Yitzchak Rabin - Opening the Door to 9/11

by Sam Z. Anvil
It’s been ten years since Yitzchak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was assassinated by a right-wing zealot who thought Rabin’s death would put an end to the Oslo process.
Of course, the assassin was wrong. Instead of halting Oslo in its tracks, the murder galvanized it, because any criticism of Oslo, no matter how justified, was immediately recast into a justification of the crime of political murder and thus rejected out of hand. Oslo’s enthusiasts no longer had to defend the thinking behind Oslo or explain away its disastrous results (for example, Shimon Peres’ memorable “victims of peace”). They only had to point an accusing finger at the critic and cry “Murderer!”
Rabin’s assassin achieved exactly the opposite of his goal, just as Oslo achieved exactly the opposite of its goal: peace.
But although Oslo has been a complete failure, it did lead to something none of its proponents (except perhaps the wily mass-murderer Arafat) could have imagined: the attacks of September 11. Oslo was a great victory in the global jihad, proof that the little Satan Israel could be brought to its knees, so why not the Great Satan? Islamic terrorists all over the world got that message, even if Bill Clinton did not.
The accelerating decline and fall of the infidel: the massacre of American troops in Mogadishu, the surrender of the most powerful military force in the Middle East to a ragtag collection of “freedom fighters,” the humiliating handshake on the White House lawn between the Israeli chief-of-staff in the Six Day War and the unshaven unrepentant jihad warrior, the daring attack on the USS Cole – for this is the only “narrative” into which a Moslem would possibly fit these events – could mean only one thing: the once-mighty infidel empire was stumbling, and it was time to strike a blow to bring about the inevitable final victory.
Hence, 9/11.
For what else could have emboldened a religious fanatic to undertake an insane scheme of hijacking four airliners with box-cutters and crashing them into the symbols of infidel political, military and economic power? Only the belief that the act would not stand alone, that it would be another blow in a great jihad that was already succeeding, that there would be many more such blows, and the Great Satan and its puny client-state Israel would collapse under a hailstorm of crushing humiliating defeats and the era of Islamic world rule would be ushered in.
The fashionable politicians who gathered yesterday in Tel Aviv to mark the tenth anniversary of Rabin’s death could only repeat the timeworn cliché that peace in the Middle East is the legacy of Oslo.
But they are wrong. Oslo’s real legacy Oslo is 9/11.