The horrifying instant-ness of the attacks, the violent explosions, the crowds of people running and screaming in the street to escape the falling debris, the sickening sight of people jumping from the burning buildings, the sense of dread as the towers, one after another, collapsed, the gruesome excavation of bodies from the rubble, the wrenching grief of those looking for missing relatives and friends and the acrid smoke that still hangs over the city—all of this was not only monstrous but previously unknown in American history.

For most of the world, however, terror raining from the sky has been a horrific and familiar sight for the last sixty-five years. It began with the bombing of the small Basque village of Guernica by Nazi warplanes on April 27, 1937. Guernica had been chosen for bombing practice by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, which pounded the village with incendiary bombs for three hours—virtually eradicating it. Later that year, the atrocities committed there became the subject for Guernica, an anti-war painting by Picasso.

With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the systematic bombing of European cities began, along with the ruthless massacre of civilians. By the end of the war, every city in Europe was in ruins, with millions dead from the bombing raids. Everyone in every town, village, and city had lost a friend or relative in the wholesale devastation.

As a child in London, I used to play in bombsites with my friends—much to the dismay of my parents. We’d find headless dolls, Mickey Mouse gas masks, mangled games of Snakes & Ladders, the odd shoe or hat, toy soldiers, torn baby pictures and other grisly mementos of the former occupants—the startling and poignant reminders of someone else’s life now gone. Not that we dwelt too long on reflections of this kind. Our thoughts were then far more morbid, exulting in the idea of colossal explosions (and treasures that were now ours). In fact, when I first came to New York, I was so used to seeing bombed-out buildings in London that when I saw the collapsing, abandoned buildings of the Lower East Side, with their wallpapered bedrooms exposed to the elements, my first thought was that they’d been bombed.

Then one morning I woke up, and the bombed-out buildings were here. Even civilians were at risk. It was no longer "over there," and everything we thought safe and solid had evaporated—as if our very sense of reality has been shaken. The unimagineableness of this disaster and our inability to make the pieces fit have brewed a lethal ferment of surreal images and true horrors. Time sheets and actuarial tables drift down into Brooklyn backyards, a Brooks Brothers store is converted into a morgue, the ash-covered figures emerging from the wreckage resemble walking mummies from Pompeii.

Disorientation is brought on by serial cultural shocks. Terrorist attacks familiar to us from TV news are alarmingly brought home, yet most of America is still experiencing the tragedy via TV. The most horrifying images—bodies falling from the buildings, close-ups of people inside looking out their windows—are kept from us as too ghoulish. What is constantly shown—people running and looking over their shoulders—is eerily familiar to us from Japanese grade-b movies, which, oddly, also take place against a Wall Street setting. Adding to the sense of unreality is the lack of survivors—none since the day after the disaster—not to mention the lack of bodies, only a hundred or so out of 5,000. Even in the worst of earthquakes, there are bodies.

But the most disturbing image of all is that of a band of medieval fanatics with inflexible beliefs and state-of-the-art weapons. The gulf between them and us is time itself. Like some apocalyptic nightmare, they come from our past—a feudal culture of absolute beliefs, a theocratic society the West emerged from over 500 years ago, a society in which any atrocity against another human being could be justified in the name of religion.

We would no more be able to reason with our own ancestors than we can with Osama bin Laden. In the name of our own fanatic beliefs we murdered Jews through periodic pogroms; we massacred women and children who did not believe in our particular sect of Christianity; we led our own holy wars, the Crusades, against the Arabs— looting, raping and pillaging the infidel along the way. We virtually eradicated the indigenous peoples of the Americas—all in the name of our God.

Ironically, in those days it was Islam that practiced religious tolerance—allowing Christians and Jews to live peacefully in their domains. The virulent form of Islamic fundamentalism espoused by the followers of bin Laden is actually a perversion of Muhammad’s teachings, which, like Christianity, forbids both murder and suicide. Terrorism is the fanatic ideology of the dispossessed who hate both the corrupt, greedy and autocratic leaders of their own countries and the Americans who made them so powerful, drenching the Middle East in the petro-dollars that bring in their wake the moral uncertainties of the modern world.

Political radicalism, empowered by fanatical faith and fear of change, creates a moral certainty that dissolves any shadow of doubt, an absolutism that permits any act of terror as long as it is in the name of their holy war. What they condemn in Americans—licentiousness, corruption, tolerance for the sexual choices of others, liberalism, moral laxity, permissiveness and godlessness—are the qualities that Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson feel have brought on this tragedy.

"I really believe," Falwell said last week, "that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way … I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’"

The power of absolute belief over its converts is that it eliminates the nagging doubts that plague a relativistic society like our own. Absolute belief also silences reason and compassion for others. As we know from four millennia of holy wars—wars against the infidel, the pagan, the savage, the Other—in the sleep of reason, atrocities flourish.