Now that the revolting spoiled Saudi pick-nose has been converted to fish food, it might be time for some reflection. But reflection on what? On the funeral ceremonies in Turkey and London, the proposed sepulchre in Palestine, the wailing of Pakistan’s opposition MP?  That would tell us nothing we don’t already know; that the Ummah is deeply infected with its own version of Ku Kluxery and the relevant stupidities. Instead, let us look at what the malevolent little tick left behind.

Though 9/11 is the best known of his stunts, it is also rarely completely understood. It is commonly thought that the attacks on September 11th 2001 killed about three thousand people. Not so. The economic fall-out killed about forty thousand children by malnutrition and disease and immiserated ten million human individuals. All of this did not prevent a gang of preposterous fops from charging into print with “Why I Would Have Blown Up The Twin Towers” essays. This ventriloquist attitude has been unshaken even by Al Qaeda’s subsequent campaigns against the Shia of Iraq or its defence of the genocide-government of the Sudan.

I confess that I rather rejoice in this outfall: the proof-positive that the modern ‘left’ has nothing in common with those who once fought oppression and tyranny, and is instead an open supporter of any murderous anti-civilization. From Yasmin Alibhai-Brown longing for more carnage in Iraq, to Noam Chomsky shouting for bin Laden, to Galloway pimping for the Baathists, to Michael Moore sobbing with sympathy for Al Qaeda and the Hussein tyranny, to Tariq Ali whooping for the lynch-mobs, the first-world left has been foursquare for fascism when it hasn’t been reactionary and range-of-the-moment. This extends even to mock-concern over our permissive society and anti-Jewish paranoia. I don’t believe that it can recover from this blood and shit fusion of red and brown, which is very nice, since it does not deserve to.

Of course, there have been those individuals who have had no desire to go along with such monkeyshines and have made their own stand, men such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen. Discovering minds like these has been a pleasure.

The converse of this is a general radicalization on the right, another improvement. The one deserved casualty of 9/11 is the old realpolitik view that it was possible to find a pliable monster and keep him in power. That view is something I won’t miss. In a grand irony this means that, say, Kurdish socialists find their place alongside the Pentagon and the neoconservatives, as their supposed ‘comrades’ are too busy with the likes of Zarqawi and Al Sadr. Of necessity, we have seen the birth of an internationalist right.

This Nietzschean transevaluation has lead to some worrying developments, such as the rise of the sort of blood-and-soil nationalism we could well do without, but it has also seen the development of a new generation of Enlightenment radicals, such as the gentle American Sam Harris and the indefatigable Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq (to underline my point about the reactionary conservatism of the first-world left, can any reader remember a squeak of protest from our much vaunted feminist society when Ms. Ali was prevented from speaking at our union out of fear of Islamic fanatics?). Discovering minds like these has been an honour.

Despite all the foregoing, I should confess that 9/11 was not for me ‘the day everything changed’. As horrible as they were, there was no question that bin Laden and his ratbag associates would be destroyed; the only question was when. The day ‘everything changed’ for me was the fifth of February, 2006. That was the day I woke up to find that book-burning mobs had taken to streets, calling for the return of a lost empire and a new Holocaust. All of the warning signs we’ve been trained to look out for, and all of this to silence freedom of expression for the non-crime of blasphemy. One could not really wish for a more open assault on everything the Enlightenment stands for, and I have not forgotten it, nor have I forgotten how many people decided to crawl to the goons. This surrender across the board was a far more sinister development which will have far longer consequences than the atrocities of bin Laden.