I remember this day 5 years ago. Awakening with eyes swollen shut from tears, sinuses burning, head pounding. Running straight to the TV. Praying – Thank you Jesus – we weren’t blown to pieces during the night. Numbly getting myself & kids ready to go out the door for another day. But not just another day. It was the first day of the rest of my life.
Christopher Hitchens at WSJ asked yesterday: What have we learned?
Our first duty is to stand together against bin Ladenism.
Living under the rock I call home, being somewhat new to the blogosphere and MSM adverse, I’d not heard this term before. So handy search engine in hand, I started digging.
According to Thomas Friedman in a NYT Opinion piece dated 11/6/2001, “bin Ladenism” is….
This is the game that produced bin Ladenism: Arab regimes fail to build a real future for their people. This triggers seething anger. Their young people who can get visas escape overseas. Those who can’t turn to the mosque and Islam to protest. The regimes crush the violent Muslim protesters, but to avoid being accused of being anti-Muslim the regimes give money and free rein to their most hard-line, but nonviolent, Moslem clerics, while also redirecting their public’s anger onto America through their press. Result: America ends up being hated and Islam gets handed over to the most anti-modern forces. Have a nice day.
Brendan Miniter outlines “bin Ladensim” in this Feb 2006, WSJ Opinion piece:
At a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sized up the progress of the war on terror, compared it to the struggle against Nazism and communism, and noted this struggle will take years to win. […] Many in the media simply don’t accept the comparison of Osama bin Laden to Hitler.
But looking over the Defense Department’s plans for remaking the military, it quickly becomes clear that that comparison isn’t dismissed inside the Pentagon. The recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, which reveals long-term military planning, shows a top brass worried about the ideology of hate preached by imams across the Islamic world. This ideology, though twisted, is somewhat coherent and calls for using terrorism to create a “caliphate,” a unified Islamic state, stretching from Afghanistan and Iran all the way to Spain and including most of North Africa. For a lack of a better term, some American military planners call this ideology “bin Ladenism.”
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains the “bin Laden point of view” in FrontPage Magazine, 12/17/2004 (titled “Osama’s Big Lie” – how apropo!):
[…] Al-Qaeda’s objective is not limited to U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. Rather, the network views this pull-out as a necessary prerequisite to the attainment of its ultimate goal: the establishment of an Islamist super-state ruled by the harshest version of Islamic law, primed to re-conquer formerly Muslim lands and pursue an aggressive expansionist agenda.
Pondering all this – I continue to come back to “Why?”. I’m a great believer that God has a PLAN and none of us are smart enough to understand it. Trust. Faith. Prayer. And I’m also a great believer that the Hand of God can be witnessed. Yesterday, I walked the campus where I work during lunch and came upon a 9/11 memorial sponsored by a student group. For a buck, you could buy a small flag that was stuck in the ground with more small flags. By the time I’d gotten there, there were lots of flags. For my buck, I was also handed a slip of paper. The coed told me that it was the name of a 9/11 victim. (Aside: I wasn’t able to pick a name for the 2996 project – I just couldn’t decide. Who? Why write about this one? Was this one more worthy? Who? What about this one? Who to pick? I was overwhelmed.) The name on my slip of paper is Tariq Amanullah. God gave me a name to write about. (See?!?!?) A native Pakistani Muslim, Tariq Amanullah worked in the World Trade Center at Fiduciary Trust; a father, an uncle, a son, a grandson, a husband. According to his legacy.com entry, he liked to build things. Denise Sanchez wrote this tribute. His son would be 18 now – in his senior year or off to college. His daughter would be 15 – just learning to drive. Eerily close to the ages of my kids. It’s sad that in the blind Islamic killing spree of that day, they killed their own as well.
War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.
Indeed.
Related: The Big Lie
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