Wednesday’s remembrances forced western reasoning to confront again the origins of the deep resentments and hatreds that drove a cadre of young Arab and Muslim men to execute such a barbaric scheme on the world’s lone superpower. In an article titled ‘Shaking the world to its foundations’ and published in the Jerusalem Post last week, Michael Novak, a former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, writes: “Preoccupied by the threat to democracy and human rights posed by the Communist powers, the free world paid almost no attention to the lack of democracy, the daily abuse of human rights and the unnecessary poverty and lack of education in the Muslim world. It is as if during all those years no one paid attention to the suffering of the Muslim multitudes, and the continuing insouciance of their elites. That is one of the realities that snapped on September 11. Eleven of the hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and not from among the poorest but from among the educated elite sent abroad for studies. A sudden white glare was cast upon the Arab world, brilliant as the noonday sun. There is no longer any place to hide. Where terror grows it must be eradicated. Where poverty is widespread in the very midst of uncommon wealth, it must be rapidly and steadily diminished by new systems of opportunity and progress. Rights of inquiry, conscience, and personal privacy and initiative and development must be established.”

In some ways, Michael Kovak’s assertions, echo the plea made by Dr George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he made a presentation at the Westminster Abbey service late last year to honour the memory of the Britons who perished in the World Trade Center (WTC) catastrophe. In his excellent and beautifully worded sermon, Dr Carey, seemed to crystalise for listeners the universal repugnance of the mayhem, death and destruction of September 11 with the urgency of this civilisation finding a formula for redressing those outstanding manifestations of injustice that could provoke such acts of atrocities against innocent lives.

“There are, of course, no adequate words for the shameful and evil deeds of September 11…Those who claim to be serving God by such appalling and indiscriminate bloodshed are cruelly deceived. They besmirch the very basis of true faith,” Archbishop Carey told the gathering. “Let us work sincerely and even-handedly for justice - the justice that may bring the balm of peace to those open wounds that deface our dealings as nations, peoples, and communities,” he continued. After positing that some good could come from the tragedy, Dr Carey added: “But whatever good we bring forth from the events of September 11, nothing and no cause can justify its barbarity.”

While urging religions of the world to put their own houses in order, Dr Carey exhorted the developed countries to find a better way, to narrow the gap between the world’s rich and the poor, to feed the poor while building schools and other facilities that will improve the lives of the disadvantaged.