Mental scars must be healed for the sake of all people

motions, of course, ran high at the remembering of the atrocities inflicted on America ten years ago. At the cascading waters of the memorial commemorating the place of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre levelled by terrorists, the reading of names of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed there while at work was tearfully and heart-rendingly poignant.

As the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, said, these were the names of “our neighbours, our friends, our husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children and parents”. And in those names, there was the sorrow at lives cut abruptly short, pride at those who had died in the effort to rescue survivors, and some comfort that their names inscribed at Ground Zero mean that their memory will endure.

Little wonder the politicians, led by Barack Obama, reverted to scripture, rather than modern rhetoric, to express their sympathies. And Paul Simon singing The Sound of Silence was poignantly appropriate.

The ceremony, and its location, was an apt metaphor for the dreadful legacy of 9/11. The physical scars are being healed. Where there was grey rubble and dust a decade ago, there is now flowing water, light, grass and trees. The gap in the city skyline is being filled by a new tower. Everyday work and activity has reclaimed the space. But the mental scars remain, and not just in the minds of those who lost relatives and friends that day when a sunny sky turned into the blackest night.

The threat which fundamentalist Islamist terrorism seemed to pose in the immediate aftermath may have receded, but it remains. London and Madrid have experienced the full horror of the consequences when the terrorists succeed. Many more are the plots and conspiracies which the security services have disrupted, from the bombs hidden in suicidal fanatics’ clothes and shoes or inside printer cartridges, to plots to simultaneously down ten airliners over the Atlantic.

The success of intelligence agencies against these plans may reassure us, but we should not delude ourselves that the threat has disappeared. Scots who may have thought their country an unlikely target had that illusion swept away with the attack on Glasgow Airport.

But these threats, which include an attempt by a Pakistani immigrant to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square as recently as last year, are not the worst legacy of 9/11.

America, with support from the British government, invaded Afghanistan to eradicate terrorist bases, and Iraq for ostensibly the same reason. Though al-Qaeda’s home bases and its leader, Osama bin Laden, have been eliminated and the organisation severely disrupted, Afghanistan remains a strife-torn mess. Dictatorship may have been replaced by something akin to democracy in Iraq, but it is a democracy that pays scant attention to the rule of law and human rights. And the human cost in hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost in the fighting is a terrible stain on nations, including our own, which went to war supposedly in the name of freedom.

More terrible yet is the fact that the invasion of Afghanistan did not succeed in the complete eradication of Islamist extremism, but displaced much of it to Pakistan, destabilising a country which possesses nuclear weapons. Iraq, too, is home to many terrorists operating under the al-Qaeda name who managed on one day this year to launch 42 attacks. This, it is sobering to understand, may be Bin Laden’s most significant victory, for one of his objectives was to draw America into wars in Muslim countries where the “infidel” might be bled to death.

Quite rightly, and being appalled by the slaughter caused and provoked by al-Qaeda, most Muslims oppose Islamist terrorism not least because the vast majority of al-Qaeda’s victims are Muslim. The uprisings and overthrow of dictatorships in the Arab spring appear also to be a hopeful sign because they have been motivated by hatred of oppression and the desire for freedom. But this does not mean that the divisions in the world opened up by the 9/11 attacks are disappearing.

Yet in international polling and surveys, majorities of Muslims say they do not believe that the perpetrators of the attacks were of their religion. Wrongly, many Muslims see westerners as violent, decadent and immoral. In turn, westerners, wrongly, view Muslims in similar fashion.

These attitudes have dreadful consequences: it was an irrational fear of an Islamic takeover that propelled Anders Behring Breivik into the slaughter of 77 of his fellow Norwegians, none of them Muslim, in July. It exists here, too: right-wing activists protesting in Edinburgh at the weekend brandished posters condemning “Islamic supremacists”.

These mental scars are much harder to heal than the physical scars of the wasteland of Ground Zero. But they are scars which must be healed, for the sake of all people, regardless of their religion.