Michael Young er debattredaktør i Daily Star i Libanon, og medredaktør av nettstedet Reason. Han gjorde seg noen tanker om 911 i Midtøsten.

It was unsurprising, yet momentous, that the peoples of the Middle East seemed least able to understand the meaning of the 9/11 attacks. It was unsurprising because many Arabs funneled their reading of the mass killings into parochial narratives—that they were a response to Palestinian suffering, to the unpopular sanctions regime in Iraq, or to the arrogance of American power. It was momentous because the Arabs’ refusal to understand why the United States reacted as it did presaged a disconnect between the region and the Americans. The misunderstanding deepened once a decision was taken in Washington to invade Iraq and use it as a cornerstone of regional transformation.
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The Arab inability, or refusal, to take 9/11 on its own terms—as a monumental crime against humanity whose aim was to be a monumental crime against humanity—was revealing. This failure to react to a crime as a crime rather than as an extension of one’s own anger or atavism would later be echoed in Arab apathy regarding the mass graves found in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s downfall; in the shocking aptitude of predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab publics to look the other way when faced with the relentless murder of Iraqi Shiites by foreign Islamists; and during the Lebanese conflict in Arab ardor for Hezbollah, with no concern shown for how the group’s pointless provocation of Israel had led to the deaths of around 1,000 civilians, traumatized a society, and reversed years of development in Lebanon.
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But today, five years later, does 9/11 have any real resonance in the Arab world? Are Arabic newspapers preparing moving retrospectives of that day? Is 9/11 seen as anything more than an event that brought America into the Middle East in the most abrasive of ways, shattering a status quo the Arabs hated but will invariably prefer to uncertainty? The answers to these questions are in the asking.

The Day Nothing Changed
How Arabs missed the significance of 9/11
Michael Young