Sept. 11, 2011

It has been ten years since the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed. The whole world knows it. The commemorations have reached their peak in the last two weeks.

The first reason is purely related to the media and its treatment of this event. September 11 was the very essence of raw information delivered on an unprecedented scale. The images were repeated on televisions worldwide, during which the commentators, just as stunned as their audiences, found themselves incapable of doing anything other than watch, sometimes cursing out of fear in prime time. The anniversary represents a form of revisiting the taking control by information professionals. A constant stream of analysis, new perspectives and other retrospectives inundate the public — the best way to put it back in its place.

The other salient feature of this profusion of commemorations undoubtedly comes from the willingness to mark the end of an era. So symbolic is the interval of ten years, that the death of bin Laden at the hands of American commandos in May represents signature elements in the long war against Islamic terrorism — a war preceded by numerous warning signs, the gravity of which nobody realized.

What a journey traveled, however, since the situation in 2001 — a journey that can essentially be credited to American President George W. Bush.

Elected on an isolationist platform, the American president was the first to understand the new situation following the attacks of September 11. The threat was global (as the Europeans would discover themselves soon enough), and the response should also be global. Regimes complicit in harboring terrorist networks from then on faced the consequences. It was equally impossible to further ignore any dictators massacring their own people, an unacceptable compromise of principle with the resulting resentment leading to more terrorism.

George W. Bush rarely described the situation as clearly as he did in a speech delivered on November 7, 2003:

“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

For those interested in the long version, it is possible to dive into the work of Guy Milliere, “Ce Que Veut Bush” [“What Bush Wants”], and read how, eight years later, the progress of democracy in the Middle East has played out impeccably.

Nicolas Sarkozy himself shared this analysis of the history of the 21st century in a speech given recently.

[The French President] affirmed that the Arab Spring of democracy constituted “the most beautiful response” to the perpetrators of the deadly attacks that shook the United States on that day. Beyond the memory of victims, the French President esteemed that the ten years gone by have given reasons to hope, the instigators of the attacks having failed in their objectives to bring a fatal attack to democratic values, and to irrevocably pit the Western and Islamic worlds against one another. Instead, “every day since September 11, an increasing number of people everywhere in the world reclaim our values. In Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, in the entire Arab and Islamic world that the terrorists claimed to embody, millions of people have risen up for the values of democracy and liberty,” he emphasized.

September 11 was the crazy gamble of a handful of Islamists embracing jihad — the idea that the symbolism of a murderous attack at the heart of the most powerful country in the world would cause Muslims in the entire world to rise up against the West, and provoke a religious war on a world-wide scale.

The failure is clear. Since then, the aspirations of people world-wide seem to be more toward justice, democracy and liberty, rather than a rejection of these Western values. Numerous despotic regimes have fallen, one after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Tomorrow maybe Syria, followed by Iran perhaps. The presence of the West hasn’t always been official or military, but it has always been there — even if it was only humbly portrayed in videos of demonstrations posted online by courageous rebels filming with their smart phones.

The attack on the World Trade Center was the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century. Since the beginning of this new global war, many battles have been won, but the fight against Islamic totalitarianism is far from over. War is dirty. Morality is put to the test. Civil liberty is curbed in democracies. There are innocent victims. Victories are uncertain. Nobody knows what type of regime will emerge in the countries liberated by the Arab Spring. The Taliban still hide in the Afghan mountains. The young democracy of Iraq remains fragile.

Nobody would contest, however, that the “Western camp” is making progress in the area. Unfortunately, these often-remarkable victories were not followed by ideological victories. The enemy’s ideology has not been defeated.

On that front, our stalling is worrying. The West is far from counteracting the mode of thinking that underlies Islamist terrorist action. We don’t dare refute their beliefs, neither confronting them nor ridiculing them, any more than we dare to dismantle the networks preaching hate in the mosques of our cities. We close our eyes even to the enemies that have infiltrated our country.

Our weaknesses largely explain these strategic failings:

1. Social democracy has undermined the notions of liberty and individual responsibility, that is to say the foundations on which rest a healthy democracy.

2. Political correctness stifles the realm of official media, prohibiting true freedom of debate.

3. Multiculturalism permits immigrants to forgo the slightest form of integration or respect towards their country of welcome, values that are substituted with communalism and contempt.

4. The Western values of democracy, religious liberty and universal justice have themselves been replaced by a cult of guilt mixed with support for the third world, depicting the existing society as corrupt, exhausted and guilty.

We are afraid of losing the respect of those who want to cut our throats.

The danger is great. In ignoring the ideological aspect of the war against terrorism and its religious base, one takes the risk of never entirely eradicating it. Dismantling the terror cells without attacking their dogma is to return to the locker room before the end of the match. The general public knows the consequences: The survival of a fertile ground from which the next generation of bombers will inevitably emerge.

The European suburbs offer an increasingly more flammable cocktail of Islam, crime and nihilism. There, anti-Western propaganda flows freely. Entire populations live on subsidies, all the while despising the hand that feeds them. The rare free spirits to denounce this state of being are ridiculed, ostracized and reduced to silence, unless they aren’t brought to justice for reasons that would have made Torquemada pale with envy. The leaders of the Fifth Islamist Column and the leftist political movements manipulate one another in a worrying waltz in which neither one any longer knows who leads the dance.

What is the point of searching for the jihad training camps in Waziristan? Their use is over. The entirety of the Islamic network is now spread out through the suburbs of the West; attacks are more and more the act of individuals whose social and ethnic origins do not differ from those of their victims. The front line has moved. As a result, the destruction of a local al-Qaida cell in such and such a country of Africa or the Middle East has much less importance for European security than it did in the past — even if the positive effects on the security of the local populations are always good to work toward.

At Ground Zero, the twin towers of the World Trade Center are nothing more than imprints on the soil. The south of Manhattan has been cleaned of its rubble and rebuilt. The attacks of September 11 are fading slowly into the past, to be written into history, serving as reminders of troubled spirits.

If the site retains an extremely symbolic charge today, the combat is elsewhere. And it is, by far, not over.