Origins Of The 9/11 Attack on America

By Shlomoh
Summer, 2006

In order to fully understand why America was attacked on 9/11/01, one has to understand who the attackers were and from what they come out of. To do that, we have to go back almost 1800 years because the roots of the attack are grounded in history and pre-modern religion.
In the 6th century of the Christian Era, the Arabian penninsula was inhabited by polytheists - people who worshipped a plethora of gods. These people did not think of themselves so much as Arabians as members of separate and distinct clans and tribes. Arabia was a land of diverse ethnic groups as were all the lands of the Middle East. Non Arab Christians and Jews lived there. Many Arabs were attracted to the Jewish religion and the Jewish lifestyle. There may have been Arabians also interested in Christianity but we do not know too much about them. We know about Arab interest in Judaism only because of Mohamud's interest in it. Muhamud was a simple uneducated man who lived in Arabia in the 6th century. He came into contact with many Jews including Arabians who had converted to Judaism. He became interested in the Jewish religion and began to study it. Therefore his education as an adult began with his study of the Jewish religion. Probably at that time he learned how to read and write so that he could read Jewish writings.
The more that Muhamud learned about the Jewish Bible, the more he began to identify with the Jewish prophets. He developed the idea that he was destined by the One God whom he called Allah [Arabic for "god"] to convert the Arab people to monotheism, the worship of one God. Soon his obsession with this idea turned to meglomania. He approached the Jewish religious leaders and told them that he would be able to convert the whole Arabian penninsula to Judaism if only the tabbis would consider him a prophet. They thought that he was mad or at least self-deluded but they said that if one man could turn an entire nation to the worship of the Jewish God, maybe he was a prophet. They agreed to regard him as a prophet if he could do what he said. But by now his meglomania had grown to such an extent that he demanded of the rabbis that they regard him as the GREATEST of all prophets, greater even than Moses.
The rabbis were not about to do that and they now knew they were dealing with a mad and dangerous man. They utterly rejected him and shunned him. Mohamud now understood that he had made himself an enemy of Jews. But that meant that the Jews were also his enemies.
Mohamud gave up the idea of becoming Jewish but he took many ideas from Judaism and created his own religion out of them, adding some which suited the Arab mentality. Mohamud began to preach his new religion which he called ISLAM, meaning "surrender to God" among the various clans and tribes of Arabia. And apparently he intuited correctly that the Arabians were ready to hear his message. What was his basic message? It consisted of two important ideas. One, that there was only One God who was formless, whose essence could not be captured in stone or any other representional form. And secondly, that One God required his worshippers to look upon themselves as one people. In order to surrender to Allah, they would have to give up the idea that their clan or tribe was more important than their identity as Muslim [followers of Islam] Arabs. These ideas caught on quickly and spread throughout the Arabian penninsula. Over the course of a few years, the religion of Islam, a poor copy of the Jewish religion, became the religion of most Arabians. Yet Muhamud still had to contend with people living in Arabia who would not accept him and his religion, namely Christians and Jews.
Christians presented no problem to him because they were not organized in tribes or clans. They lived in Arabia simply as individuals. But the Jews were another story. Jews were united into tribes who faught against his efforts to force them to accept his religion. For a number of years, wars raged between Muslims and Jewish tribes in Arabia. But the Jewish tribes never united together as the Arab gentile tribes had done. Therefore with strength of numbers and religious dedication, the Arab Muslims ultimately won the day over their Jewish opponents. A day came when the military might of Jews in Arabia finally came to an end.
After that, Muhamud showed no mercy to his opponents. The Jews and Chirstians were ordered to leave Arabia under pain of death. Muhamud said that no more than one religion could exist there and that religion was the religion of Allah.
Muhamud invented his religion and preached it to his fellow Arabs and succeeded in uniting the tribes of the Arabian penninsula in just a brief few years. But he was not satisfied with just being a king over his Arabian converts. As a man who believed himself to be the ultimate prophet of God, he felt entitled to spread Islam over the entire world, or at least as much as he was able. He was ready to spread it by the sword, that is, to force it upon the world.
