Excerpt:
As should be evident to anyone who is not in denial and is willing to credit the evidence mounting by the day, the West is now under siege. Paradoxically, it appears to be increasingly at the mercy not only of radical Islam, but of its own anomie and its blatant philistinism. Indeed the former preys relentlessly upon the latter as it does upon the ineluctable corollary of cultural weakness, the presumably tolerant and progressive ethos of so-called "liberal" thinking. "Something stirs in the East, a sleepless malice" says one of the characters in The Lord of the Rings. What stirs in the West, however, is a growing tendency to fall asleep, a kind of spiritual encephalitis generating an epidemic of lethargy before reality and accompanied by various spastic maneuvers intended to disguise the truth.
Reasonable people can have little sympathy with the feverish pack of journalists, academics, and intellectuals who believe that 9/11 was payback for America's supposed colonial iniquities and who argue that the reaction of the Islamic world is understandable. Their number is legion but a few instances of such chicanery will serve to fill out the picture.
On September 16, just five days after the carnage visited upon an unprepared America, Edward Said published a Comment in The Observer in which, while professing concern for the dead and injured, he went on to deprecate an American "superpower almost constantly at war…all over the Islamic world," its "ignorance of Islam that takes new forms every day," and "the influence of oil, defence and Zionist lobbies." Advising his readers to avoid fictive constructions that only complicate the issue — this from Said! — he placed 9/11 in the context of "the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions" and, of course, the "Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories," concluding that the "roots of terror" lay in "injustice." No one seemed to notice that this was the rhetoric of the ideological scavenger, picking over the carcasses to feed his hatred and fatten his agenda.