World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [134]
Destroying America
Market-dominant minorities are often the victims of homicidal fury. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Tutsi in Rwanda, Jews in Germany, Ibo in Nigeria, and Croats in the former Yugoslavia were all, at some point, murdered en masse by enraged members of a frustrated, relatively impoverished majority who saw themselves as the humiliated “true” owners of the nation.
The September 11, 2001, killings had much in common with other mass killings of market-dominant minorities. First, they revealed an all-consuming group hatred that may have shocked Americans but is distinctly parallel to the hatred felt, for example, by the Hutu when they murdered Tutsis, who had dominated them economically and politically for four hundred years. In the eyes of the killers on September 11, as in every case when market-dominant minorities are massacred, the victims were no longer individuals but faceless embodiments of corrupt wealth, arrogance, and abusive power.
Second, this intense group hatred was fomented by a calculating, charismatic demagogue. In this respect, Osama bin Laden has his counterparts in Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. In all these cases the leaders found great wells of anger, disgust, and spiritual misery waiting to be exploited.
Third, like other mass killings aimed at “cleansing” the nation of a hated “outsider” market-dominant minority, one of the main objectives of Islamic terrorism has been to eliminate the presence of America from the Middle East. A stunning feature of this terrorism is its global reach. Nevertheless, one of bin Laden’s primary missions has been to “purge” the “lands of Islam” of Western and particularly American infidels. “For more than seven years,” bin Laden declared in 1993, “the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its peninsula as a spearhead to fight neighboring Islamic peoples.”
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Similarly, after the 1996 twin bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—in which over 250 people died and more than 5,500 were injured—bin Laden’s associate Abdul-Bari Atwan published an article called “American Harvest of Blood,” defending the suicide attacks as “the logical results of the unjust and demeaning policies which the United States has been pursuing in the Arab region and in the Islamic world.” A litany of grievances followed, summarized by Yossef Bodansky in his recent biography of bin Laden, with the main criticism aimed at the United States’ policy of sponsoring corrupt dictators in the Arab world, hypocritically “prevent[ing] the democratic tide from spreading to the region . . .” According to Atwan, “America’s insistence on imposing its own puppets on the Muslim world in order to expedite exploitation of oil and other riches—and not U.S.-Israeli relations—was at the core of the Islamist eruption.”
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After the September 11 attacks, bin Laden himself issued a strongly worded warning to Americans in a recorded statement broadcast on Al-Jazeera television. Describing the American victims generically as “killers, who have abused the blood, honour, and sanctuaries of Muslims,” bin Laden swore “by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars,” that “neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad.”
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Fourth, like all acts of violence against market-dominant minorities, the September 11 attacks were an act of revenge by the weak against the powerful, motivated by tremendous feelings of humiliation and inferiority. “Weakness” is a complicated matter, with a large subjective component. Poverty breeds feelings of weakness.