MICHAEL VISONTAY
EVERY year the world waits with bated breath as the anniversary of September 11 approaches, and every year there is a collective sigh of relief when nothing happens.
This year, however, something slipped under the radar -– the release of another video message by al-Qaeda, an address to the American people, with a still picture of Osama bin Laden.
The stated purpose of the address was “to remind you of the causes” of September 11, chiefly “your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine”.
In a prescient message to US President Barack Obama, the video continued: “We have demonstrated and stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half decades, that the cause of our disagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies, who occupy our land of Palestine.”
The video was reported around the world and given subdued coverage. It echoed a similar message released last year on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence.
Until the past two years, the irregular videos from al-Qaeda pushed the line that the object of their terror was America and the West. In the aftermath of 2001, the world bristled with debate about “the clash of civilisations”.
Public discussion focused on the anti-western values being taught and spread in Muslim seminaries and on the street. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was widely interpreted as an attack against America, the West and our way of life.
The thesis by American historian Samuel Huntington, that the world was in the midst of a war between competing value systems, seemed to fit with the scale of planning and ambition behind September 11, 2001 – an ideological mission statement rather than a mere reprisal.
It was followed in the years after by similarly motivated attacks in Bali, London and Madrid – all of them linked by an anti-western bias, directed at symbols of their modernity and affluence, but not with an openly anti-Israel theme.
The underlying message and logic of these attacks was that it was not so much what the West did, but what the West was that provoked these barbaric acts of terror.
But over the past 18 months, al-Qaeda has subtly rewritten its own history and raison d’etre.
It now claims that September 11 was all about Israel – not American foreign policy in general, nor its decadence, as it had led the world to believe over the past six or so years.
The key point is that while several commentators, especially conservative voices such as Daniel Pipes, have argued that America’s support for Israel was a large undercurrent in al-Qaeda’s quarrel, its centrality to the whole issue has been underplayed. Now al-Qaeda has openly made this admission.
This has important ramifications for Israel and Jews everywhere. For one thing, it adds a new sense of justification to Israeli paranoia.
It’s not just Iran that wants to wipe Israel off the map; al-Qaeda is emphasising that the occupation of Palestine is the core of its grievance.
It also reinforces the vulnerability of Jewish institutions, synagogues and other communal symbols in the western world.
To many people, the above discussion may seem like an old argument aired again without fresh reason. That misses the point: if the West succeeds in installing democracy in both Afghanistan and Iraq, if the violence ends in those countries and the Taliban is defeated, once and for all, then the message from this video implies that it won’t make any difference to the main game -– or the chief source of our daily fears and anxieties.
There is something profoundly uncomfortable about the idea that all along, this era of terror hasn’t been directed at America per se, nor at the West, but rather it has been driven by another agenda.
The real message is this: as long as Israel and the Palestinians are at odds, the world will be forced to walk, travel and live on eggshells. If President Obama hopes to fulfil the promise implied by his recent Nobel Peace Prize, then he will have to concentrate all his efforts in one part of the world.
Michael Visontay lectures in media at the University of NSW.
