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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For me, 9/11 has never simply been history.
I was there, in Manhattan, mere blocks from the World Trade Center when the planes hit.
I was planning to move to New York. It had always been a dream of mine to live there and, specifically, to work on Wall Street. This ambition had been inspired in no small part by the film starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen of the same name, which probably proves that, like a great many young men of my generation, I had managed to watch Oliver Stone’s morality tale and take precisely the opposite message from the one intended.
Then the towers came down, literally around me, and suddenly Wall Street didn’t seem quite so important. In fact, at least in physical terms, much of it ceased to exist.
I remember the confusion, the fear and, more than anything, the incomprehensibility of what was happening. We were watching a world change around us without yet understanding quite how much it had changed.
What I don’t remember doing is crying. The shock was too overwhelming. The true emotional reaction — the tears, the breakdown — took a year.
On September 11, 2002, I was sitting alone in my car in Sunderland, listening to the radio as they read the names of the people who had been murdered. Every single one of them, one by one, a relentless list of loss.
I have never forgotten either of those days — September 11, 2001, or September 11, 2002 — but 25 years later, I have begun to wonder whether collectively we have forgotten something else: what 9/11 meant and how ineffectual our response has been to the threat that the attack on the Twin Towers heralded.
In the days and weeks following September 11th, two words became inseparable from the attacks: Never Forget.
The phrase itself wasn’t new. Variations of it had long accompanied remembrance of war and atrocity, most notably the Holocaust and the words indelibly embedded in every Jew: “Never Again.” But after September 11th, the phrase “Never Forget” acquired a particular resonance in America. It appeared on bumper stickers, was scrawled in graffiti across the wreckage and was intoned by commentators across America’s news networks.
First and foremost, it was a promise to the dead, a commitment that the nearly 3,000 people murdered that morning would not simply become a statistic or disappear into history. Their names would continue to be spoken, their photographs displayed and their stories told on every anniversary of that horrific attack.
But there was something else contained within those words, “Never Forget” — a warning about vigilance. It meant remembering not merely what happened, but how it happened; not simply mourning the people who were killed, but understanding the ideology that motivated those who killed them and ensuring that complacency did not make such an attack possible again.
Remembrance and vigilance were two sides of the same promise. Both were equally important, and yet 25 years later, we have honoured the first far better than the second. We built memorials and preserved photographs; we published books and made films and TV series. We tell the extraordinary stories of firefighters, police officers and ordinary citizens whose courage revealed the very best of humanity in response to some of its worst.
Somewhere along the way, though, we became increasingly uncomfortable remembering what else September 11th taught us: ideas matter, ideology matters, and people can be motivated by beliefs we find irrational, offensive or incomprehensible and still genuinely believe and act upon them.
It taught us that when extremists repeatedly tell us what they believe, who they hate and what they intend to do about it, dismissing their words as rhetoric can have catastrophic consequences.
That was the other meaning of “Never Forget,” and if we have seen it once since, we have seen it a thousand times: It is precisely the part we have forgotten.
One of the distortions created by the sheer enormity of 9/11 is that it can appear to be the beginning of the story, but even a cursory look at history tells us that this was far from the case.
There is no universally agreed birthday for modern militant Islamism, and it would be historically wrong to collapse the many movements that have emerged from it into a single ideology. Sunni jihadism, revolutionary Shia Islamism, Palestinian Islamism, and the various national movements operating within the Muslim world have profound theological and political differences and have often fought one another as ferociously as they have fought their supposed common enemies.
Nevertheless, if one were to pick a particular moment in time, 1979 stands out as a pivotal year in the evolution of militant Islamism.
The Iranian Revolution established an Islamist theocracy in Tehran that would ultimately export its revolutionary ideology and build a network of militant proxies across the Middle East: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created the battlefield on which thousands of foreign Muslim fighters converged, among them Osama bin Laden, creating networks of fighters, financiers and ideologues whose significance would extend far beyond Afghanistan. That same year, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by armed fundamentalists demonstrated the revolutionary potential of violent religious extremism within the Muslim world itself.
These events were not manifestations of one organisation or one coherent movement. What they revealed, however, was the growing political power of an idea: that religious absolutism could provide not merely a personal faith but a revolutionary programme, and that violence could be sanctified, celebrated and exported globally in pursuit of it.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the warnings accumulated. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, a precursor to the attack that brought the towers down some eight years later. American military personnel were targeted in Saudi Arabia, followed by the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Then came September 11, 2001.
