Why 9/11?

Understanding the enemy.

By Larry Franklin
Monday, September 22, 2008

‘The Building which they built will never cease to be a cause of hypocrisy and doubt in their hearts, unless their hearts are cut to pieces. And Allah is all-Knowing, All Wise. Verily, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties; for a price, for theirs shall be Paradise. They fight in Allah’s cause, so they kill and are killed.”

This passage is from the Quran — Surah 9, verses 110-11. It occurs in Part 11 of the 30 parts of the Quran. Is this numerical echo of 9/11 pure coincidence? Maybe not.

After all, Surah 9, “Taubah” (Repentance), is the only chapter of the 114 chapters in the Quran that does not open with the salutation “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” This is a purposeful elision, as there can be no mercy, no compassion for us infidels. This inveterate hatred is underscored by verse 109, which asserts that the infidel building’s “foundation is on the undetermined brink of a precipice ready to crumble down with those in it, to the fire of hell. And Allah guides not the people who are polytheists” — which is to say, us. This may well be why Osama chose the date 9/11.

It is this Quranic passage that the 9/11 airborne assassins and others used to religiously justify and sanctify mass murder. It was through this verse that they often communicated their resolve.

We need to know this enemy. We need to rely more on our fellow Americans who are Muslim — who understand the mindset of those among them who are shaped spiritually and politically by a literal understanding of those specific verses. We need to appreciate the wonderful diversity of Islam that exists in our midst — and seek the assistance of the legions of spiritually focused Shiite, Sufi-oriented, and non-Wahhabi Sunni Muslims that are willing to help us battle the pernicious influence of Saudi Arabian-backed (Wahhabi-sect) extremist Sunnis. This would help us be better informed as to the true nature of our enemy and the challenge that confronts our civilization.

Our refusal to call the enemy by name — out of misplaced tolerance, political correctness, or intellectual pusillanimity — has contributed to our failure fully to comprehend his motives and methods. We continue, obscurely and inaccurately, to refer to the war on terror, terrorism, or terrorists. In truth, we are engaged in a war against radical Muslim ideologues who literally interpret Quranic passages as the eternal word of God. We should begin to tune in to how they think.

Why the date 9/11? There are other reasons, besides the Quran-numbering I mentioned above. Radical Muslims are bent on world conquest and plan the establishment of a global Caliphate. For them, the war between believer and infidel is a cosmic war, a war that began with the Prophet’s first recitation of Allah’s word. For extremist Islam, this struggle (external jihad) can end in only one way: the imposition of Islamist rule over all humanity. After all, they claim it is the will of Allah. Our enemy’s sense of time is quite different from that of our civilization. Unlike most Americans, who have little sense of history, many Muslims are highly sensitive to specific dates that reflect the vicissitudes of Islam’s history. Osama and his ilk are aware that it was on 9/11/1683 that the forces of militant Islam pressed their jihad critically close to achieving the continental conquest of Europe. It was on this date that the Ottoman Caliphate’s best troops, the Janissaries (kidnapped Christian boys trained as Muslim warriors) had penetrated the outer defenses of Vienna, the capital of Europe’s most powerful empire, the Hapsburgs.



On that date, Western civilization won one of its greatest victories. The Polish army of King John Sobieski, in response to urgent entreaties by the Pope, arrived on 9/11, joining German and Austrian relief forces led by the Duke of Lorraine. The first contingents of the European alliance arrived on the slopes of Mt. Kahlenberg, 1,000 feet above Vienna. They unfurled a giant flag that featured a white field emblazoned with a red cross. They shot off rockets so that the desperate defenders were aware that their salvation was at hand: Their lives would be spared. (The leader of the Muslim army, Kara Mustapha, had vowed to slay all within.) The next day, Lorraine and Sobieski routed the Turks. The flag flown over Kahlenberg remains to this day in a Viennese Catholic church honoring the victors.

An earlier 9/11 battle also brought defeat to Muslim military adventures. It was on September 11, 1481, that Venetian sailors turned back the Ottoman Caliphate’s fleet off the shores of Otranto in southern Italy. A follow-on planned amphibious Muslim landing was tasked with the seizure of Rome. The Eternal City was not ever again so precariously threatened. Mehmet II — the Ottoman Sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453 — died the next year.

The date 9/11/1990 was also personally important for Osama bin Laden. It was on this date that President George H. W. Bush, speaking before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, declared a “New World Order.” In the speech’s opening paragraphs, he spoke of our troops arrayed in Arabia. This assertion was anathema to many Muslims — who remembered the Prophet’s admonition that no infidel troops should ever occupy any land on the Island of the Arabs (al-Jazirah al Arabiyah). Osama had begged the Saudi ruling family (to no avail) to permit his Arab veterans of the Afghan mujahedin war against the Soviets to defend the holy soil of Mecca and Medina rather than to depend upon “crusader” infidel troops.

On 9/11/1979, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, became the first Arab leader to apostatize himself from Islam by signing a peace treaty with the “Zionist Entity” (Israel).On that date, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin shook hands in President Carter’s presence after inking the Camp David Accords. Sadat paid with his life.

It would be prudent for our policymakers and intelligence czars to become more sensitive to the Islamic radicals’ worldview and sense of history. They believe their hour has arrived. They remember the incredible defeat of two empires by Muslim armies in Islam’s first century. Islamists believe that just as Allah granted them victory over that earlier age’s twin superpowers — Persia and Byzantium — he also granted them victory over the Soviet Union in our own day. Only one superpower remains, with which there can be no compromise and no peace. It is time for our political leaders and their national-security advisers to better educate themselves and our citizenry so that we can mobilize our population for what will prove to be our longest war, one that may determine whether the last best hope on earth will endure.