There will be much - some might say too much - commentary today, the seventh anniversary of the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

This remark by Tom Segev in Ha’aretz caught my eye:

“Seven years after that day in September, the attack is too distant for tears, too near for understanding. Therefore, it may be no coincidence that the American media are returning this week to the survivors of the attack and the bereaved, asking them what they feel and what has happened to them since then, as though it were their private disaster. We can learn from that - it’s easier to enter the culture of memory than the history books.”

Today is a day to remember the dead and the bereaved, above all else. But it - the attacks - wasn’t a “private disaster.” September 11, it is widely agreed, brought about tectonic changes in our political assumptions. In the shock of the aftermath, one commentator (I think it was Christopher Hitchens), said that any date before that fateful day felt like pre-history. And yet, all the issues we have dealt with since then - when to go to war, the character and purpose of US global power, the meanings and variations of Islamism, the festering conflicts in the Middle East, the stability of our civil rights culture, the relationship between Europe and America, the purpose of the United Nations, to name but a handful - were in our consciousness before the terrorists flew those planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

What September 11 demonstrated most immediately was this: that the war of obscurantist Islam against the Enlightenment’s democratic legacy, and the ghastly slaughter of innocents that comes with it, can manifest in New York or Washington or London or Madrid or Istanbul or Baghdad or Kandahar or Haifa or Bali or anywhere just about any time.