Nineteen terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft and transformed them into weapons, murdering nearly 3,000 people and demonstrating that a relatively small number of ideological fanatics could force the most powerful country on earth to reorder its foreign policy, its security apparatus and, eventually, much of the geopolitical landscape.
The lesson was not that Muslims were the enemy, even if some attempted to skew the conversation to achieve exactly that. Millions of Muslims rejected Al-Qaeda’s ideology, and Muslims themselves were and would continue to be among the greatest victims of Islamist terrorism.
The lesson was more precise and ultimately more uncomfortable: ideas have consequences. Ideology cannot simply be wished away by those who find it irrational, and movements whose ambitions appear fantastical should not therefore be assumed incapable of pursuing them.
Perhaps, for a while, the West understood that.
Then we forgot.
There is another thread running through this history, and it matters enormously to what happened both before and after 9/11: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is important to be precise here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not cause 9/11. However, we must recognise that for decades “Palestine” has occupied a remarkable position within Islamist and jihadist rhetoric. It is a cause capable of being attached to almost any conflict, almost anywhere in the world. This is not a retrospective interpretation of Osama bin Laden’s motives. We know because he repeatedly told us.
“Palestine” was woven into his public rhetoric long before 9/11, alongside grievances concerning American troops in Saudi Arabia and conflicts involving Muslims elsewhere. Bin Laden’s ability was to take different wars, different peoples, and different grievances and weave them into a single story about Muslims under attack and a common enemy responsible for their suffering. Much of this leaned into the occupier narrative, and one can see how “Palestine” was exceptionally useful to that project.
This narrative could reach people who knew little about Afghanistan, had no personal connection to American troops stationed in the Gulf, and cared nothing about the internal politics of Saudi Arabia. It was visual, emotional, and familiar, capable of transforming enormously complicated conflicts into a much simpler story about humiliation, injustice and resistance. It also leaned into multiple antisemitic tropes, many of which had a long and storied history within Islamist narratives.
Bin Laden understood that utility. The private documents recovered years later from his compound in Abbottabad revealed a man who, for all his fanaticism, was intensely conscious of public opinion. He worried about the damage caused to Al-Qaeda’s reputation when jihadists killed Muslim civilians, about the behaviour of regional affiliates, and about messaging, recruitment and how his movement should present itself to the Muslim world.
This does not mean his hostility towards Israel was invented or his commitment to jihad insincere. Both were plainly real. But fanaticism and calculation are not mutually exclusive, and Bin Laden understood that “Palestine” possessed something exceptionally valuable to anyone attempting to turn numerous local struggles into a single global cause: it travelled.
Researchers examining Al-Qaeda’s rhetoric have noted the extraordinary frequency with which “Palestine” appeared in Bin Laden’s public statements despite the very limited operational effort his organisation devoted to attacking Israel itself. That disparity is revealing. “Palestine” was simultaneously part of his worldview and an instrument for selling that worldview.
A jihadist fighting Russia could invoke “Palestine.” An extremist attacking Americans could invoke “Palestine.” A movement engaged in a conflict thousands of miles from Jerusalem could invoke “Palestine.” The battlefield could change, the immediate grievance could change and even the enemy could change, yet “Palestine” remained.
Within this narrative, it became more than a territorial conflict between two peoples. It could instead be presented as universal proof of a much larger proposition: Muslims were under attack, Islam was being humiliated, the West was responsible, and Israel and the Jews were the most visible symbols of that injustice.
“Palestine” became less the destination of jihadist ideology than its passport, and passports are useful precisely because people travelling with them do not all have to be going to the same place.
When the planes hit New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, Israel was already a year into the Second Intifada. Israelis had spent the preceding year confronting shootings, bombings, and suicide attacks directed at civilians. Only three months before September 11th, a suicide bomber attacked young people outside the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv, murdering 21 teenagers and injuring a further 120.
Then America was attacked, and within weeks Bin Laden was again invoking “Palestine” and the intifada as part of the global confrontation he had created.
The timing exposes something important. At precisely the moment Israel was experiencing terrorism on a greater scale and intensity than ever before, Al-Qaeda was appropriating the Palestinian cause as part of the ideological justification for an entirely different global war.
