This 2005 article was a short excerpt from my critique of Bernard Lewis.

Who Did This To Us?

It is very hard for people outside North America—especially outside the West—to understand how 9/11 could have come as a surprise to Americans. While the re-election of Bush II may have lowered Europeans’ expectations of Americans’ awareness of the world outside, the Europeans themselves were hardly prescient of the affair….It’s an affliction of affluence.

When Ken Burns’ documentary, “The Civil War”, came out, the letter of a soldier to his wife Sarah became one of the most famous letters in American pop history: “But Oh Sarah…if there be a soft breeze upon your cheeks it shall be my breath or the cool air cools your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.” Less noted, was a letter she had sent. In it, she wonders if the negroes really knew what was happening! That is, if they understood the implications of the war!

“In the colonies the truth stood naked…..” ^1

When they repeat their mantra, “The World Changed”, they are actually being very accurate: their idea of the ‘world’ is uncannily like those Mediaeval maps: circular, vague, looking like it’s drawn by a child, and centred around their immediate milieu. It’s the world as imagined by Homer Simpson.

“The reaction of the American people is like that of a beautiful woman living in a lavish house. Suddenly she hears lots of gun fire, and so runs out asking what’s happened. They say, ‘Didn’t you know? Your husband is Don Corleone!’” ^2

They, truly, were stunned! How is the average person to respond to this, to make sense of it? The empire’s minstrels got to work! Into this vacuum came the usual, “They hate us”, “They hate us because we love freedom,” and related tripe. While this sufficed for the hoi polloi, something more was needed for the latte literati. The urge, unfulfilled, was to know why it is Their fault, not Ours. Enter the Orientalists.

This sort of thing became so popular that, suddenly, all the Lady Di fans became Islamic Reformation experts. ^3

Suddenly the media were filled with reasons why our holy sandals are better than their holy sandals! The mildest that one would hear was along the lines of, “Sure the Arabs were great once, but the only thing they’ve invented since has been [kamikazes]”! A little while later, when France showed the temerity to take on the alpha male, the air waves echoed, “Sure France was once great, but what have they done lately!”… I recall reading about the Opium Wars and, sure enough, there was a British general saying, “Sure the Chinese were great once, but…!”

Apologists for imperialism used to measure craniums. Now, ‘culture’ is the racial touchstone.

Rah Sabs

March 2005

^1 Jean Paul Sartre’s Preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth.

^2 Bonnie Greer, American playwright and broadcaster, on 9/11. This is not an exact quote, but a transcription of a BBC interview, done soon afterwards.

^3 Within the first year after the Iranian Revolution, it became common place in Iran to say that the Islamic Revolution turned Iranians into a nation of atheists!… The Islamic Reformation has been long underway. They did not need the West to teach them anything.