Twenty-five years ago this month, America was attacked by Islamist terrorists.
In Washington, DC, smoke rose from the shattered Pentagon as civilians fled for their lives. In New York City, mothers and fathers trapped in the World Trade Center called emergency workers for help; when none could come, they asked that their families be told they loved them after accepting their fate.
Three days later, standing in the lower Manhattan rubble beside New York firefighters, President George W. Bush raised a bullhorn and declared, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The grief and shock of that morning quickly hardened into a fierce desire to root out the terrorists and avenge the dead.
Twenty-six days later, on October 7, 2001, American warplanes took off to commence Operation Enduring Freedom against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. A deployment of roughly 1,000 US troops grew to 10,000 and, eventually, more than 100,000. Washington then turned its eyes toward Iraq. The White House, relying on flawed intelligence, assured the public that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a genuine threat. The invasion followed, and America was soon fighting two wars.
The 9/11 attack also drastically reordered life at home. Congress passed the Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force; the government created the TSA, expanded the reach of the NSA, and built a surveillance apparatus with extraordinary powers. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from those wars were resettled here. In many ways, or perhaps in every way, America became a different country.
America has argued about that response ever since. But today’s debate has far surpassed good-faith policy questions about war and surveillance. What’s now being argued, sometimes openly and sometimes by implication, is that America provoked the attacks and deserved them.
The argument comes from the ascendent far-Left and its new Islamist allies. The irony is staggering: twenty-five years after Islamist terrorists slaughtered thousands and permanently scarred New York, the city elected Zohran Mamdani, a mayor who has worked with and defended radical Muslims with documented terror ties. That coalition would have been unthinkable in mainstream American politics two decades ago.
And New York was just the start. Mamdani’s allies, some Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members and others running alongside them, will soon be entering Congress. One, Darializa Avila Chevalier, once said she used an American flag to wipe her dirty hands because she ran out of napkins.
The movement’s online stars are less guarded. The communist-sympathizing streamer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with top Democrats including Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, believes “America deserved 9/11, dude.” He recently told Axios that America is worse than al-Qaeda, the terrorists who attacked us.
El-Sayed is more careful, but still ideologically aligned. In a now-deleted post, he wrote that he mourned the “3K lives” lost in New York, killed “ignorantly in the name of my faith.” Then, he added, he would also mourn the roughly one million lives lost “in 3 countries,” killed “ignorantly in the name of my country.” The point was that America’s foreign policy made it guilty, too: a wounded country lashing out, driven by the same “tribalistic grievance,” as he put it, that drove the hijackers.
None of this is new. It’s the same argument made by Osama bin Laden — the mastermind behind 9/11. A few years ago, his “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok because young left-wingers found it, read it, and agreed with it. Bin Laden states: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.”
He names American and Israeli military action in Iraq, Somalia, and Palestinian territories as justification for his jihadi campaigns. (The US did not initiate any of these conflicts; it responded to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, intervened in Somalia to stop a famine, and has never occupied Palestinian territory. Many Americans believe bin Laden's accusations justify his terrorism anyway.)
George W. Bush was ridiculed at the time for saying that Osama bin Laden hated America for our freedoms, but this is demonstrably true. His "Letter to America" makes that explicit, condemning the United States for its separation of church and state, its permissiveness on issues like usury and sexual liberty, and what he called the "immoral" freedoms Americans enjoy under a secular, democratic system.
By pointing to Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine, bin Laden could portray his war as a reaction to American policy. The current Left-Muslim coalition is using the same cover, but their real objection, like bin Laden’s, is to what America is.
In 2021, Mamdani told a Young DSA conference that among the causes “we firmly believe in” was “the end goal of seizing the means of production,” a goal he admitted did not yet have popular support. The organization, however, is more explicit. The DSA’s 2025–2026 program calls America’s “capitalist economic system” “the cause of violence, unemployment, and a climate crisis,” and its newest platform calls for abolishing the US Senate.
In March, two radicalized teenagers who told police they were inspired by ISIS threw shrapnel-packed bombs at an anti-Islam protest outside Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence. One of them told police they had wanted an attack bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing.
El-Sayed, who called the War on Terror an “echo of the worst of our history,” likened it to “the Transatlantic Slave Trade” and “Jim Crow segregation,” and cast Muslim Americans as its chief victims, made to “take our collective punishment with a smile.”
In 2011, El-Sayed defended the Muslim Brotherhood. Crucially, bin Laden joined the Brotherhood as a student, and its theorist Sayyid Qutb shaped al-Qaeda’s founders. In 2012, after the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi seized sweeping powers as Egypt’s president, El-Sayed signed a statement urging him to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”
In El-Sayed’s Michigan, this politics has put down roots. Hamtramck elected America’s first all-Muslim city government, which then banned the Pride flag from city property. In neighboring Dearborn, a 2024 Al-Quds Day rally chanted “Death to America,” which local leaders condemned, and a later vigil mourned Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In Minneapolis, more than 20 Somali Americans have been convicted on terrorism charges after ISIS recruited in their community. Just 23 percent of Muslim Americans believe that al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attack, versus 62 percent of non-Muslims. 18 percent of Muslim Americans blame the US government or CIA, and 27 percent blame Zionists or Israel.
Mamdani won 78 percent of New York voters under 30. El-Sayed might soon be a Senator. Their allies are winning too. Those ideas have now found their voters, and the fight is at home; it’s no longer just that an increasingly loud share of our own countrymen doubts America was the victim. It’s now also about whether America should remain a global power, a democracy, and a free, Christian nation.
From the rubble and ash, President Bush promised that the people who knocked these buildings down would soon hear from all of us. They did. What no one imagined was that, twenty-five years later, some Americans would be repeating the terrorists' own justifications back to them.
