin (in The Americans: The Democratic Experience), has built skyscrapers not only in its major metropolises, but also in relatively remote towns where there is no shortage of real estate. Consequently, when a US warplane accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, thoughts were focused on the wisdom of that Tower-of-Babel urge to scrape the sky, on the limits of technological achievement, and on the irony of mankind's two major gravity-defying creations - the aircraft and the tower - ramming each other like a multi-headed Frankenstein turning on itself.
Yet this week's catastrophe is neither about inventions turning on inventors nor about Mother Nature turning on humanity. It's about peaceful people being attacked by bad people Ð the type who can be confronted with no form of compromise, appeasement or dialogue. Like the Nazis and Fascists in the 1940s, they - the leaders, sponsors and beneficiaries of Arab terror and tyranny - must be met with the one language they understand: violence.
The assault perpetrated on America this week is the most ominous in its history. It has taken more lives than the Pearl Harbor attack and was waged not in a remote military theater, but in America's commercial, cultural and governmental solar plexus.
Sadly, as Middle Israelis have been arguing in the face of repeated suicide bomb attacks, the war has now proven to be not about land, creed or faith, but about civilization. It is the Armageddon of tyranny on freedom, the war of the sons of darkness against the sons of light, who dared make Islamic fundamentalists and Arab tyrants suffer from an inferiority complex they would neither treat nor contain.
It was but a few centuries ago that Christendom was inferior to the civilization of the Moslem astronomers, mathematicians, doctors, architects, bankers and soldiers who gave English the words admiral, traffic and cheque, and conquered Byzantium, Greece, Hungary and Spain. Then, as Christians circumnavigated the globe, settled new continents and launched the industrial revolution, the Arab world stayed behind. Infidels invented the printing press, steamboat, motorcar, locomotive and airplane, then fast-fed mankind, electrified, computerized and telecommunicated the globe, and finally landed with a spaceship on the crescent itself.
It is this loss of historical prominence that feeds what Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis has called "Moslem rage." Yet the misery of the Arab peoples - which remain disproportionately illiterate, jobless and destitute - is not the fault of any Westerner, but the doing of their own unelected leaders who have squandered the vast mineral riches with which their lands have been blessed, spending one-in-three petrodollars on weapons and investing much of the remainder abroad as private individuals rather than at home as governments bent on promoting progress and prosperity.
It is the fusion of these cultures of political robbery and religious frustration that bred this week's attack. And the first ones to acknowledge this are its protagonists; that is why Muammar Gaddafi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, to mention but a few, so cowardly and hurriedly came out "condemning" the attack. Having spent years creating a Newspeak in which the murder of innocent and defenseless people became not only a legitimate act of war, but a moral value and an educational goal, they - along with Iran's mullahs, Syria's generalisimos and Iraq's thugs - must now be legitimate targets in the free world's war for its soul.
For years, democrats elsewhere, particularly in Europe, dismissed the thesis that our own conflict is about freedom. For years, and particularly over the past year, the Jewish state has been under a massive, brazen and state-inspired terror attack. Throughout it all we were pretty much abandoned to our neighbors' devices by cynics who often preferred to accuse the victim and delude themselves that the enemy's agenda is really about real estate (which Israel had agreed to relinquish), or "occupation" (which Israel had been phasing out of), or "human rights" (which Israeli courts are famous for upholding) - all Western values that the Arab world's regimes habitually disparage, abuse and trample in broad daylight.
Now all that should finally change.
This week's towering infernos should etch 2001 in human memory as a watershed year on the scale of 1492, 1789 and 1939.
For now, '01 is the year that opened the Third Millennium with a totalitarian bang that sets back freedom's emergence from the previous millennium as the Cold War's shining victor. Yet '01 can end up as the year in which the free world waged the ultimate war on tyranny.
What has been repeated in recent days ad nauseam Ð that the enemy remains "unknown" Ð is nonsense. Yes, the perpetrators of the specific attacks have yet to be tracked down, but the ones who hosted, defended and legitimized terror are well known. They range from Damascus to Teheran and from Baghdad to Tripoli.
It is time that those who abuse power at home and threaten stability abroad were called to task. Tragically, while the enemy is a set of regimes like some of our neighbors', the targets might also end up including their subjects. The inhabitants of Dresden and Tokyo never danced in the streets when Americans were killed, and yet they were carpet-bombed. That was what their governments concocted for them, and it was only traumas on the scales of those handed them by the Allies that ultimately made them understand their own leaders' moral bankruptcy, and the enemy's resolve to eradicate it.
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