Subscribe
We all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot in 1963, when Princess Diana was killed in 1997, and when terrorists attacked the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in 2001. These were sudden, shocking, and totally unexpected events. In 1963, I was a ten-year-old bookworm, quietly reading, when a young neighbour burst in and shouted: Kennedy has been shot! In 1997, I was in the back seat of a taxi in Milan when the driver suddenly turned up the wireless, looked at me, and said: Princess Diana was killed in a car accident! In 2001, I was in Bratislava, attending a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society—where I served on the Board of Directors—when a friend staying at the same hotel called and said, They are attacking the Twin Towers! As in a film? I said. Yes, except it is not a film, he replied.
Not Hatred of Israel
The first two events were easy to explain. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a confused leftist, probably mad; and the driver of Diana’s car was drunk. Conspiracy theories about these two events are implausible. But what motivated the small group of terrorists who hijacked four aeroplanes on 11 September 2001, twenty-five years ago? Many say it was hatred of Israel, with critics of Israel adding that the Jews had seized land from the Arabs, founded their own state, and driven the Arabs away. ‘For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’ This is, of course, only partly true. Israel was the ancient homeland of the Jews. Arabs arrived there only in the seventh century. Jewish mass migration to Israel began in the late nineteenth century because of persecution in many countries. The Jews bought land, but met fierce Arab opposition. When the United Nations proposed a partition of the country between Jews and Arabs in 1947, the Jews accepted it, but the nearby Arab states rejected it and waged a war in 1948 against Israel, which they lost. As a consequence, 700,000 Arabs fled from Israel (while 150,000 Arabs remained there), and 800,000 Jews were driven out of Arab countries to Israel.
Hatred of the West
Whereas hatred of Israel may be unfounded, it can still be real. But if hatred of Israel motivated the hijackers, why did they not attack Israel? Nineteen trained terrorists on a suicide mission could have caused considerable damage there. However, none of the nineteen hijackers was Palestinian: they were from Saudi Arabia (15), the United Arab Emirates (2), Egypt (1), and Lebanon (1). It was hatred of the United States, not of Israel, that motivated the hijackers, and that hatred was really hatred of the West, as it has developed over the last two thousand years, with its heritage of toleration, diversity, and individuality, the freedom to choose, limited government, free trade, and private property: hatred of what Karl Popper called the Open Society and Friedrich von Hayek the Extended Order. The hijackers and their backers in the Al-Qaeda terrorist organisation were religious zealots, fanatical Islamists, for whom the West was an existential threat because, if given the choice, most people would embrace Western values and practices. Therefore, it was not enough to seize power in Arab countries and impose sharia law there; the West also had to be destroyed, weakened, or transformed into the same intolerant force as they ran themselves.
Significant Choice of Targets
It is significant that the hijackers chose not only the Pentagon, a symbol of America’s ability and will to defend itself, but also the Twin Towers in New York, a potent symbol of the commercial society that the extremists feared and loathed, as their targets. Each skyscraper is, as Ayn Rand observed, an expression of human ingenuity, creativity, and achievement. The New York skyline is an irrefutable illustration of Adam Smith’s great idea that individuals seeking their own profit will create prosperity for all.