What We Have Forgotten About 9/11

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Islamist war against the liberal, democratic West still shapes our daily lives. Most Americans recognize that certain people and groups around the world want to destroy us—sometimes for reasons we can comprehend, sometimes not. Remembering 9/11 stands, in part, for the proposition that we will not allow the terrorists to win. Our laws, at least as written, have codified that remembrance. They reflect our national conclusion that foreign terrorist organizations are among the most depraved criminal enterprises imaginable. It was once commonplace to hear President George W. Bush declare that you were either part of the free world or aligned with the terrorists. Yet 25 years later, that ultimatum seems far less self-evident.

Consider the axis of leftism and Islamism—the Red–Green alliance, whose cultural and political prominence has grown in recent years. Dalliance with foreign terrorist organizations is part of its organizing ethos. The shocking proliferation of terrorist paraphernalia at post–October 7 protests in 2023 testifies to the rallying power of symbolism—in this case, a symbolism emphasizing sacrificial moral purity and conscientious opposition to decadent Western policies. In the Red–Green worldview, 9/11 signifies the moment Americans were forced to confront the consequences of their own evil, now visited upon them. Noam Chomsky often advanced versions of this argument on behalf of the Third-Worldist Left; clerics around the world (including some in the United States) have, unsurprisingly, echoed the Islamist account of America’s misdeeds.

What has changed today is where expressing such sentiments might get you. In articulating the inescapable conclusion of this line of thinking—“America deserved 9/11,” as he put it—Hasan Piker has entered today’s Democratic mainstream, not the pariahdom that would have resulted in the early years after 9/11. (To leave no doubt about his views, he recently moved a framed copy of the New York Times cover page from September 12, 2001, to be visible over his shoulder while streaming.) Several Democratic Socialists of America candidates have displayed oddly conciliatory instincts toward al Qaeda and 9/11. Drawing a moral equivalence between the U.S. and its enemies has become an important signal in progressive politics, with 9/11 equivocation as its touchstone.

In our mimetic culture, a transgressive message delivered under the guise of forbidden truth can influence millions of susceptible minds. That is what happened in late 2023, shortly after Israel began its counteroffensive in Gaza, when Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok. As the New York Times reported, the letter prefigured our Red–Green moment perfectly:

One video with nearly 100,000 likes showed a TikTok user at her kitchen sink with the caption: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” In a video with more than 60,000 views, another user said the letter showed her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

Such messaging, amplified by algorithms, feeds young Americans’ worst instincts while advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s broader efforts to sow division in the West. But that explains only half the equation. Exposure to bin Laden’s justifications for murdering innocents is one thing—but why would anyone find those justifications compelling? And why did they resonate in November 2023?

To be sure, some of the initial videos were likely inorganic, scripted to create the impression that freethinking young people were reclaiming Islamism from its paranoid American critics. But at least some young Americans proved receptive to the idea that suicide attacks targeting civilians were an understandable, if extreme, response to America’s actions abroad and its support for Israel. Our revulsion toward terror, rooted in a tradition of morally constrained violence, has been eroding. Replacing it is an alien, Manichean morality preoccupied with heroes and villains, in which the good are licensed to do whatever they deem necessary to liberate themselves from the evil.

Complementing the new morality is the contention that the United States is a force for evil, perhaps uniquely so in world history. How could such a notion catch on? Here the thesis offered by critic Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism, analyzing the world’s rush of sympathy to the perpetrators of suicide bombings in Israel during the opening years of the 2000s—what might be called the era of High Islamist Terror—becomes inescapable:

There was, in short, an idea that each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt. And, if unfathomable motives appeared to drive the suicide bombers forward, the oppressiveness of Israel was likewise deemed to be, by logical inference, unfathomable—a bottomless oppression, which had given rise to the maximum of violence, which is suicide murder.

So, too, with 9/11—and, years later, the macabre spectacle of October 7. If others launch such attacks against us, the assumption must be that they are responding to something intolerable in our own conduct. The alternative—that their violence is irrational and unjustifiable, compelled by some condemnable approach to solving our differences—would require admitting that Western ways of governing and ordering society are, in key respects, superior to those of our rivals. Better, then, to concede the opposite: we made them do it, and we had it coming.

Ironically, this conclusion follows from the liberal pretension of universal rationality advancing toward the future, which leaves no room for fanatic theocrats lashing out with hatred for the West. Yet by turning the accusatory finger inward, it systematically undermines the liberal project to the point of inevitable collapse. It is little wonder that progressives have offered so little resistance to the Red–Green march through their institutions. Until they can say that America and its allies are better than their enemies and deserve to prevail, they will keep ceding ground to those who equivocate about 9/11—if not worse.

George W. Bush, much maligned, was actually right: you are either with us or against us. Our terrorism laws are designed to force institutions around the world to choose between affiliating with the United States—its markets, citizens, and institutions—or aligning with groups we have designated as a uniquely dangerous class of adversary. Congress has prohibited all forms of support for foreign terrorist organizations, which “are so tainted by their criminal conduct that any contribution to such an organization facilitates that conduct.” In upholding that principle, the Supreme Court has ruled that even some forms of speech may constitute prosecutable material support if they confer a benefit on a terrorist group.

Our enforcement of these laws, however, lags behind their apparent implications. Expressions of support for terrorist organizations abound, from city streets to conferences where some American lawmakers voice enthusiastic backing. Some of this activity may be protected by the First Amendment. But some of it—from conspiring to disrupt American military supply chains to stealing and burning American flags—is surely not. Yet investigations and prosecutions remain rare.

There is at least one reason for this. As I argue in the forthcoming autumn issue of City Journal, courts have been reluctant to hold defendants liable for supporting terrorist organizations, inventing new requirements of knowledge and coordination that the law itself does not impose. This is the legal, highly technical expression of a broader shift over the past 25 years. We have not forgotten 9/11, but we have forgotten that a real difference exists between us and our enemies—and that Americans are right to insist that their nation belongs to those who believe in Americanism, not those who aid and abet its enemies.