THE EAST European poet-turned-statesmen, Vaclav Havel, penned these words in an article in 1995: “National, racial, religious, social and political intolerance has been the lot of humanity for millennia, and it is unfortunately deeply-rooted in the human psyche and in the spirit of entire communities. The problem is, like many other things, this phenomenon-now that we live in a world with a single global civilisation-is far more dangerous than it has ever been before.

At the time these words were published, they seemed to this writer and to others, to have immediate applicability to the atrocities that were being committed by the Serbs in Bosnia against the Croats and Muslims, and also to the genocide that had been perpetrated against the Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi. Vaclav Havel’s words were also pertinent to the perennial eruptions of strife and clashes that characterise the Middle East, where Palestinians and Israelis - all children of Abraham-have been at each other’s throats for generations.

However, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 catastrophes in which hijacked commercial aircraft were crashed kamikaze-style into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and a section of the Pentagon in Washington DC, one is constrained to wonder at the profound foresight of poet and writer Vaclav Havel. Driven by a consuming hatred of the United States, its prosperity, its military might and the quality of life of its population, these people, whoever they are, spent a considerable period of time conceptualising a most diabolical enterprise and then implementing their scheme with a high degree of efficiency, unfazed by the deadly certainty of their mission.

In analysing the state of mind of the Muslim fundamentalists, Hamid Dabashi, a writer and scholar, points out in a Reuters report this week, that the grievance is both historical and contemporary, and that this grievance has to be understood in the memory of Islam as a world power.

According to the Reuters story, Islam’s position as a world power began to unravel with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the defeat of the Persian and Ottoman empires at the hands of the Russians and other Europeans in the early 19th century, “a period that forced an unsuspecting Islamic world to confront its weakness in the face of the West.”

Dabashi, who is the author of the book, Theology of Discontent, is quoted as saying: “Islam emerged as a dialogue with the West - the point at which it ceased to be a universal religion and became an ideology and a political response to colonialism.”

While the scholar Dabashi posits that the people of Islam are responding to centuries of perceived weakness against Western thinking and culture, other perennially warring and disputatious peoples harbour hatreds from historical defeats. It is said that the Serbs have never forgotten the battle they lost as Kosovo over 200 years ago, and as recently as the mid-1990s, they were using that defeat as a rallying point to pursue their racist policy of ethnic cleansing.

Vaclav Havel is right. With an increasingly globalised world culture, the negative impact of intolerance, in all its facets -- racial, religious, political - is proving to be more dangerous and far more widespread than could have been envisaged a generation ago.

While the aircraft that ploughed into the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were striking symbolically at the heart of American might and military pre-eminence, the people who lost their lives were not only Americans, but also nationals of nearly 40 countries of the world. No argument can honestly justify or rationalise the actions that brought about the scale of human carnage and the wanton destruction of property that were wreaked on the world nine days ago.