September 11 2019 is the 18th anniversary of 9/11/2001, a day made forever infamous by the killing of 2,996 innocent Americans and other nationalities at the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, an event that ignited an American "War Against Terror" that has destabilized the Middle East and recently the European Union, and that has led to the creation of maybe four or five million refugees and the destruction of much of Iraq and Syria and Libya and Afghanistan and has led to somewhere between maybe a million and maybe three million deaths (depending on who is counting) and many millions more maimed, including upwards of 30,000 Americans who joined the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eighteen years after the 9/11 attack most Americans still don't know what motivated the attack.
Very quickly after the attack the Bush administration began lying about the reasons for the attack, in the persons of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush himself. The motivation behind the attack, they said, was because "they envy our way of life" and have an irrational hatred of Americans.
The Report of the 9/11 Commission, validated by a stack of evidence, has a very different explanation.
In the authorized first edition of the report, page 147 states that the person who originated the attack -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani -- was motivated by "his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel" and (by implication) American disregard since 1948 of the rights of Muslims. He was angered because the U.S. government has -- in its actions -- gone along with the idea that Zionists have a right to take land from Muslims, and not just any chunk of land, but part of the heartland of the Muslim religion, including the site where Mohammed is believed to have ascended to heaven.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got the idea of flying hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center from his association with Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, that killed six people. But it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who went to Osama Bin Laden asking for money to fund the 2001 operation.
I will not be surprised if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on the list of five prisoners that U.S. Attorney General William Barr plans to execute, as the centerpiece, in a crowd pleasing spectacle intended to help re-elect Donald Trump.
If anyone deserves extreme punishment it is KSM, though he has already undergone far worse treatment than death by lethal injection, in the form of maybe hundreds of days of waterboarding and other torture, ostensibly not as punishment but as a method for extracting information. He is reportedly now pleading not to be executed. But maybe this is because he knows this will make his execution more likely, and move him from being a mostly forgotten prisoner to the exalted state of martyrdom among many traditional Muslims.
Before anyone attacks the author of this piece for being anti-Semitic, let me state that in my view, Jews have made an enormous positive contribution to human civilization, in the sciences, in the arts, in commerce, in economic development, and in many other ways, far outweighing their numbers.
But Zionism in its current form -- the belief in the right of Jews to take land from Palestinians for the construction of a Jewish homeland -- has turned out to have had horrible consequences, including not just the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11, but the whole terrible history since 1948, that has led to millions of Muslims dead and injured, millions made homeless, tens of thousands of Americans killed and injured, and led to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and drone attacks in Pakistan, no doubt manufacturing more hatred towards the U.S.
I think that in the interests of peace, and in the interests of fairness, the United States needs to radically rebalance its policy toward Israel, in the direction of a much more even-handed approach, insisting on compensation of the dispossessed, and signalling to the world through both words and actions that it now respects the rights of Arabs and Muslims just as much as it respects the rights of Jews.
I am an atheist, appalled at this terrible clash between ancient religions which have been the cause of so much conflict since the beginning of the Christian era. While I think that faith in a deity which protects believers is misleading and gives them a false sense of security, I do think that when religion promotes harmony and good behavior, it plays an enormously constructive role. But when it promotes death and destruction, it is a plague.
There are more than two billion Muslims in the world. If only one tenth of one per cent are angry enough to support violent acts against the United States in protest of our policies towards Israel, there would be upwards of 2 million people wanting to hurt us. No doubt strong efforts are being made to infiltrate groups planning to attack American interests, but the question is whether some may escape our attention.
The vast investment in U.S. homeland security since 2001, and the resulting efficiency of our security services, has so far been almost totally successful in keeping the lid on since 2001, in terms of attacks inside the United States, with not more than 20 casualties, but at the cost of our becoming increasingly a surveillance state, forever on the alert for attacks, possibly monitoring emails, definitely recording international phone conversations between American residents and people in other countries, possibly scanning internal phone conversations with voice to text, reporting bags left alone in the subway, with TSA agents inspecting every airline passenger.
Outside the United States we have established a large number of military bases — as many as 100 — and our aircraft carriers cruise the world’s oceans. But if ever terrorists angry at the United States acquire nuclear materials, and manage to remain invisible, the mainland is at risk of a major attack.
Donald Trump’s alienation of our allies increases our risk because it decreases the interchange of information between their security services and ours.
Donald Trump’s tilt toward Israel — relocating the American embassy to Jerusalem — and greenlighting further settlements, and greenlighting further attacks on Gaza — is likely to generate more anger among Muslims. The fact that there have been no major attacks on the American mainland since 9/11 should not lull us into a false sense of safety.
Being honest with the general public about the cause of 9/11 — Muslim anger at our policy towards Israel — should help us devise policies that reduce risk.