Three 9/11 anniversary reflections from the Australian press. Pamela Bone:
For every attack on innocent civilians since September 11 dozens of planned attacks have been thwarted. Whether we like it or not, there's a war on. What is needed to fight this war, and most of all, to fight the ideas behind it, is moral clarity.Christopher Hitchens (for whom someone at the Sydney Morning Herald has chosen an obtusely misleading subhead):
[I]n the faces and slogans of the "other" side people can see the mentality that rejoiced when the towers of the World Trade Centre slid into a cloud of human and material refuse. It is an elemental question of recognising an enemy, and in men like the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi people can see the grim visage of Mohamed Atta all over again. Much the same effect is produced by Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or reports of a cell of jihadists in almost every American's second-favourite city, London. Although there is such a thing as September 11 fatigue, it does not take much to reawaken the dormant spectre of that day and all it has come to represent.Michael Gawenda:... More than 80 nationalities were represented among the slain, and it would not be much of a stretch to describe al-Qaeda as an enemy of civilisation, Muslim or secular, from Bali to Baghdad.
[F]ive years after September 11 it seems incontrovertible to me that in a number of different ways, liberal democracies are locked in a struggle against the adherents of an ideology whose theorists, leaders and supporters are prepared to do anything to weaken and, if possible, destroy liberal secularism and its despised manifestations - feminism, homosexuality, godlessness, materialism, to name just a few.(Thanks: Jim Nolan.)
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I would have thought that in Iraq and in Iran and throughout the Middle East, despite the disdain for Bush and all his works, social democrats and feminists, indeed the broad left, owe their brothers and sisters - and comrades - in the region more than just silence and Bush hatred.