It’s actually amazing how dog shit Obama’s reflections on 9/11 were in 2001. His writing is amazing because it actually perfectly illustrates how the left never understood 9/11 ever. Obama said that the fundamental problem was that the hijackers lacked empathy and that their lack of empathy grew out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Basically a version of “hurt people hurt people.” But Bin Laden came from a billionaire family and the pilots and planners were all university-educated, middle-class men. Marc Sageman analysed hundreds of terrorist biographies and found that three quarters of his al-Qaeda sample came from the upper or middle class, 90 percent from intact families, and 63 percent had attended college against a developing world norm of 5–6 percent. They were essentially a kind of jihadist version of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organisation with a much higher concentrated pool of human capital than the masses they claimed to speak for. Qutb's Milestones actually explicitly calls for a vanguard to lead the Muslim masses, and Qutb is the intellectual lineage Zawahiri came out of. And rather than lacking empathy for their victims, they knew full well that they were inflicting massive suffering on the world - they simply believed that Americans deserved this suffering. Think about it for a second. How do we define the concept of empathy? It’s the ability to understand and access the feelings of others. This necessarily rests upon an understanding that the other party is in fact human and can feel. The 9/11 hijackers and the men who plotted it knew full well that their victims were human. They fully understood that they were slaughtering thousands of American civilians in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. It’s not that they dehumanised Americans - they knew they were human and wanted them to suffer. Cruelty requires cognitive empathy - you can't design maximal suffering without modelling the victim's mind. To terrorise, humiliate or maximise suffering you have to model what the target dreads, what will break them, what they will see coming. Bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" argues that American civilians are not innocent because they elect their government and fund it through taxes. That is the collective-guilt argument in the perpetrators' own words - it presupposes Americans are moral agents, not sub-human. So Obama diagnosed a deficit - an "inability to imagine" - when the 9/11 hijackers and plotters in fact imagined the suffering perfectly well. They wanted to inflict suffering on Americans because they believed their actions were morally right. Al-Qaeda operated according to a highly developed and ideological Schmittian friend-enemy distinction framework, yet Obama naively imagined they were a bunch of poor suffering Third Worlders who could have been diverted from attacking America through development aid, economic opportunity and education. Doesn’t work like that when your enemy marks you as an eternal enemy against which anything is justified.