The Arab Muslims swept out of Arabia and invaded North Africa, the areas that are now Egypt, Lybia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, and the Western Sahara, and they conquered that whole area within a few number of years with practically no resistance. North Africa was part of the Eastern Roman Empire and unlike the more primitive Arabs and the Arabian Jews, the Christians living in the Eastern Empire were not constituted into clans and tribes. They lived as individuals who expected the government to protect them. But by the 600s of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire was no longer the strong military-political entity it had once been. Even so, it was undreamed of that any nation would dare attack Roman provinces. The rulers and subjects of the Roman Empire had been Christians for three centuries by then and they expected to be protected by the Christian God. But almost over night Christianity was wiped out as THE major religion of North Africa. The inhabitants were converted to Islam. Those Jews and Christians who refused to convert were allowed to live and remain but they were moved to an inferior status called Dhimmini, what we would call infidels.
The defeat of a significant part of the Roman Empire only served to convince the Muslims that God really was on their side and that their religion was the ONLY true religion. Therefore others religions were worthless and people who adhered to other religions were unworthy of respect.
Now, in the mid seventh century, the Muslim Arabs prepared the next step, the conquest of the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire. They prepared to invade Israel and Syria. In a very short time, they had conquered the Holy Land and established themselves in Jerusalem. They proceeded to convert the inhabitants of the Holy Land and to turn them into Muslim Arabs. In the population of the Holy Land of the seventh century, Jews constituted a minority. The Holy Land had become a typical Roman province whose with inhabitants were a mixed multitude of ethnic groups. Most of these became Muslim and took on an Arab identity.
Jerusalem was turned into an Arab city eventually two mosques were built on the site of the former Temple of Solomon. Since Jerusalem had been a holy city to both Jews and Chirstians the Muslims renamed it AlQuds in Arabic which means "the holy place." That's what Muslims still call it to this day.
The Arab Muslims went on the conquer Syria, Babylon and Persia and lands beyond. The once mighty Roman Empire had lost much of its lands, and Christianity was almost obliterated in the Middle East, almost but not quite.
In less than a quarter century, Islam had spread out and become an Empire itself to be reckoned with, it's leaders believing themselves to be the chosen of God and treating all nonMuslims as Dhimmini, tolerated but not respected.
By the end of the 8th century, Muslim armies had crossed over from North Africa into Iberia and established an Islamic territory in the south ofwhat was to become Spain. From there, they attempted to move east and conquer all of Europe but they were stopped at the western border of France.
Meanwhile in the East, the Islamic capital had moved from Arabia to Baghdad in what is now modern Iraq. Moslems never gave up the idea of conquering the whole world and converting it to Islam but towards the end of the first millenium [1000CE], hordes of barbarians from Central Asia began moving westward in their own quest to conquer. They succeeded in conquering Babylon [Iraq] but they could not dislodge Islam with their own pagan religions. Within 2 centuries, most of these Asiatic conquerers had succumbed to the Islamic religion of their vassals.
By the 14th century, the Asiatic Turks were Moslems who were determined to build an empire of their own. Using Islam as a vehicle of conquest, they succeeded in becoming the new masters of the Islamic world. While other Asiatic peoples who had converted to Islam spread their new religion eastward into areas that are now Indonesia and Pakistan, the Turks concentrated on etablishing their empire in areas already under Islam. Arabs, who had originated Islam, were no longer the leaders of the Islamic world. Turks had now taken over that position and would hold onto an Islamic Empire from the 14th to the 20th century, 7 centuries!
The Muslim Arabs had taken away vast parts of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire. The Turks now chose to destroy the very heart of that Empire. In the 15th century, Turkish Muslim armies swept into Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christianity and conquered it, thereby formally ending a Roman Empire that had existed for over a thousand years. The Turks made Constantinople their Empire capital, calling it Ishtanbul. Vast areas of Europe that had been Eastern Christian now became Muslim, including what were to become Yugoslavia and Albania. The Muslim Empire was at it's peak. Muslims all over the world considered themselves on people, on nation. There were geographic areas to be sure. There were places called Egypt, Syria, Palestine [Israel] but the people living in this vast empire considered themselves Muslims first and Egyptians or Syrians second.
