Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.I will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States (US), as I have done for the past two-and-a-half decades, by remembering the falling bodies, dozens of them, plummeting through the air as they leapt from the flaming twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. I will have no trouble seeing them again; the images are seared into my memory.On the morning of September 11, 2001, a group of Islamist fanatics hijacked four domestic airliners and slammed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. At least 2,753 people — clerks and executives, cooks and waiters, accountants and investment advisers — died horribly as the tallest buildings in New York collapsed. Another 184 perished in the strike on the Pentagon. Forty airline passengers were killed when the fourth plane plowed into a farm field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as they tried heroically to overpower the hijackers. All 19 terrorists — 15 from Saudi Arabia and four others from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon — died.Some 200 people jumped from the North and South Towers in the hour-and-a-half the buildings remained standing after the planes struck. As Tom Junod wrote at the time in Esquire magazine: “They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when ceilings fell, and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died.”The most remembered image of a jumper is likely that of the “Falling Man,” who, to borrow Junod’s phrasing, appears to have embraced his death, diving to the ground in a Superman-in-flight pose. But the image that most haunts me is of two people holding hands as they fall. I have always imagined them as a man and a woman. Were they colleagues, friends, or strangers who met by chance and chose to die together rather than alone? Were they able to defy the laws of physics pulling them apart and hold hands all the way down? I hope they did; somehow, it’s important.Of course, other images of the towers’ collapse remain with me, as I’m sure they do for many people: ash-covered pedestrians emerging from the roiling clouds of pulverized concrete; shell-shocked relatives stalking the streets with photographs of missing loved ones; firefighters and police officers risking their lives crawling over a smouldering wasteland; ululating mobs dancing on the streets of Baghdad, Tehran, Cairo, and Gaza City..But 25 years ago, it was the image of the falling couple that sparked my first flare of fury, of cold cerebral anger, at the intellectuals of our time, the cosmopolitans and sophists who contributed to that destruction with their sophisticated hostility towards the traditions of Western civilization.The 9/11 attack, the worst terrorist event in American history, marked the beginning of what US President George W. Bush declared as the “War on Terror.” This war, in its various manifestations — the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the campaign against Islamic State, and, most recently, the effort to crush the Iranian regime, the main sponsor of international terrorism — has shaped the geopolitics of the world for a quarter of a century.Surely, after a quarter of a century, it is reasonable to ask: How goes the War? And why are so many — particularly the intellectual chattering classes — in denial about the need to continue fighting?The War on Terrorism has not proceeded as many hoped. Who would have thought it would remain unresolved after so long, or that the terrorist reach would extend so far after 9/11? Even so, as scholars Hal Brand and Michael O’Hanlon observe in a still-valid 2021 analysis, “it would still be wrong — and rash — simply to discard the Global War on Terrorism as a strategic failure.” The absence of follow-up strikes on the American homeland, as well as the denial, destruction, and decapitation of various terrorist groups as evidence of “relatively clear success.” It would be a serious policy “error,” they warn, to abandon the campaign against terrorism “out of undue pessimism.”Nonetheless, doubts about the future of the war are not unwarranted. There is no denying the sharp upsurge in terrorist violence since 9/11: bombings, shootings, vehicle-ramming massacres, attacks on musical concerts, beheadings, crucifixions, immolations, suicide attacks, stabbings, church burnings, rape gangs, home invasions, and even the occasional beheading on a city street..Between 1979, the theocratic revolutionaries took over Iran, and 2000, 6,817 people died in 2,194 terrorist attacks, according to the French think-tank Fondation Pour L’Innovation Politique. But after 9/11, the pace and scope of terrorist attacks increased dramatically. Between 2001 and early 2024, the world witnessed 64,678 Islamic terrorist attacks in which 243,124 people died.While the vast majority of attacks occurred in Muslim countries, Western nations have not been immune. In 2005, suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 700 others in coordinated attacks on the London Underground during rush hour. In 2015, Paris was hit with a series of coordinated attacks targeting a stadium, a concert hall, and restaurants. About 130 people died. Suicide bombers struck the airport and a metro station in Brussels in 2016, killing 32 people. A year later, another suicide bomber killed 22 people in an attack on an arena in Manchester, while an attack on London Bridge left eight dead.The most horrific terrorist assault in recent years — on a per capita basis, worse than 9/11 — was Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel. Hundreds of Gazans, mostly young men and boys, murdered, raped, mutilated, and kidnapped 1,400 mostly unarmed men, women, and children. The Gazans weren’t shy about documenting their depravity: using cellphones to record atrocities that should get the attention of the International Criminal Court. American scholar Jacob Howland has summed up the implications for the West of this descent into barbarism. “Something truly hideous, long hidden just beneath the surface of everyday life, is breaking forth from the ground. It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us,” he said, meaning not only Israel but the collective West.If the West is to defeat this evil, it will require Westerners to awaken to