- Op Ed
by Sherelle Jacobs (The Telegraph)
"Twenty-two years ago today, the West woke up to a diabolical new existential enemy. When 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed two into the Twin Towers, killing almost 3,000 people, the US government and its European counterparts learnt to their horror that the fall of the Soviet Union had not, in fact, brought about the End of History – that is, the final exhaustion of the great dialectical battle between the forces of freedom and fundamentalism.
Instead it turned out that there were people who were willing to blow themselves up in order to destroy the West. Their fundamentalism boiled down to a total rejection of Western civilization, and in particular its idea of freedom anchored in individual liberty and personal autonomy rather than unquestioning submission before God.
Frightening as this attack was, it was at least tangible. The new struggle seemed a straightforwardly Manichean one, between individual freedom and collective fundamentalism; the life force and death instinct.
Terrorists, exalting their murderous deeds, raged against the infidel in the open air. The movement had standout villains, most notably Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who seemed pathologically obsessed with Whitney Houston and yet so despised American consumerism that he refused to use a fridge. The gauntlet thrown down by these terrorists brought out the essence of the West. The cowboy president George W Bush vowed, with a Texan smoke ’em out lilt, to hunt down the ringleaders “dead or alive”.
Today,
the enemy we face – the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – is in some ways more frightening than al-Qaeda. This new enemy
does not seek to destroy Western values by waging open war.
Rather it is steadily rendering freedom and democracy obsolete, through infiltration of our economic and political system in the shadows. The CCP has been extraordinarily successful in capturing Britain plc..."