After the 15th century, Muslim conquests ended. Islam continued to spread in the Eastern world but only by missionary efforts and conversion. Meanwhile the Turks fell into sluggish Levantine trance. They allowed their territories to deteriorate. This was seen most prominently in so-called Palestine, the Holy Land where once flourishing forrests turned into malarial swamps.
In 1914, World War I broke out. England, France, America, Italy, and Russia formed an alliance to fight against the alliance formed by Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. When the war ended, the Austrian-German alliance was defeated. The Turkish Empire fell apart and vast areas of Muslim lands fell into the hands of France and England. The Holy Land was now in British hands. The winning allies now divided the Muslim Empire into COUNTRIES, installing so-called friendly rulers who acted as British and French vassals. The residents of these "countries" were expected to identify themselves as "citizens" of these countries in the same way that Western citizens identified themselves with their geographical states. This went against the grain of Muslim's mentality which continued to think of themselves as one united people under Allah.
The Turkish Moslem empire was gone. Because Arabs had helped the British to fight the Turks, England promised them independence and national self-determination. But England had also promised the Jews a homeland in what they called Palestine, which was really the Holy Land [Israel]. Things remained quiet in the Middle East during the 1930s. In the 1940s two things happened. Oil was discovered under the earth where Arab countries has been established, and, Nazism was on the rise. As the Nazis took over Europe, Jews began to leave there in large numbers and resettle in British held Palestine. The Arabs resented a nonMuslim people coming to settle on what they considered their land. As more and more Jews came to Palestine, the Arabs became more and more resentfull and violent. The British had made a promise to the Jews to establish a homeland for them in Palestine yet they feared an uprising on the part of the Arabs that would hurt them in their war against the German Nazis. They also were worried that after the war, they would have to vacate their Arab lands and would lose a necessary commodity to make the modern world run smoothly, namely oil. So to placate the Arabs, they began to withdraw some part of the land of Israel from the deal they had promised the Jews. Instead of giving Jews all the Holy Land, they decided to break it up into two sections which would ultimately become two states, Israel and Palestine. The Jews bitterly accepted this compromise. The Arabs did not. After the war was over, the United Nations took over the hand over to Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. In 1948 the Jews proclaimed the Jewish State of Israel. The Arabs did not declare a Palestinian state in their part. Instead they allowed invading Arab armies from Lebanon,Syria,Jordan,Iraq,Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to come to and declare war against the new State of Israel. But the tide of war turned against the Arabs. Israel acting alone was able to defeat 7 Arab nations in the war. However the Jordanian army was now left at the armistice line occupying the area that was to have been the Palestinian Arab country in the Holy Land. Jordan annexed that part of the Holy Land and made it part of Greater Jordan. The war ended and a truce was in place. No peace agreement was reached. The Arabs and Israel remained at war in an on again, off again fighting for 19 years.
