Machine summary:
In other words, the writer intends to explore to what extent 9-11 and the events that followed such as the military interventions of Western countries in Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban, and the developments in Palestine impacted the theory of the clashes of civilizations in general and the conflicts between the West and the Islamic world-which happens to be the focal point of this theory-in particular.
<15> The developments that took place following the attacks, that is the preparations to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan did lead to certain pro• Bin Laden hard-line Islamists announcing that the statements made by George Bush, Tony Blair, and Colin Powell are much similar to the antagonism expressed by the Church and Western statespersons in previous times and that what the West was up to after 9-11 was merely a war raged against Muslims and the Islamic civilization'<Nevertheless, many figures and scholars in both the West and the Islamic world very cautiously denied all this as a confrontation between the two worlds.
Although, as stated earlier, Huntington himself did not consider the 9-11 events as one instance of the confrontation of the West and Islam, he did later on (April 2002) defend once again his theory of the clash of civilizations in a paper he wrote in Newsweek giving evidence for his theory by providing statistics on the number of the past and present conflicts in the world, especially those between Islam and the West<23> • This new paper once again demonstrated the framework of his ideological-political thinking while once again proving its fallacy in terms of empirical research and studies since none of the wars he labeled as contemporary Islamic wars was in effect one being founded upon Islamic roots and causes.