Free Frank Warner

Christopher Hitchens: 9-11 evil not too complex

Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on the hand-wringing of pseudo-intellectuals since that attacks of Sept. 11, 2001:

“[S]ome stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and “free speech fundamentalism.” The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of “ancient hatreds” but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called “evil.” And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

A culture of freedom is always better than a culture of repression. But because freedom by its nature invites a clash of ideas, it occasionally looks less tidy than that the pure filth of oppression. 9-11 exposed the dirt of despotism for what it was.

Frank Warner

9-11 legacy: Fanatical suicide killings

If anything good followed the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, it was that it woke us up to some of the obvious, yet ignored, death threats around us. We ignored Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and got burned. Next we went down the list of other obvious threats -- Iraq being at the top -- and knocked off one.

We missed some other big ones. With politics and finances limiting our reach, we did nothing practical about the threats posed by the dictators in Iran, North Korea and China.

But the worst legacy of the 9-11 attacks was the psychology of "nothing success like success." The act of mass murder was so spectacular, and so appealing to the darkest impulses of the Muslim world, that rather than inspiring shame over the fact that avowed Muslims would commit such an atrocity, it aroused Islamist copycats to go for their own blood-soaked glory. To a significantly large minority of Muslims in the Middle East, 9-11 gave mass-murder-by-suicide a legitimacy it had never had before.

Frank Warner