The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington have monopolized the attention of the main international dailies ever since the day following the tragedy of 11 September. The dailies of 12 September speak in fact of an “apocalypse” for the United States. “Assault on America” was the headline for instance in the Financial Times, which gave front page coverage to President Bush’s address to the nation. Much the same headline, “Attack on America” is found in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, while the ‘ Herald Tribune speaks of a “deadly attack” on the heart of America, and carries the headline: “Hijacked jets strike the Twin Towers in New York and attack the Pentagon”. In the days and weeks that followed, comments and analyses continued to monopolize the world press; we will cite just a few of the more recent ones as examples. “The shadow war has begun”. That’s the headline of Le Monde on 1st October, that announced on its front page an ample dossier on the operation of the American and British special forces in Afghanistan, engaged in the effort to capture Osama Bin Laden, but also in the preparation – considered imminent – of the military attack in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September. The French daily, in particular, calls the anti-terrorist response of the West “a combination of spectacular operations and clandestine actions”. And in a special dossier inside the paper, entitled “Afghanistan, the impossible assault”, Sylvain Cypel asks what kind of war will be adopted by America to react to the violence of the tragedy that has struck at her heart: “Against whom precisely? And precisely with what allies? (…) A geographically limited war or a ‘world’ war against terrorism?”. What is certain, maintains the author of the article, is that “‘Afghanistan is for central ‘Asia a ‘mixture’ of what Poland and the Balkans have historically represented for Europe. A key crossroads of the greatest strategic importance which constantly whets the desires of its neighbours (Russians, Persians and Indians in particular). It is, at the same time, a country tormented by schisms, internal conflicts, periodic alliances and counter-alliances, a country in which different ethnic groups and religions are inextricably mixed”. La Croix of 26 September also dedicated an eight-page special dossier to Islam, with the revealing title: “Islamism is not Islam”. The plea made by the French daily is, in essence, that of “resisting the temptation to simplification”, seeing that – as Michel Kubler recalls – “there does not exist a single Islam, but different traditions” and that “Islamism itself, depending on period and context, takes very different forms which are not systematically warlike”. “ In response to Islam and to the diversity of its uses, we need to steer between the devil and the deep blue sea and conduct a work of discernment: we need to listen to the other person to learn to know him, we need to study his history and his doctrine to better understand it, without necessarily sharing it all”. According to the Catholic Herald (21/9), “Catholics (…) must firmly repudiate those racist tendencies that identify the Moslem religion with sympathy for the demands of various fundamental groups that have declared a holy war against the United States”. What is “undeniable”, however, is that this is a war, “in the sense that we are all involved in a confrontation that may require years to be resolved, and that will undoubtedly involve an armed conflict. War has been declared by an enemy against whom we must now defend ourselves: and it doesn’t take much to grasp that the mentality of those with whom we are in conflict involves a war that must end with their destruction”. The German papers too have devoted ample coverage to comment and reflection on what had happened. An often recurring phrase in them is: “ nothing will be the same as before“, cited for example in the Bavarian daily, the Sueddeutsche Zeitungl of 24/09, in its feature “ America’s war against terrorism“. On the other hand, it is undeniable that a good deal of heart-searching is going on in Germany about Germany’s relations with Islam and with the terrorists who have often found a safe haven in the country. In this connection, the papers have devoted a good of coverage to internal security: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2/10) thus polemically headlines its third page: “ Are the Islamics in Germany of collective interest?” The author of the article, Udo Ulfklotte, points out that the state contributions allocated to communities of religious type with charitable aims have often been used to finance terrorist groups in the Mid-East.