In June, 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan joined in an attack on Israel meant to destroy the country and murder its inhabitants. But before the attack actually began, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian airforce, destroying practically all its airplanes before they could leave the ground. Then the Israeli army began an assault on southern Syria, capturiing the Golan Heights in northern Galilee and driving the Syrian military back. Lastly, Israel engaged the Jordanians, capturing all of the HOly Land west of the Jordan River, including the old City of Jerusalem. The Arabs were demoralized and humiliated and stepped up their bitter polemic agianst Israel. They blamed France for supplying Israel with weapons, and they blamed other Europeans for sympathizing with Israel. After that war which lasted six days, thousands of Americans and Europeans poured into Israel to help with post-war needs. On YOM KIPPUR, The Jewish Day Of Atonement, in October of 1973, Syria and Egypt again attacked Israel, this time without Jordan. Again, after several weeks, the Israelis succeeded in pushing both armies back across their borders. The Arabs were livid. This time they blamed America for supplying Israel with weaopns. They also raised the price of oil. Throughout 1974, gasoline prices soared. This was the Arabs one weapon. The yhad oil and sold it to the West. But they were not able to defeat or destroy Israel in a war. Syria and Egypt now turned to Russia to help them in their ongoing war with Israel. This was the time of the COld War and the Russians were happy to give their latest weapons to the Arabs to test out in a real war situation. In fact, in the mini wars that were faught between Israel and the Arabs, it was really the United States and Russia doing the psychological fighting. Nevertheless, every time the Russians gave their new weapons to the Arabs, Israel wound up capturing or stealing them and turning them over to the United States so America, during this period, always knew what the Russians were developing in their arsenal. Finally in 1977, it occured to Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, that there was no way for Egypt to beat Israel with or without Russian help. He therefore did something very bold. He approached Israel with an offer of peace, the first Arab-Moslem country to do so. By the beginning of 1978 Israel and Egypt had a peace treaty in effect which left Syria and the other Arab Moslem countries isolated. Now the Moslems turned their anger against Egypt whom they felt had betrayed the Muslim cause of once agian establishing an Empire silmilar to the one they had before 1917. Sadat was assassinated after a year or so - but the new leader of Egypt, Mubarak, kept the peace treaty in effect. Now both Egypt and Israel were allies of America and there was very little that the other Arab and Moslem countries could do to them. Now Russia sought to build up a weapons base in Lebanon, an Arab country which had up to then mostly stayed out of miltary actions in that part of the world. Up to the late 1970s, Lebanon had been mostly a Christian Arab country but in the late 1970s, Palestinian Muslims began migrating there and turned the country into an Islamic entity. When that happened, Russia began to deal with Arab terrorists and supply them with weapons. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebabon, captured hundreds of thousands of weapons and chased the terrorists out of Lebanon. Once again it was a humiliating defeat of Arabs and Muslims. Throughout the world, Muslim anger and hatred of the Western world was growing stronger. The West was blamed for having created and maintaining a Jewish country in the midst of a Muslim hub in the Middle East. The Arabs had no humility; only humiliation.
Through the Reagan years, 1981 to 1989, America engaged in several military adventures. Iraq and Iran had been fighting a long and dirty war for nearly a decade. Because America saw Iran for what it was and is, a theocratic fundamentalist country antithetical to the West, it supported Iran in that war, supplying Iraq with high tech weapons abd intelligence. However the war ended in the late 1980s with no real winner. America also increased its military presence in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two Muslim countries, which enraged Muslim religious fundamentalists in the Middle East. The Arab world was going through a de-evolution. While the rest of humanity was progressing towards the 21st century, Arabs were falling behind in all spheres. There was mass unemployment and hunger throughout the Arab world. Th leaders of the major Arab countries were dictators put into power by Western colonialists because the western nations, including America, believed these autocrats would keep their countries pro-west and anti-Communist. Day to day misery and oppression by their leaders caused the people in the Arab street to turn to religious clerics for guidance. These clerics told the Arab masses that the only way to get rid of their misery was to get rid of their leaders and og Israel, and take up the cause of Islam. They were told to divest themselves of all Western Satanic ideas including democracy and individual freedom and equality of the sexes. They were told that only by complete submission to the Law of Allah could they hope to once again regain the glory that had been Islam's in the 13th century. They were told that the only way to rid themselves of the western Satanic Americans and Europeans, as well as of Israel, was through terroism. Jihad has been the Islamic way since its beginning under Mohamud. Violence is not new to the Islamic mind. By 1990, the Soviet Union was falling apart and communism was disappearing. It appeared to the world, and correctly so, that America was now the oNLY super power left in the word, and as such, it could and would impose its will on the entire world much the way that Rome had done when IT was the only super power. America would try to shape the world in its image - the image of democracy. individual freedom, secularism, and equality of the sexes. That year, Saddam Hussein called a confernce of all Arab leaders and told them that Arabs and Muslims had to stand up to American imperialism - before America re-established its own colonialism in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein decided on a show of force to test the United States. In late 1989, Iraq invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait. The Elder Bush warned Saddam that America would not tollerate this behavior and ordered Iraq to withdraw its army from Kuwait immediately or face the consquences. Saddam believed that if Iraq were attacked by America, all Arab countries would join in the war on the side of Iraq. In January, 1990, America attacked Iraq in Operation Dessert Storm and chased the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Then, instead of finishing the job and getting rid of Saddam, the elder Bush withdrew from Iraq. The sole purpose for the war was so that America could shoe the Arab world that it would control its destiny and the oil of the MIddle East. Iraq's defeat caused humiliation throughout the Arab and Muslim world. But America remained deaf and blind to that. America thought it could but Arab friendship with oil dollars. The Arabs continued to sell their oil to the west while at the same time, their anger, frustration, and hatred continued to grow. To punish America for its attack on Iraq, the World Trade Center was attacked with a powerful car bomb in 1993. No major damage was done and the perpertrators were captured. But America did not learn its lesson. This act of terror was not to be an isolated incident.