Bin Laden was not arguing for a negotiated Palestinian state alongside Israel. His conception of “Palestine” belonged within a much broader religious and civilisational struggle. For Al-Qaeda, jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere could be folded into the liberation of “Palestine” because all these apparently separate conflicts could be presented as fronts in the same war against the West.
This is why hearing an extremist invoke a grievance does not necessarily tell us what would satisfy him. Sometimes the grievance is the destination; sometimes it is the vehicle for a broader remit.
Understanding the difference between the cause extremists use to recruit people and the world they ultimately hope to create may be one of the most important distinctions 9/11 should have taught us.
For a brief period afterwards, Western policy seemed capable of holding two ideas simultaneously: Palestinians had legitimate national aspirations and deserved a state of their own, while terrorism against Israeli civilians remained terrorism.
In June 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush explicitly called for two states, Israel and Palestine, living alongside one another in peace and security, while insisting in the same speech that peace could not be achieved until terrorism was confronted.
Fast-forward 22 years. On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups crossed into Israel and committed the largest massacre of Jews on any single day since the Holocaust. Civilians were murdered and hostages taken, and for a brief moment the moral vocabulary seemed familiar: terrorism, massacre, victims, hostages.
But something happened remarkably quickly afterwards: “Palestine” travelled again. This time, it crossed a frontier that even Bin Laden might have struggled to imagine. In 2001, he had invoked “Palestine” as a means of mobilising Muslims around a jihadist project. By 2023, the same cause was capable of mobilising substantial parts of a Western “progressive” movement whose social and political values could scarcely have been more different from his own.
The language changed completely. Where Islamist extremists spoke about jihad and the umma (religious communities and groups guided by prophets), Western activists spoke about decolonisation and intersectionality. Where the former understood “Palestine” through religious struggle, the latter increasingly understood it through the language of indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, racial hierarchy, oppressor and oppressed.
A cause that Islamist movements had spent decades presenting as the great universal symbol of Muslim grievance found an entirely new audience within a Western political culture organised around its own universal story of oppression.
The theology disappeared. The organising narrative survived.
And with that migration came something else: The argument was no longer confined to where Israel’s borders should lie, whether settlements should exist, how Israel should conduct a war or whether Palestinians should have a state. Increasingly, the question of Israel’s very right to exist entered mainstream conversation.
Whether Zionism (the proposition that Jews, like other peoples, are entitled to national self-determination) was itself inherently racist or colonial became a question. Whether the creation of the world’s only Jewish state represented a historical wrong that should somehow be reversed became another. So too did whether the objective should be a Palestinian state alongside Israel or one that ultimately replaces it.
Ideas that once lived predominantly within Islamist extremist circles, revolutionary political movements and the ideological fringes could now find echoes — sometimes altered, sometimes sanitised — in universities, political movements, newspapers, television studios, and popular culture.
The boundaries of acceptable Western conversation about Jewish national self-determination shifted with astonishing speed. Actors, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and athletes became some of the most visible participants in a conflict thousands of miles away. Boycotts of Israeli cultural institutions became respectable campaigns. Anti-Zionism became an increasingly familiar component of progressive politics.
What happened was not simply that millions of people became concerned about Palestinian suffering; there is nothing remotely surprising or objectionable about that. Something more profound happened: Anti-Zionism acquired a cultural reach in the West it had never previously enjoyed, and the chronology should profoundly trouble us.
This did not begin after years of war in Gaza. In fact, the demonstrations began before Israel’s military response could possibly explain them. Within hours and days of October 7th, while bodies were still being identified and hostages had only just been dragged into Gaza, there were already people in Western cities interpreting what had happened through the language of resistance and decolonisation.
The massacre did not discredit the cause in whose name Hamas claimed to act. In substantial parts of Western culture, it accelerated it.
That is an extraordinary inversion, and it is also where the story returns to Bin Laden.
The “progressive” activists who embraced “Palestine” after October 7th frequently hold values utterly irreconcilable with Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Iranian regime, or almost any jihadist organisation. Their attitudes towards women, sexuality, religion, democracy, and individual freedom could scarcely be further apart.
Yet “Palestine” bridged the gulf — because radically different ideologies can attach themselves to the same symbol.
For Bin Laden, “Palestine” demonstrated the humiliation of Islam and the perfidy of the West. For large parts of the contemporary revolutionary Left, “Palestine” demonstrates colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the oppression of an indigenous people.
Different diagnosis, different vocabulary, different desired society, same cause.
