9/11/01 Was It the Beginning of Our Decline?

Islam interprets the events of 9/11/01 as a turning point and the beginning of the decline of Western military and economic dominance around the world. Are they right?

The result of economic, political and military actions taken after 9/11, by the West, points to that conclusion. The West’s military actions in the Middle East and Asia have been effective in many ways, some good and some bad. But the overwhelming result has been an ever spreading hostility towards the West. Many point fingers at George Bush and Barack Obama, but that would be too simplistic. Most Western governments were and have been on board with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, after over ten years, even though the U.S. is out of Iraq and soon will be out of Afghanistan, this undeclared war has spread to over a dozen more countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Prior to 9/11/01 you could say there was a relative normalcy in these areas, but not now. Why?

Whenever you connect the events of the past twenty years one cannot avoid the importance of 9/11/01. It seems that the actions taken that day and afterwards have led us towards a global collision with Islam.

The so-called Arab Spring across North Africa and most of the Middle East has ever weakened the West’s hold on the region. At this very moment millions of non-combatant civilians are desperately getting out of the way of this tectonic movement of cultures. There is an unreported migration of peoples who want nothing more than peace but are being dislodged from centuries old homelands into hostile new countries. Millions from Syria now live in Jordan and Turkey as they flee from a meat grinder that’s called the Syria Civil War. These people have nowhere to go except Europe. Western countries are now paying billions to keep these refugees where they are, but they eventually will end up in the West since there seems to be no real answer to this uprising of Muslim peoples. In addition millions of Christians in Egypt have and are now planning moves to anywhere there isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood.

This mass migration of Islam into a predominantly Christian world, while the countries left behind turn more radical, has so many ramifications it’s frightening to imagine.

There is no question that after 9/11/01 the West’s economic policies became reckless and self-destructive. With Europe’s economy now in recession after a weak recovery from the 2009 trauma and the U.S. economy in a constant near zero growth-pattern, it seems there’s no good news anywhere.

Yes, 9/11/01 was the beginning of the decline of Western military and economic dominance around the world, but can’t we also say that the rest of the world has declined in turn? There are no winners or losers, no shining stars rising from the ashes. There are just piles of ashes and they keep getting bigger…… – N.P.Contompasis