The Towers Are Gone and Memories are Fading of the Real Enemy
Towers in Twilight
By Daniel Greenfield
…This is a conflict of ideologies, a collision of cultures and a war that for the enemy encompasses the religious and the racial, that is nothing less than a primal battle against the Other. And where better to wage that war than in the places where others meet others every day? What better target than a World Trade Center for a violent ideology built on merchants turned robbers and robbers turned merchants?
In a city where everyone is different, it can be difficult to understand that the attackers were motivated by those differences. Their war against us, at a primal level beneath ideology and faith, is an attack on people who are fundamentally and incomprehensibly different than they are. Islam is xenophobia written into scripture, a long chain of conquest, subjugation and cultural destruction by desert nomads who know how to drive a sharp bargain, but have never been anything more than the jackals sniffing around the ruins of greater civilizations. It is as natural for them to attack us as it is for us to wonder why we were attacked.
Americans hold the peculiar belief that life need not be a zero sum game. That we can learn from other people without turning them into our subjects. That we can make more of something instead of stealing from a finite amount that someone else has. That is the great creative power of American exceptionalism. It is a transcendent force that turned a land full of refugees into a world power brimming with technological wonders.
New York, that strange part-Dutch, part-English, part-Everything-Else city, runs on the creativity of the impossible. Starving artists, aspiring actors, failed musicians, real estate mavens without a dime and brokers trading thin air. This is a city that always seems on the verge of total anarchy and destruction. It is the city that filmmakers repeatedly choose to destroy in alien invasions and other catastrophes. And yet it is the city that keeps going on that strange half-mad creativity of making things happen.
For Islam, the game is strictly zero sum. If American civilization thrives, then their civilization is shadowed. If people are happy here, then their own happiness is marred. If there are two towers in New York City, then that takes away from the glory of their civilization. Islam is the bitter beggar forever looking to steal what it cannot have, worrying over the imaginary history of its own greatness and cursing the upstarts in the streets of a foreign city for taking what was rightfully theirs.
The American who shares his good fortune with the rest of the world cannot understand that there are some people who would rather steal than accept a gift, who would rather destroy than build and who would rather drown the world in darkness than accept someone else’s light. With difficulty he might accept the existence of a small number of people who think this way, but the notion of a civilization built in this mold is too obscene an idea for him to accept.
As with so many other strange things that wash up in the concrete streets of a strange city, it is easier to leave the mystery unsolved, to let the blanket fall back over the clash of civilizations and go on forward. It is the way that things have always been done in the city and as twin rays of light bisect the sky, they remind New Yorkers of their own fortitude, and not of the enemy waiting outside the light.
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