Is Osama bin Laden winning? The attacks of September 11 did not emerge from nowhere. They were the culmination of years of escalating Islamist terrorism against Americans and others. A quarter-century later, remembrance requires more than mourning the dead. It requires remembering the ideology that motivated their killers.
Twenty-five years ago this morning, Americans turned on their televisions and watched something that seemed impossible.
A passenger jet had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At first, millions assumed they were witnessing a terrible accident. Then, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower before television cameras and millions of witnesses.
America was under attack.
Before the morning was over, another hijacked airliner had crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth, United Flight 93, was brought down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers learned what was happening and fought the hijackers. Both towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed. Twenty-five years later, Americans are gathering again at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville to remember them.
But September 11 did not come without warning.
The War Had Already Begun
For years before Americans understood that they were confronting a new kind of enemy, radical Islamist organizations had been telling the United States precisely what they intended to do.
On February 26, 1993, terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. The objective was vastly more ambitious than the death toll suggests: mastermind Ramzi Yousef intended to topple one tower into the other, potentially killing tens of thousands. The FBI later described the bombing as a deadly dress rehearsal for what would happen eight years later.
The plotters were Islamist extremists. Yousef had trained in a camp associated with Osama bin Laden, and his uncle was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would become the principal architect of the September 11 plot. Investigators subsequently uncovered another conspiracy to bomb New York landmarks, including the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. In 1995, authorities in the Philippines disrupted the Bojinka plot, which envisioned blowing up a dozen U.S.-bound airliners over the Pacific; Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were involved.
The attacks continued.
In November 1995, a bombing in Riyadh killed five Americans and two others. In June 1996, terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen and wounding hundreds. The 9/11 Commission attributed that attack primarily to Saudi Hezbollah, with assistance from Iran—a reminder that the terrorist threat Americans faced was not confined to al-Qaeda or to Sunni jihadism.
Then came Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war.
In February 1998, bin Laden and other Islamist leaders issued a purported religious decree calling for Muslims to kill Americans, military and civilian. Six months later, al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands.
In December 1999, an attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport was stopped when Ahmed Ressam was caught entering the United States from Canada with explosives.
Then, on October 12, 2000, suicide terrorists maneuvered an explosives-laden boat alongside the USS Cole while the American destroyer was refueling in Aden, Yemen. The explosion ripped a massive hole in the ship, killing 17 American sailors and injuring nearly 40. The FBI concluded that al-Qaeda planned and carried out the attack. Investigators also discovered that the terrorists had previously attempted to attack the USS The Sullivans, but their overloaded explosives boat sank before reaching its target.
The pattern was no longer obscure. Indeed, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission later concluded that by September 2001 America’s government, Congress, news media and public had received unmistakable warning that Islamist terrorists intended to kill Americans in large numbers.
The Ideology Behind the Terror
Islamism is a political ideology seeking to organize government and society according to particular interpretations of Islamic law and authority. Jihadism is its revolutionary and violently extremist manifestation—the ideology embraced in differing forms by al-Qaeda, ISIS and affiliated organizations.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, jihadist terrorism has not vanished. Europol reported this year that it remained the primary terrorist threat in the European Union: jihadists accounted for 24 of the EU’s 45 terrorist attacks in 2025 and 347 of its 486 terrorism-related arrests. Modern jihadism increasingly operates through propaganda and online radicalization that can mobilize lone actors without the enormous organizational machinery al-Qaeda required for September 11.
Western societies therefore have two responsibilities that are entirely compatible: refusing to treat peaceful Muslims as terrorists because of their religion, while refusing equally to sanitize or ignore a violent Islamist ideology because acknowledging it might offend someone.
September 11, 2001
Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists boarded four commercial aircraft that Tuesday morning.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 struck the South Tower.
At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
On Flight 93, passengers receiving telephone calls learned what had happened in New York and Washington. Understanding that their airplane was itself a weapon, they acted. They rushed the cockpit. At 10:03, the hijackers crashed the aircraft near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before reaching their intended target.
At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed. At 10:28, the North Tower followed.
The scale of the destruction almost defied comprehension. Firefighters and police officers ran upward while thousands fled downward. Ordinary office workers carried injured strangers. Passengers aboard Flight 93 knowingly confronted armed terrorists rather than permit their aircraft to destroy another American landmark. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered in a matter of hours.
And then something remarkable happened. America became America again.
For a Brief Time, We Remembered That We Were One People
The flags appeared everywhere.
They hung from houses and apartment windows. They flew from pickup trucks and highway overpasses. Blood-donation centers filled. Churches filled. Americans donated money, food and equipment. Firefighters drove toward New York from communities hundreds of miles away.
Political divisions that had seemed enormous on September 10 suddenly looked trivial.
There was widespread agreement about several basic facts. America had been deliberately attacked. The killers were al-Qaeda Islamic terrorists motivated by a radical Islamist ideology. The country had a right to defend itself. Terrorist organizations could not be allowed sanctuary from which to organize mass murder.
The mistake came later, when parts of Western political and media culture increasingly treated concern about Islamist ideology itself as though it were indistinguishable from prejudice against individual Muslims. Islamophobia was born on CNN and other liberal outlets.
One can defend a Muslim American’s constitutional right to worship while vigorously opposing Islamism. One can welcome an immigrant who embraces America’s constitutional order while questioning immigration policies that import people hostile to that order. And one can condemn anti-Muslim bigotry while demanding that governments confront jihadist organizations without euphemism.
