Reclaiming the Muslim empire.(Foreign Affairs)

Americans were not accustomed to what so much of the world had already grown weary of: the sudden, deafening explosion of a bomb, a hail of glass and debris, the screams of innocent victims ... And then last week, in an instant, the World Trade Center in New York City became ground zero.

--Time

NO, NOT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. It was March 8, 1993, and the perpetrators were a group of Arab immigrants and Arab-Americans, led by a Muslim fundamentalist cleric linked to Osama bin Laden's "Office of Services", his Afghanistan-based precursor to the global al Qaeda network. Note the year, 1993, when bin Laden's agents showed their "gratitude" for American assistance against the Soviets. Even after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, US forces were still providing assistance to the Muslim mujaheddin, now fighting the pro-Soviet regime. According to Brendan O'Niell, assistant editor of Spiked Online, writing in the Spectator, this assistance only ceased in 1992.

So the first attack by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists on US territory occurred eight years before the USA and its allies incurred the wrath of many Muslims by intervening in Afghanistan to help other Muslims topple the Osama bin Laden-supported Taliban regime.

"What makes this whole debate about whether our participation in the attack on Iraq increased the terrorist threat to Australia so absurd," wrote Michael Costello, in the Australian on March 19 this year, "is that what bin Laden has been saying since September 11, 2001, makes clear that Australia was a terrorist target even before then."

On November 3, 2001, one year before the Bali bombing--in which Australians were specifically targeted for the first time--bin Laden's Indonesian affiliates, Jamah Islamiah, released a taped statement, denouncing Australia as a "Crusader state, intent on seizing East Timor, which is part of the Islamic world. Australia's action is a war of annihilation against Islamic nations."

As if to remove any doubts about the rationale of the Bali bombings, three days after the event, the Arab satellite news channel al Jazeera broadcast a taped interview with bin Laden, in which he said, "Australia had been warned about its participation in Afghanistan and its ignoble contribution to the separation of East Timor, but it ignored this warning until it was awakened by the echoes of explosions in Bali."