by Martin Amis
September 11 has given to us a planet we barely recognise. In a sense it revealed what was already there, largely unremarked, since the collapse of the Soviet Union: the unprecedented preponderance of a single power. It also revealed the longstanding but increasingly dynamic loathing of this power in the Islamic world, where anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are exacerbated by America's relationship with Israel - a relationship that many in the west, this writer included, find unnatural. In addition, like all "acts of terrorism" (easily and unsubjectively defined as organised violence against civilians), September 11 was an attack on morality: we felt a general deficit. Who, on September 10, was expecting by Christmastime to be reading unscandalised editorials in the Herald Tribune about the pros and cons of using torture on captured "enemy combatants"? Who expected Britain to renounce the doctrine of nuclear no-first-use? Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too, it undermines reason.
Osama bin Laden is an identifiable human type, but on an unidentifiable scale. He is an enormous stirrer - a titanic mixer. Look how he's shaken us up, both in the heart and in the head. One could say, countervailingly, that on September 11 America was visited by something very alien and unbelievably radical. A completely new kind of enemy for whom death is not death - and for whom life is not life, either, but illusion, a staging-post, merely "the thing which is called World". No, you wouldn't expect such a massive world-historical jolt, which will reverberate for centuries, to be effortlessly absorbed. But the suspicion remains that America is not behaving rationally - that America is behaving like someone still in shock.
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