Bin Laden understood “Palestine” as a passport because he knew people did not need to agree about the destination in order to travel beneath the same flag. Twenty-two years later, the passport crossed a frontier even he could scarcely have dreamed of.
There is another connection between 9/11 and October 7th that I find increasingly difficult to ignore.
When Jews or Israel are victims of an atrocity, there seems to be a peculiar determination in some quarters not simply to allow them to remain victims. The facts must be challenged, the numbers questioned, responsibility redistributed and, eventually, if necessary, the atrocity itself distorted beyond recognition.
It happened almost immediately after 9/11. First came the claim that thousands of Jews had mysteriously stayed away from the World Trade Center that morning, then that Israelis had advance warning, then that Mossad knew. Eventually, inevitably, came the allegation that Israel itself was somehow involved.
What is remarkable is that these are no longer merely historical conspiracy theories confined to the darker recesses of the early internet. Twenty-five years later, some of the most influential political voices in America are still breathing life into variations of precisely the same story.
These are not four anonymous cranks talking to one another on an obscure message board. They are personalities whose collective reach runs into many tens of millions and who occupy strikingly different parts of the political spectrum.
That matters because the conspiracy has not disappeared. It has migrated towards the mainstream.
Consider the inversion required. Al-Qaeda planned 9/11. Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked the planes. Osama bin Laden articulated the ideology that motivated them and repeatedly invoked Palestine himself. Yet 25 years later, somehow Israel is still being placed in the dock.
Then came October 7th, and almost immediately we watched the same machinery begin turning again. First came the suggestion that Israel must have known the attack was coming. “Netanyahu knew” became “Netanyahu allowed it to happen,” which in turn became the suggestion that October 7th had provided Israel with precisely the pretext it wanted for war.
Then came the Hannibal Directive. Evidence that some Israelis died from Israeli fire became a claim that Israel killed hundreds of its own citizens. Questions about particular incidents became assertions that the IDF was responsible for much of the massacre. In the most extreme versions, Hamas itself became almost incidental to October 7th.
And so the inversion was complete: Israel was invaded, Israeli communities were attacked, civilians were murdered, hundreds of people were dragged into Gaza as hostages, and yet somehow Israel became responsible for October 7th too.
This is not an argument against investigating what happened that day — quite the opposite. But there is an enormous difference between investigating whether Israeli forces accidentally or recklessly killed some Israelis amid the chaos and constructing from those incidents a narrative in which Israel becomes substantially responsible for a massacre initiated and overwhelmingly perpetrated by the forces that invaded it.
The latter is no longer scepticism. It is a pattern.
Modern atrocity denial rarely requires someone to announce that nothing happened. It is usually cleverer than that. Instead: Diminish it, distort it, pick at individual claims through sleight of hand.
An inaccurate detail becomes evidence that the event was fabricated. A corrected story becomes evidence of conspiracy. An Israeli friendly-fire death becomes evidence that Israel committed the massacre. An intelligence failure becomes evidence that Netanyahu authorised it.
Eventually, uncertainty surrounding individual details is used to manufacture uncertainty about an event for which the overwhelming evidence is beyond serious dispute.
It is always the same journey. The details change; the destination remains remarkably familiar. The Jews cannot simply be victims. Somehow, they must also become responsible for what was done to them. And this is where the horseshoe closes.
On one side sits a populist and Far-Right conspiratorial world in which Israel and Jews exercise hidden power over governments, wars, finance, and history. On another sits a radical anti-Zionist Left in which superficially different language can sometimes produce strikingly similar conclusions: Zionists manipulate governments, manufacture narratives, control political discourse, and fabricate or exploit atrocities in order to justify their actions.
One calls it Jewish power; another calls it Zionism. One says Mossad knew about 9/11; another says the IDF committed October 7th.
These people may despise one another politically. Their audiences may believe themselves to have almost nothing in common. Yet travel far enough towards either extreme and the same ancient explanation keeps appearing.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, perhaps the most disturbing thing is not that these conspiracies survived. It is how far they have travelled.
Thank you, again, Leo.
Gas lighting appears to work, it would seem.
It is not disturbing, per se, that New York, the city of the Twin Towers, would elect a Muslim mayor.
But it is at least interesting to see that 100s of thousands of 9/11 families want him to stay away from the memorial service.
He won't, of course - but it will be interesting to see whether he manages to blame Israel again . . .