The left’s framing of everything as “oppressor v. oppressed” has allowed grievances, even illegitimate ones, to trump facts, law, and morality.
Read more After 9/11, what?
America has built an impressive system for remembering September 11. The memorial in Lower Manhattan preserves the names. The museum preserves the images, recordings, wreckage, and personal stories.
I visited recently because I wanted to understand the attack more deeply at a moment when America seems increasingly confused about political violence and the ideas used to justify it.
The museum is difficult to absorb. I say that as an Israeli who has lived through terrorist attacks against civilians and served for years in a war zone. I know what violence looks like. September 11 still has a particular horror because the people responsible had already explained what they believed.
Years before the towers fell, Osama bin Laden was declaring war on the United States. In 1998, he and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued what they called a fatwa declaring the killing of Americans an individual religious duty. The 9/11 Commission documented the religious language explicitly.
America eventually understood the military threat. It destroyed training camps, disrupted networks, hunted commanders, expanded intelligence operations, and killed bin Laden.
The ideological front received far less attention.
Jihadist organizations don’t need permanent armies. They need people who accept the beliefs that give terrorism moral permission. New recruits can replace dead commanders as long as the underlying worldview remains available to them.
That should have made education central to the post-9/11 strategy.
Instead, American institutions became increasingly uncomfortable examining Islamist ideology on its own terms. Discussions moved toward Western foreign policy, discrimination, poverty, colonial history, and grievance. Those subjects can explain political conditions. They don’t explain away a belief system whose own advocates use religious language to justify violence and supremacy.
Not every Muslim supports radical Islamist ideology, but enough do that its influence has become a serious challenge to Western values even inside Western societies.
An ideology needs neither majority support nor electoral victory to gain influence. A committed population can move institutions when those institutions lose confidence in the values they are supposed to defend.
America’s progressive political culture has made that easier.
The “oppressor and oppressed” framework gives some movements a ready-made moral advantage. Once a group receives the status of oppressed, attention shifts toward its grievances. Its own ideology receives less examination, and acts that would normally be condemned can acquire softer descriptions.
Read more The Self-Governing Election Administrative State
October 7 exposed how far that thinking had traveled.
Within days of Hamas murdering and kidnapping civilians in Israel, dozens of Harvard student organizations signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Harvard’s president later condemned Hamas’s terrorist atrocities and clarified that the student organizations didn’t speak for the university. The original response still revealed how quickly educated Americans could move from a massacre to an argument assigning responsibility to the people who were attacked.
That reflex didn’t develop overnight.
Radical Islamist movements have learned that Western language about oppression can provide political cover for ideas that conflict sharply with Western freedoms. At the same time, parts of the radical left have accepted allies whose views on religious authority, women’s rights, sexual freedom, and dissent would be intolerable if they came from a Western conservative movement.
Their cooperation becomes easier when they share enemies. The convergence around anti-Jewish hatred has become particularly visible since October 7.
A democracy can tolerate hostile ideas and unsupported accusations. Freedom of speech allows people to be wrong. That freedom also gives everyone else the right to examine those ideas clearly and reject them.
Western societies should be capable of saying that religious law doesn’t outrank civil law, terrorism doesn’t become legitimate through grievance, and murdering civilians doesn’t become resistance because the attacker claims oppression.
My work in self-defense has taught me that preparedness begins before physical contact. Once an attacker chooses the timing and conditions, your options have already narrowed.
America approached 9/11 too late in exactly that sense. It spent the next twenty years becoming exceptionally capable at finding armed jihadists.
The unfinished work is educational.
Young Americans should understand what jihadist movements actually teach, how extremist ideology converts grievance into permission, and why Western liberty requires confidence in its own principles.
The next ideological threat won’t wait until America is comfortable naming it.
Image created using AI.
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
Read more Bush’s Islamic Appeasement Greatly Damaged America