It’s 9-11 ’02: What Next?

by John Thompson

September 9, 2002

In the year since the September 11^th attacks killed over 3,000 people, most of us have become — again — complacent and sure of our safety. This is a mistake.

The Al-Qaeda network is still a going concern. Thousands of Islamic Fundamentalists passed through its Afghan camps and learned how to mix their own high explosives, mix poison gas, assemble truck bombs and commit assassinations. Most of these trainees, like much of the Al-Qaeda leadership, remain at large and free to act. Make no mistake, the threat will continue to present itself for many years.

Worse, Islamic Fundamentalism is an ideology and cannot be defeated easily. Tens of millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars were consumed before the Western ideological aberrations of Nazism and Communism were disgraced and defeated; Islamic Fundamentalism has deeper roots and the seeming authority of a religion. Even should Al Qaeda be completely destroyed, others will follow it unless Islam manages to re-invent itself and adjust to the modern world — which is a dim prospect so long as the Fundamentalists continue to terrorize and intimidate liberal Muslims too.

So long as the preachers and the teachers who espouse Fundamentalism are free to operate, so long as Islam remains intellectually incapable of modernization, and so long it remains vulnerable to easy control by dictatorial leaders, the Muslim World will generate hoards of angry young men more ready to blame others for their situation than to look inwards for the solution to the poverty and tyranny that oppresses them.

Contemporary Canadians have a stunning capacity to ignore danger and threats to their safety, assuming — against all logic and experience — that because we are harmless the world must love us. Thus we look, sometimes smugly, at the Americans or Israelis and feel that they are the authors of the hatred directed against them. This is a supremely ignorant view.

Islamic Fundamentalists do not like the Western World — all of it, and that does include us. They hate the ease with which we generate wealth (because we have the freedom to grow). They do not like our technological superiority (because we have the freedom to think). They do not like our easy liberal ways. They despise the confidence and self-assertion of Western women — few of whom are more self-confident than Canadian women. They loath the casual ease with which we range throughout the rest of the world, unconsciously bringing Western culture with us everywhere we go.

In short, they hate us — Americans, Britons, Canadians, Danes, the French, Germans, Israelis, Italians, etcetera -- for who we are and not for anything we do. Besides, thinking that specific policies and actions have motivated terrorism is a mug’s game. Terrorists are terrorists for internal psychological reasons, and political causes are quite secondary.

For those of us who have difficulty thinking of themselves as "Westerners" and representative of "Western Culture", they should know that is exactly how they are seen by Islamic Fundamentalists. To them, we are all Westerners and Christians; whether we want to be seen as such by them is an irrelevant point so far as the terrorists are concerned.

Al Qaeda did manage to kill 24 Canadians in the World Trade Centre, and they knew that people from dozens of nations worked there. They also planned to bomb the European Parliament, expose French consumers to hydrogen-cyanide gas, bomb a dozen Filipino airliners, wrack Singapore with a dozen bombs, and some of its members considered detonating propane tanker trucks in Montreal. We are on Al Qaeda’s radar screen.

For a group that purportedly reserves its hate for Americans and Israelis, Al-Qaeda’s member groups have also managed to kill and maim large numbers of Africans and Indians — oh, and tens of thousands of Afghans and Algerians too. Canadians have no real immunity to their violence, and we are at risk too.

Canadians vulnerability to future Islamic Fundamentalist violence rests on the point that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we still believe ourselves to be safe from it. Although some small measures have been taken since the World Trade Center attacks; the political willpower and the real funding needed to limit the risk of major attacks has been absent. Now, with our usual governing party being preoccupied with leadership issues and the ‘legacy’ of the Prime Minister, security will be remain on a back-burner — if not moved off the range altogether.

Canadians are at risk, and just because we have been lucky so far, there is no guarantee we will be lucky in the future.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca