Years after 9/11 and apologetic tropes for terrorism go on, let's speak up

No one event more starkly highlights the contrast between all that is precious about the secular, liberal way of life we enjoy in the West – all that we have achieved and must protect – and the savage, medieval barbarism of the religious fanatics who sought, and still seek, to destroy it. The freedoms society affords us, its tolerance and dynamism, our democracy, our common humanity were assaulted so brazenly by the forces of division, hatred and illiberalism.

Then, as now, the response in many “progressive” circles was revealing. While the horrific loss of life was mourned on all sides, some on the Left and “liberal” end of the political sphere were quick to suggest the attacks were somehow the fault of the US itself.

Cambridge academic and commentator Mary Beard notoriously quipped that “the US had it coming,” less than one month after the attacks took place and while the rubble was still smoldering. In a piece filed for Slate in October 2001, the brilliant essayist Christopher Hitchens describes speaking at an event at which a Hollywood celebrity called the attacks “a revolt,” to the nodding approval of sections of the largely liberal audience. That same celebrity later went on to draw comparisons between crowds cheering the attacks in Pakistan and the French revolutionaries.

“Progressive” attempts to make excuses for, or deflect attention away from, the savagery of the ideology motivating jihadist killings remain absolutely par for the course. The scourge of radical Islamic terrorism claims significant numbers of innocent lives across the world annually, and the West has been racked by a large number of attacks in recent years. After each one, we are put through the same tired attempts to deflect attention from the medieval religious ideology behind it, to equivocate, to blame ourselves. The same tropes are repeated with mind-numbing predictability – the attacker must have been a lone wolf, the attackers were mentally ill, the attack had “nothing to do with Islam,” it is only an Islamophobic backlash that we should fear rather than the next jihadist atrocity (can’t we fear both?), and so on.

Every new attack is followed by a round of self-flagellation and deflection. Hitchens and others rightly called out the nauseating acceptability of this attitude in “liberal” circles back in 2001, and we should continue to do so now.

Of course anti-Muslim bigotry must be guarded against, but we can call out such bigotry while also speaking clearly about the need to fight and counter radicalism wherever it rears its ugly head. Beware those who would rather not, for “they are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” Hitchens again.