In Plain Sight
Mark Steyn has a must read in the Chicago Sun-Times today. Some people remember 9/11 while some have gone back to thinking and acting in terms of September 10th sensibilities. Still others indulge in conspiracy theories and miss the real truth: The enemies of the West and the US are hiding in plain sight.
As the years go by, it's these curious examples of cultural interconnectedness that stay with me. "Interconnectedness" is the word used by the late Edward Said, the New York-based Palestinian grievance-monger and eminent America-disparager: A couple of weeks after 9/11, the professor deplored the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into what he called "sealed-off entities," when in reality Western civilization and the Muslim world are so "intertwined" that it was impossible to "draw the line" between them. National Review's Rich Lowry was unimpressed. "The line seems pretty clear," he said. "Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea."
Very true. But that may be the only "interconnectedness" a large part of the world is interested in: state-of-the-art technology in the service of ancient hatreds. Edward Said was right: There are no more "sealed-off entities." The "modern world" and the "primitive world" are more like those overlaid area codes the phone company's so partial to. So a man can roar "Allahu Akhbar!" as he plows his jet into an office building. Even the most primitive parts of the map aren't that "sealed off" these days. After all, why were they listening to the BBC's Arabic Service in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't an Arabic-speaking country. They parly-voo the old Pushtun and Dari and Turkmen and whatnot. But on Sept. 11, 2001, the nation was, in effect, under colonial occupation by thousands of Arab and other foreign jihadists. We think of the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistani border as a remote region of isolated peoples whose rituals have been unchanged for centuries. Yet the truth is that these village tribal cultures have been wholly subverted by Saudi money and ideology. The House of Saud's toxic kingdom, a land where the beheading schedule is computerized, may be a more apt emblem of the way an "interconnected" world is heading than we like to think.
The continued attempts to lay the blame for the situation in the world all at the feet of the US is actually a form of elitism. No other nation or group can act except in reaction to the US and its policies. Nobody has free will without the say-so of the US. The blame America crowd points to a statement made by a madman blaming America for this or that as proof that it is America's fault. They do not see that the madman is simply offering any excuse but that the mad activities would continue whether there was an excuse or not.
Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef's successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the "day that changed everything." Sept. 11 was less "a failure of imagination" than an ability to see that America's enemies were hiding in plain sight.
The enemy is real. The enemy is not driven by anything America or the West does. The enemy is driven because America and the West exist. Please read the whole thing.
