On the morning of September 11, 2001, in Manhattan, the beating heart of the Western world shattered. At the controls of the two planes that will hit the World Trade Center towers are the new horsemen of the Apocalypse. The free world discovers them and will never stop dealing with them. They want to collapse our world, reduce it to blood and dust. From that disastrous date until today, they have continued to pursue their sinister design: here I am talking about the Islamists.
In New York, that day, we converge, in suits and ties or in business suits, towards this temple of American power and globalized capitalism that are the twin towers. From the foot of the buildings to their summit, thousands of workers go about their usual business, oblivious to the tragedy that looms like a shadow. A few minutes will be enough to destroy the hundreds of human lives that populated the offices of the skyscrapers and, of course, those of the unfortunate passengers of the hijacked planes.
Like a shaky house of cards, these seemingly impregnable towers of Babel are collapsing. America is stunned, President Bush and his administration are groggy. But even more than the United States, it is the Western world that is being struck to the heart. The terrible ordeal of the victims trapped in the top floors of the towers, above the impact of the two Boeings; the unfortunate people who jump into the void; those who call in vain from the windows… All these images flood the screens and still populate our minds twenty-five years later.
The emergence of political Islam
The ordeal of the victims of September 11 heralds a 20th century of terror for the people of the West. Political Islam emerges in a world that believed itself to be secure. The nerve center of Western stability is nothing more than a field of ruins. In the streets of the big cities of the Middle East, people celebrate. The television news shows scenes of jubilation where children, women and young men exult at the collapse of the twin towers, praying to their god to thank him for this massacre. Thus is born a divide that no one had seen coming before.
What ? Is the free world and universal democracy that we were promised in the 1990s just a pipe dream? Didn’t all the people of the world mourn the civilian victims of the United States? East and West are not in unison in the face of the tragedy? All these questions, new at the time, were only emerging in people’s minds. Our dream of world peace through trade and democracy was hit, at 800 km/h, by two airliners launched at full power against our windows.
Twenty-five years after the tragedy, we are faced with the same terrorists
At that time, from Sydney to Paris, via London and Montreal, the West (which some today dare to assert did not exist) was crossed by the same emotions. The 21st century opened with an immense tragedy, of which Islamism was the new and unexpected cause. From this deadly ideology, the existence of which many then discovered, we were not going to be delivered soon. In retrospect, there is something enviable about our candor at the time. This gentleness of the world that the fall of the Berlin Wall suggested offered the West immense hope for humanity. From 1991 to 2001, it was a decade of freedom, promises of the future and carefreeness that ended there, under the rubble of Ground Zero.
Since then, nothing has been the same as before. The war that Islamism is waging against us has never stopped. It is hidden, deep, sometimes insidious, sometimes bloody, but always present. France paid a heavy price. Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, Nice, Strasbourg and so many other tragic attacks, always with the same cries, always in the name of the same god. Our candor has faded, giving way to sadness for some, struggle for others and, unfortunately, renunciation for some.
Twenty-five years after the tragedy of September 11, we are confronted with the same terrorists, the same fanatics, the same divisions. The West still cannot escape the trap in which our enemies enclose us more and more every day. In his time, George W. Bush believed he could escape this deadly cycle with a war. But Jacques Chirac was right, and this military adventure changed nothing.
We now have to think about the future. That is to say, definitively putting an end to an ideology which made all these massacres possible. The task is difficult, if not impossible, but that is the characteristic of all great battles. They seem unattainable, but worth pursuing. In the name of freedom. In the name of our freedom.
