My reaction to 9/11 followed a path familiar to millions of Americans.  Grief, rage, frustration.  After Pearl Harbor, we spent a long time in Europe because it was circling the drain, but we always knew where we would wind up.  In Japan.  After 9/11 we had no return address for our response. 

We killed a lot of enemies, unfortunately not bin Laden, in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We captured some more and sent them to Guantanamo Bay.  We tried some enemies in our criminal courts.  But almost eight years later the number of enemies seems to have grown, if you believe their own statements.  There seems to be something out there generating enemies.

I needed to understand the ideas behind 9/11, and I noticed that bin Laden was talking about religious doctrine as justification for his attacks.  But not to Americans.  To Americans he said something completely different.

Raymond Ibrahim has done the West a service by collecting and translating the writings of the leaders of Al Qaeda into The Al Qaeda Reader.  In his 4/11/08 article for Middle East Strategy at Harvard, Jihadi Studies as Trivia, he says:

Consider the disparity of the following two quotes, both by bin Laden, one directed to Americans, the other to Muslims. To Americans, he says: “Reciprocal treatment is part of justice; he who initiates the aggression is the unjust one.”

However, in an obscure essay entitled “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West,” directed at fellow Muslims—his Saudi kinsmen, to be specific—bin Laden celebrates his understanding of Islam’s aggressive nature:

“[O]ur talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?

Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission [i.e., conversion]; or payment of the jizya [poll-tax paid by non-Muslims], thereby bodily, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.

The matter is summed up for every person alive: either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die…. Such, then, is the basis of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion.”

(The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42.)

Bin Laden’s putative second-in-command, Zawahiri, quotes the chapter and verse from the Koran to back up bin Laden’s statements. I recommend The Al Qaeda Reader to anyone who wants to understand the war we are in. 

The enemy generator is the Islamic law bin Laden and Zawahiri cite as justification for their jihad. 

Any intelligent reader of the Koran and Sunna would have to agree that bin Laden and Zawahiri are correct when they say that traditional Islam allows only three paths for the infidel: 

• converting to Islam
• becoming a Dhimmi, and therefore subject to humiliating second-class citizenship 
• death.

So, I think that the return address for 9/11 is the reform of Islamic law.  We are at war with those who believe, as bin Laden does, that Islamic law constitutes an open-ended declaration of war against unbelievers; that the Koranic commands to battle unbelievers are not limited in time or place.   

It is not up to infidels to solve the problem.  It is up to Muslims to rescind the state of war that has existed for centuries.  It may, however, be prudent for us to suspend Muslim immigration until that happens. 

The appropriate Islamic authorities should publish a new interpretation of the Koran which makes clear that the aggressive violence recorded there was wrong then and is wrong now.  Experience has taught us that violence in the name of religion is wrong, and always has been. 

That is the meaning of the right to freedom of conscience.