the “hidden” reality of the Islamist threat. Following a nearly 400-year hiatus, Islamists have renewed a long-sought campaign to conquer the West. By historical coincidence, Islam’s last major attack on the West was September 12, 1683, when a Christian army defeated the Ottoman forces at the Gates of Vienna. Four centuries later, the renewal of the jihadist campaign is more variegated and widespread — from Iran and its proxies attacking Israel and the Gulf States to turning the streets of Western cities into battlegrounds where innocents are stabbed, synagogues and churches firebombed, pedestrians run down, and Jews assaulted. The goal, however, is the same: the conquest of the West and the establishment of the Caliphate.The French philosopher René Girard is one of the few intellectuals to recognize that 9/11 constituted a spiritual crisis for Western civilization. Girard died in 2015, but in the last years of his career, he devoted himself to studying jihadist terrorism. “I see [9/11] as a seminal event, and it is fundamentally wrong to minimize it,” he wrote. “I personally think it represents a new dimension, a new world dimension.”.If Communism and Fascism were the West’s ideological enemies during the twentieth century, the destruction of the Twin Towers made fundamentalist Islam the cultural enemy for this century, he argued. “What communism was trying to do, to have a truly global war, has happened, and it is real now. To minimize 9/11 is to try to avoid thinking … From now on, war exists everywhere.”What puzzles me, what continues to anger me, is how so many of the West’s political and cultural elites — political, academic, journalistic, etc. — continue to downplay the Islamist threat.How might we account for this denialist psychology?Until the 1960s, the intellectual class was generally respectful of the Western inheritance. Academics thought — and taught — that whatever its flaws and failings (and yes, there were many), the West, drawing on its Greek and Judeo-Christian inheritance, had benefited mankind as a whole, bringing the rule of law, literacy, and technology, among other benefits.Beginning in the 1960s, a postmodern attitude emerged: the West as the fount of the world’s ills. Imperialist, aggressive, exploitative, environmentally destructive; these came to be regarded as the characteristics of Western culture. The West’s economic success was at the expense of other cultures. Human rights were a Western ethnocentric value, with no universal applicability to other cultures. Western imperialism and colonial settlement were inherently genocidal. Never mind that Western powers brought improvements in social, economic, and political conditions — better education, modern medicine, curbs on tribal warfare, and even an end to cannibalism. In any case, the age of empire ended more than half a century ago..Such realities haven’t stopped academics and activists from promoting theories — post-colonial settler studies and whiteness studies, for example — and instructing students, especially white students, that they have inherited the guilt of great wrongs and must atone. French philosopher Pascal Bruckner refers to this as “Third Worldism” — the ideological obligation of intellectuals, especially those on the Left, to regard non-Western cultures as paragons of virtue and Western cultures as the enemy of mankind and, thus, required to bend the knee.As Bruckner writes in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism: “The duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths shut.”Such self-flagellation betrays the West’s spiritual disorder. In their devotion to perpetual remorse, Westerners who focus on the West’s historical failings while ignoring how it has benefited the world, effectively collaborate with those who seek the West’s downfall. When a culture’s opinion-makers — those teachers, writers, scholars, artists, and thinkers who provide the ideas and concepts that shape societies — no longer uphold the values and traditions necessary for that culture’s survival, well, you’re on the downward slope.Can the Westerners recover a belief in themselves, in the principles and practices of their civilization? The Islamists seeking to destroy the West are spiritually driven. They envision a world under the sway of their faith as they understand it and are willing to fight to make that vision a reality. Westerners, weaned of the practice of mixing religion and politics, have difficulty understanding such spiritual fervour. Indeed, the West’s weakness is its loss of the spiritual sources of its own culture, a spirit once reflected in valued institutions and worthy principles — liberal democracy, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, for example — and embodied in a populace willing to defend those institutions and principles proudly and without apology..Perhaps they should take some advice from members of Canada’s Muslim community who recognize the threat the Islamists represent. Raheel Raza, the author of Their Jihad … Not My Jihad, has observed that while the majority of Muslims do not share the Islamist agenda, they have been cowed into silence by an aggressive minority pushing the Islamization of Canada. “People are silenced by fear and intimidation,” she said in a 2011 interview published by the Ottawa Citizen.In the same Citizen article, Muslim activist and scholar Farzana Hassan reinforced Raza’s view, saying that even “skeptical Muslims” are afraid to speak against ultraorthodox agitators. “I don’t believe in this narrative that they (the Islamists) are a small minority and can be ignored,” said Hassan, the author of two books calling for Islam’s reformation, Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Quest of Islam, and Islam, Women and the Challenge of Today. “They are the ones calling for Sharia. They are the ones wanting to put limits on freedom of speech and so many other values that we cherish in the West.”Such remarks bring me back to Girard’s argument that the 2001 terrorist attacks, by exposing Western spiritual disorder, require Westerners to “radically change the way we think.” I can’t think of a better way to change how we, as Westerners, think of ourselves and our civilization than by remembering those falling bodies.Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.