Clinton and his administration did not adequately respond to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The administration was well aware of BinLaden and his activities, and had more than enough intelligence on him and his movements curtesy of the Israeli government. Yet Clinton was more concerned about his legacy as the Great White Peacemaker than in anything else. So instead of understanding that this attack was just the beginning of more to come and doing something about it, he concentrated instead on forcing Israel to weaken itself to gratify the will of Arafat and the Palestinians, not understanding that he was showing the entire Arab world that America can be pushed into being a submissive partner to terrorism. All through the 1990s, Israel kept insisting that it was only a matter of time until Arab terrorism would hit America big time. Apparently both Clinton and Bush went on thinking that Arabs are a Jewish problem, not ours. Concurrently another process had been going on since 1979 and was now in full operation, the Iranian movement to build a second Persian Empire. Iran had been a loyal friend to the United States for many years under the Shah. But Jimmy Carter was determined to rid Iran of its despotic king and bring freedom to Iran. He therefore had the CIA influence the overthrow of the Shah's goverment leading to the return and takeover of the Ayatola Khomeni. The Iranians could not forget about their freedom. Instead of the Shah, they got a religious fundamentalist fanatic who turned the clock back and turned Iran into a pre-modern theocracy. The West had given Khomeni a safe haven and protection for years. In return, Khomeni now expressed his hatred and contempt for the Western world and its civilization. The West, and princibally America, was Satan to him, as were all nonMuslims. He and the other Ayatolas now began to concentrate on exporting their religious revolution abroad to the rest of the Muslim world using any and every means possible, particularly terrorism. The goal of the Ayatolas was now to destroy America and Israel as symbols of nonMuslim superiority and arrogance.
During the 1990s, Al Qaida was growing in strength. Islamism as a worldwide movement attracted the young unemployed masses from all over the Muslim world. The West was made the scapegoat as THE evil entity in much the same way that the Germans made the Jews THEIR scapegoat. America as the chief supporter of the State of Israel became the main target of Islamist hatred. Osama had become the hero of terrorist fundamentalist Islam after he engineered a series of major attacks against America. Although Iran had become the main sponsor of worldwide terror, BinLaden made his homebase in neighboring Taliban Afghanistan. From there he planned and brought to fruition the disaster of Spetember 11. The destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City started a new Era in history. Perhaps a far greater danger than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, its stands as an ongoing symbol of ongoing potential danger to the world. Islamist terrorist can only be stopped if the Western nations act in concert to show Muslim terrorists that the West will react to terror with equal or greater terror. This is not likely to happen until enough damage is done to the nonMuslim world. But by then it may be too late.
ADDENDUM: [August 17, 2022] It turns out that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was the real mastermind behind the 9/11 attack.
"Zawahiri, (president) Biden said, 'was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11, one of the most responsible for the attacks that murdered 2,977 people on American soil. For decades, he was the mastermind of attacks against Americans.'" - https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/01/politics/joe-biden-counter-terrorism/index.html

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