This really was Israel’s 9/11

In the Indian movie Aakhri Raasta, there is an interesting scene between Amitabh Bachchan and his son who happens to be his duplicate. The father writes down the number 6 on his palm and shows it to his son who is standing in front of him at a distance. He tells his son that he had written 9 on his palm but the son would read it as 6. Then he says that none of them are wrong, it is just that their ways of seeing the same thing are different.

When Israel says that October 7 was their 9/11, I genuinely agree with the Israelis. Let me condemn the Hamas attacks before someone labels me a terrorist or something worse. The Israelis shedding crocodile tears over the Hamas attack is how they want this to be painted as their 9/11. However, the rest of the world, except the western society’s leadership, sees it as the 9/11 that gave America the justification to unleash its hammer around the world. Israel and the rest of the world see the same event with different meanings.

Israel wants to make the case that just like America was attacked by the terrorists, it was also attacked by the terrorists. And I agree that there are quite some similarities here which, in our anger for the terrorist activities of Israel, we simply overlook. Here are some of them:

Al Qaeda, which attacked America on land in 1998, in the ocean in the year 2000, and from the air in 2001, was helped shape as a terrorist organisation by the United States back in the 1980s. Al Qaeda was created by the Palestinian doctor Dr Abdullah Azzam around 1980. At the time, its name was Al Qaeda Al Sulbah, whose goal was to provide education to the Muslims so as to create a strong base of the Muslim Ummah. Bin Laden took control of the organisation after Dr Azzam was killed by the Jordanian spy agency Mokhabarat in Peshawar, where I spent much of my adult life. Bin Laden gave it a terrorist makeup. The rest is history.

Hamas too was created by Israel. And just as the Jihad practised by Al Qaeda was supported by the United States in order to counter communism, Hamas was created by Israel with the aim of undermining the secular party Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Both turned out to be Frankensteins.

The American 9/11 is the story of blowback. American blind support for the state of Israel in its aggression against innocent and helpless Palestinians, American soldiers stationing on Islam’s holy land during Saddam’s aggressive moves against Kuwait, and for providing support for the dictators ruling over the Muslim world led to the takfiris swearing revenge against America for the humiliation they felt. America trained these jihadists to fight against the aggressive superpower, which at the time was the Soviet Union, but with time, that aggressive superpower in the eyes of the Jihadists was none other than the United States.

Hamas, being an Israeli creation and a generation of these people being humiliated by the Israeli aggression over the open air prison that Gaza has been, returned to sting the aggressor. That is textbook blowback.

Similarly, America after 9/11 had instantly announced to Afghan people that they were going to bomb them because they were sheltering Al Qaeda on their soil. The Taliban sheltering Al Qaeda on their soil was as much a practice of their culture of hospitality (pashtunvali) as much as it was the British norm to give shelter and asylum to Al Qaeda where they issued calls for jihad against America in 1996 right when they were operating out of London.

And lastly, just as America used those attacks to launch a global war on terror without any clear goals and without any clear boundary, Israel has launched a similar war of aggression with unclear yet limitless goals.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2023.

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