The horrors of Sept. 11 presented headaches not only for the airline industry, skyscraper engineers and honest citizens of Arabic descent who were just minding their own business; the attacks also provoked a crisis for those who, in the last few years, have come together under the banner of anti-globalization.

Anti-globalization, the most significant protest movement in decades, maybe since the Vietnam War, is really about anti-capitalism. "One Two Three Four, Starve The Rich And Feed The Poor," chanted 400 demonstrators at a rally that snaked through downtown Ottawa on Friday afternoon. (Another favourite: "Human Need Over Corporate Greed.") Underneath anti-globalization is a general hostility to the West, especially the United States, the symbol of capitalism. Protesters dress in Third World chic, with Che Guevera T-shirts, Yasser Arafat scarves and Ecuadorian bead necklaces.

The anti-globalization family is a large one, and members bring their own pet issues. For some it's the environment, for others it's poverty or child labour. But one theme is constant: Wherever in the world there is injustice and suffering, somehow the U.S. or its western allies are responsible.

The attacks in New York and Washington unsettled anti-globalizers because, suddenly, knee-jerk hatred of the U.S. seemed unfair, even reckless. What was once fashionable, or at least harmless, is no longer so. Before Sept. 11, no one needed to take moral responsibility for demagoguery that paints the West as the source of all evil.

Of course, the activists who have descended on Ottawa this weekend -- mostly middle class, white twentysomethings -- are not terrorists. Even when they call George W. Bush and Jean Chrétien war criminals, and their respective countries imperialist aggressors, the demonstrators are still several rungs behind Osama bin Laden. But they're climbing the same ladder.

Pro-life activists who, ignoring the complexity of the debate, preach that abortion is baby-killing, plain and simple, cannot claim to have clean hands when the next day an abortion clinic is bombed. Fearmongers who demonize "big government" to pander to the political right are not blameless when someone such as Timothy McVeigh comes along. The Sept. 11 hijackers may not have been protesting global capitalism, but they were nonetheless bringing anti-West sentiments to their logical conclusion. One would therefore have expected that, post-Sept. 11, the political left would restrain itself -- not by dropping the protests, but by blunting the hate-filled hyperbole that turns the U.S. (or Canada or Britain) into the touchstones of tyranny.

Just as the Holocaust made anti-Semitism unacceptable, by showing that murderous hatred has murderous consequences, so too the Sept. 11 massacres should have embarrassed those who foment mindless anti-Americanism. In the case of the Holocaust, hatemongers soon emerged who began to deny that it ever occurred. Six million Jews did not die, they claimed. It was a hoax contrived by international Jewry to win sympathy and support for the State of Israel. The aim of Holocaust denial is to preserve Jew-hatred as legitimate political expression. If no Jews were harmed, then anti-Semitism need not be taboo.

Rather than examine its own rhetorical excesses, the anti-globalization crowd is also playing a dangerous game of denial, one that, if not dropped immediately, will surely discredit the entire movement, which would be unfortunate to those who believe in honest dissent. In conversation after conversation, activists at the Friday rally denied, or doubted, that Islamic anti-American militants were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. One popular theory was that corporate America orchestrated the attacks. "Don't you think it's suspicious that just as the economy is going under, suddenly there's this very convenient war," said one activist.

It is not just the thuggish anarchists, the window-smashing goons in black helmets, who are infecting the left with anti-intellectualism. Even the university students are parroting conspiracy theories that would shame a gorilla. One articulate young man, who said he drove up from the U.S. for the rally, insisted there is no proof that the "so-called" al-Qaeda terrorist network had anything to do with Sept. 11. He suggested that the U.S. government invented the bin Laden angle in order to instigate a racist crusade against Arabs. When it was pointed out that bin Laden himself has declared on video that the hijackers were "blessed" by Allah and that "history should be a witness that we are terrorists," this activist shrugged and said he hadn't seen the video and that the media can't be trusted.

Sept. 11 exposed a faultline in the anti-globalization movement, just as it did in Islam itself. There are, it is now known, two Islams -- one a religion of peace and the other a medieval ideology of jihad. Sept. 11 sparked a war not between Islam and the West, but a war between the two visions of Islam. The stakes are high. If the violent, pre-modern Islam triumphs, it bodes ill for the West but even more so for Islam. So too with anti-globalization. Will it be a constructive social movement, built on ideas, that advocates for justice and equality? Or will it be hijacked by an irrational agenda of hate, more concerned with vilifying the West than finding solutions to real global problems.

At the moment, the prognosis is not good. That anti-globalizers are grasping at conspiracy theories to explain Sept. 11 suggests that hatred of America is already a religious tenet of the movement. Sept. 11 posed an existential challenge to the faith because on that day Americans were victims. But in the anti-globalization universe, it is Americans who are the victimizers. Hence the need to invent conspiracy theories. Perversely, Sept. 11 only makes the activists hate America and its allies more.

At Friday's rally, a pamphlet circulated that described Israel, the only western democracy in the Middle East, as a "blood-thirsty gang of horror, terror, murder and plunder." For two dollars, marchers could purchase buttons bearing a glorified photograph of an Arab holding a machine gun, his face covered with a kafiya. Several protesters, when asked by a reporter, said with a straight face that they would rather live in Syria or Iraq than the United States. The idea that Syria, possibly the most brutal dictatorship in the world, has the moral high ground over a democracy -- any democracy -- is bizarre. Irrational prejudice destroys one's judgment, and unless anti-globalizers purge themselves of this virus, they will become, if they haven't already, the political equivalent of the Elvis Sighting society.

Copyright 2001 The Ottawa Citizen