“The Inevitable Failure of Radical Islam”, OpenTheMagazine, 11 Sep 2026.
“Commemorations are about letting memory retrieve a piece of history with ceremonial solemnity. To remember is to convince ourselves, once again, that the past doesn’t fade, time doesn’t always heal. That reminders are still required in a world where justice is still a dispute. We return to 9/11, twenty-five years after that image of the towering inferno woke up humanity to a new age of fear, with a realisation of the distance we have travelled since, the change it has brought to the lives of nations, and the moral dividends of grief we were too cautious to reject.
We were all Americans then, to take the cue from a French newspaper.
It was the culmination of a rage, its origin in the scriptural fantasy of an alternative to the world dreaded by those who held the Book and the bomb with equal piety. Someone from Mount Jihad, in the arid remoteness of Afghanistan, had been, with the calm menace of a false prophet, spelling out the nature of the coming war, a purifying process, for a while. In that grainy video of bin Laden, a religion’s trainee revolutionaries saw their deliverer, their own Che with a longer beard. He was only mapping the end of the infidels’ kingdom—and creating his Caliphate in angry edicts of exclusion.
The Caliphate didn’t happen. Still, 9/11 changed for ever how nations behave when fear was added to the glossary of geopolitics. And America under George W Bush gave it a Biblical flavour by declaring war on evil. Afghanistan became the theatre of the just war, the morality of which was explained by the scale of suffering and the determination to avenge. The religion of terror was only contested by those who still preferred to generalise the threat to freedom………”
Read the full article at OpenTheMagazine.
