Why Us?

Pundits are now asking, “Why did they attack us?” After all, they note, unlike England and Spain, Canada did not ally with the US to go into Iraq. In comparison to many other nations—the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Denmark, The Netherlands…--Canada would seem to have bent over backwards to avoid offending Al Qaeda and its ilk. Yet we too get argeted by the bombers.

But this is foolish thinking. It misses the point. Remember, Americans were asking the same question after 9/11. And what, indeed, had America done at that point to offend Al Qaeda? According to Bin Laden himself, their crime was positioning their soldiers on Saudi soil—in order to defend Saudi Arabia.

There is no way to avoid an attack by Al Qaeda. As with Hitler, appeasement does not work. Because like Hitler, they do not have any one or many particular demands that can be satisfied. What they want is an excuse to bomb.

It is not even that becoming Muslim, as some suggest, is the only way we could satisfy them. That cannot explain the attacks on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the common people of Iraq.

Not being rich and successful is what it would take. No more and no less. The vision that drives these terrorists is the same vision that inspired Lee Harvey Oswald, or Sirhan Sirhan, or James Earl Ray; or the killers of John the Baptist or Jesus Christ. “Here is someone who seems better than I am; here is something better than I can create. Therefore, for the sake of my self-esteem, which is what is most important to me, I must destroy him; I must destroy it.”

Islam is only the currently popular cover for this tendency, the current alibi; as, in other times and places, it was Marxism, or Anarchy, or Fascism, or indeed, a similarly perverted Christianity.

People like the Canadian bombers must be understood as common criminals, as garden variety psychopaths. No more and no less. There is nothing more mysterious about them.