9/11: Do mention the war

Most readers remember where they were when the heard the news of the 9/11 attacks, just as older generations remembered where they were when World War II ended, or when they heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Those earlier examples were as defined as the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon but they also had a finite ending: a closure, to use the clich aac. Gazing upon the rows of war graves which lie in manicured parks along the Somme, or at Gallipoli or in Thailand and Indonesia, we have an idea of what the aftermath of war looks like as time flows on. But the memorials in Manhattan and Washington and in a green Pennsylvania field lack that finality, the definition of a conflict. Today's tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks reminds us that this conflict is not yet resolved, that the ideology which drove the middle-class Arab terrorists to hijack aircraft for the sole purpose of murdering as many Western civilians as possible, and to strike at the heart of the American culture, is still being preached in mosques and madrasahs across the Middle East and South-East Asia. It is impolite and politically incorrect to say so but we have Islamists living among us in Australia, and in every other Western nation, who take what our culture provides but still despise Western values. As we know from the successful trials against terrorist plotters in Sydney, only the vigilance of our security and intelligence organisations have prevented some of these people carrying out horrific crimes, including launching attacks against crowds in iconic venues. Yet it is considered offensive to mention the obvious, that there is a direct link between Islamic extremism and murderous terrorism. We didn't think that way when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour or the Germans invaded Poland. Today, Western nations which responded so magnificently and heroically to earlier threats against their culture and values are being eroded from within as much, or more, than they are attacked from without. The Western nations have permitted their values to be diminished through the acceptance of a hard left-wing culture masquerading as environmentalism, as pacifism, as progressivism, and being taught from infancy to our children through the media and through our schools. When the aircraft whacked into the World Trade Center towers, sending them crashing down, there was a moment of universal condemnation but that evaporated as the debris settled. The real victims were not the dead, we were told by the progressives, but Muslims worldwide. Forget that their oppressors were not Westerners, nor was their oppression a hangover from colonial times: their oppressors were home-grown tribal leaders and local despots like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The awful moral relativism entrenched in our universities, in large sections of our clergy, and firmly lodged in the inner-urban elites who control the Labor and Green parties, now dictates the response as it attempts to dominate the culture. This year the US finally tracked and killed Osama bin Laden but among the timely rejoicing, many demanded to know why Western soldiers didn't further risk their lives trying to capture the mass murderer alive. There was hand-wringing over whether the corpse of this evil killer had been treated with respect (it was). The West was again put on trial by Westerners hoping to find ammunition with which to continue their war against the culture which provided them with a secure home and the freedom and liberty to launch their attacks. Their bottom line was the lunatic notion that the West itself was to blame for the attacks. The suicide pilots and their henchmen were fighting for extremist Islamic fundamentalism and they found support for their attacks on the West from Westerners determined to tear down the values of the West and replace them with the same centralised collectivist philosophy responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions under the Soviets, Chinese and Koreans over the past century. This idiotic progressivism and relativism are vividly illustrated by the support shown for the wannabe-terrorist David Hicks, a young man who eagerly went to Pakistan seeking to be trained to kill those who embraced Western values. No matter how his fans dress up their backing for this repellent man, his character is easily determined through the remarkable letters he wrote to his family describing his desire to be a murderer. His horrendous desire to kill has been massaged and redefined through fawning articles and a series of pandering profiles on the ABC to permit his followers to now dismiss his then-murderous bent as the ordinary dreams of a harmless youngster caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, too, have the relativists and revisionists redrawn the act of war which occurred on 9/11 as a tragedy which just happened to take place in the US and by-the-way killed 2977 innocent people. Hicks, the wrong man in the wrong place, who re-entered Afghanistan to take up arms against Western soldiers after 9/11, boasted of hearing Osama bin Laden speak a number of times after the attack on the US, though there is no suggestion he was aware of the attack before it occurred. Those Westerners who argued against Western retaliation after 9/11 now face another dilemma with outbreaks of unrest across the Middle East in which Western nations are playing little part. Those who brought down the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia fought for real freedom, not bicycle lanes in Darlinghurst. Ten years on, the West's war is as much with those whose extremism authored 9/11 as with those who determined to undermine the West through their pusillanimous revisionism. We must not lose sight of the enormity of what happened on that most terrible of days and we must not let those who wish to erase our memory destroy our culture and its values.