9/11: The Israeli connection

Editorial

Most analysts are focusing on the portion of the 9/11 Commission report that criticizes the Clinton and Bush administrations for doing far too little to protect the United States from the traumatizing events of Sept. 11, 2001.

The report released last week by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States also presents a disturbing picture of the pure hatred that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida henchmen feel toward Israel and American Jews.

The report reveals that U.S. intelligence agencies had received signals long before terrorists slammed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon indicating that Al Qaida had targeted Israel and U.S. Jewish sites. The report also discloses that several of the hijackers, along with the Saudi-born bin Laden, were driven in part by their hatred of the Jewish state and fury over U.S. support to Israel. The report confirms that the reputed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had sent an Al Qaida operative to New York City months before 9/11 to scout possible targets, including Jewish facilities.

Now you may have read about this before, but the commission report in effect drives home the relationship between the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., and U.S. policy in the Middle East. This is not to suggest that all Arabs or Muslims hate Israel and Jews. However, it does affirm once again that Islamist fundamentalists are deeply anti-Semitic and that they despise the West. Israel - the only democratic nation in the heartland of Islam - represents Western civilization and all of its inherent freedoms, too close to home to bear. Its very presence is a constant stick in the eye to those who would fight to the death to preserve an antediluvian way of life.

Consider, for example, that when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, it treated women as second-class citizens - and worse. A tenet of Western society is the equality of men and women. Imagine what it represents to the fundamentalists that women serve in the Israeli Army, and that female soldiers in the U.S. military are making the supreme sacrifice in Iraq.

Some will try to use the report's findings as an argument for identifying Israel's presence in the disputed territories as the driving force behind world terrorism. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with the existence of Israel as an unwelcome reminder of all the terrorists oppose.

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