The radical left’s response to September 11th was wrong-headed: they regarded the terrorist attacks as the legitimate political expression of the victims of American imperialism.
While the US unquestionably meddles excessively in the business of other nations–and always has–that argument didn’t hold water. The men who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center weren’t activists. They were terrorists. And terrorism can never been seen as an acceptable form of political discourse: you surrender your credibility when you employ suicide bombers.
As Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in “Two years of gibberish: The garbled utterances of the left after 9/11 merely flattered the arguments of warmongers,”
One after another, literary luminaries and academic pundits felt unable to condemn the killing, express sympathy, and leave it at that. They had to say, “Butwhatabout” US imperialism, what about globalisation, what about Palestine? Rana Kabbani’s reaction was to howl that “All must kowtow to the Pentagon and the almighty dollar, or be blown to smithereens,” and she described the murder of thousands of ordinary New Yorkers as “a painful lesson that Americans have had to learn.”