Twenty-Five Years of an Argument We Still Have Not Resolved
The intervening quarter-century did not make the underlying problem disappear.
Al-Qaeda survived in altered form. ISIS established a territorial caliphate before losing it and inspired or directed terrorist attacks abroad. Europe endured jihadist massacres in Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Manchester and elsewhere. America suffered attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, Orlando and other locations.
And on October 7, 2023, Hamas and other armed groups poured across the Gaza border into Israel, murdering civilians and taking hostages. A United Nations investigative mission subsequently found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations during the attack and clear and convincing information that hostages were subjected to sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture. The same UN investigation also rejected some specific allegations for which evidence did not hold up—an important reason to distinguish documented atrocities from rumor.
None of this means Muslims collectively bear responsibility for terrorism. They do not. Collective guilt is both unjust and intellectually lazy.
But neither does that truth require the West to avert its eyes from radical Islamism.
Even today Americans remain profoundly divided about that question. A Pew Research Center survey released just before this anniversary found that 51 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers, compared with 25 percent in March 2002. The partisan divide is enormous: 76 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said so, compared with 29 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
That does not establish which interpretation of Islam is correct. It demonstrates something else: the argument America seemed to have settled on September 12, 2001, is very much alive 25 years later.
Europe Learned Some Lessons the Hard Way
Immigration makes the issue still more difficult because several distinct questions are routinely collapsed into one.
Europe has experienced serious problems involving integration, radicalization and—in some communities—forms of criminality whose cultural dimensions authorities were reluctant to discuss. Britain’s group-based child-sexual-exploitation scandals are an especially grim example. A major British government audit concluded in 2025 that national ethnicity data remained too inadequate to establish a definitive nationwide perpetrator profile, while also examining significant local evidence involving men of Pakistani heritage. The British government has since established a statutory inquiry specifically charged with examining ethnicity, religion and culture alongside institutional failures.
The lesson should not be that Pakistani men, Muslims or immigrants are collectively responsible for these crimes. That would substitute prejudice for analysis.
The lesson is that governments must be willing to investigate uncomfortable facts—including cultural or religious factors when the evidence supports them—without suppressing discussion because officials fear accusations of intolerance.
A civilization confident in itself should be capable of doing both things simultaneously: protecting innocent minorities from collective blame and protecting the larger society from genuinely dangerous movements within minority populations.
The Strange Political Coalitions of the Post-9/11 Era
One of the more remarkable developments of the past 25 years has been the political convergence, on certain issues, between elements of the Western progressive left and Islamist political movements. Their underlying philosophies are hardly natural allies. Secular progressivism and traditional Islamist doctrine profoundly disagree about religion, sexuality, women’s roles, family structure and the proper relationship between religious authority and government.
Yet alliances can form around common political causes—anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, opposition to Western foreign policy, immigration politics or a shared conception of certain groups as oppressed and others as oppressors.
That phenomenon deserves scrutiny without turning every Muslim political candidate, immigrant or Palestinian advocate into an Islamist. American Muslims are politically diverse, just as Christians, Jews and atheists are.
The constitutional question is ultimately straightforward. Americans may believe whatever religion they choose. They may criticize Christianity, Judaism, Islam or atheism. They may advocate socialism, capitalism or almost any other political philosophy. But America’s constitutional system—not religious law, racial identity or revolutionary ideology—remains the governing compact.
Immigration policy has a legitimate role in protecting that compact. Citizenship should mean more than physical residence. A country has every right to ask whether those seeking to join it are prepared to live peacefully under its laws and constitutional institutions.
Did Bin Laden Succeed?
Osama bin Laden failed in his most obvious objective.
He did not destroy the United States. He did not establish an Islamist state here. Al-Qaeda’s original leadership was devastated, bin Laden was eventually killed by American forces, and the United States has prevented another foreign terrorist attack approaching the scale of September 11.
But the more disturbing question on this 25th anniversary is whether he succeeded in a different way.
Terrorism is intended not merely to kill people but to alter societies. Bin Laden hoped to provoke conflict, deepen divisions and undermine confidence in the Western order. Twenty-five years later, Americans distrust one another profoundly. Our understanding of national identity is contested. Even basic discussions about borders, assimilation, religion, terrorism and Western civilization can become exercises in partisan accusation.
It would go too far to attribute those changes to bin Laden. They have many causes, most of them originating within the West itself.
But that makes the lesson of September 11 more important, not less.
Bin Laden therefore failed to conquer America, but he succeeded in making America change itself. Every security checkpoint, every fortified airport, every counterterrorism bureaucracy and every hour an innocent traveler spends proving that he is not carrying a weapon is part of the enormous price a free society has paid because a small number of men were willing to murder strangers in the name of an extremist ideology. Necessary precautions may protect liberty, but their necessity itself represents something we lost on September 11. The America of September 10, 2001—where ordinary citizens could move through many public spaces with a degree of openness that younger Americans have never experienced—is a country that in some respects no longer exists.
The Freedom We Lost After September 11
There was another victory the terrorists achieved that Americans rarely discuss when commemorating September 11: they permanently changed the way ordinary Americans live. Before 9/11, family members could routinely accompany travelers to an airport gate and wait there to embrace them when they stepped off the airplane. Airport security was comparatively unobtrusive. Americans traveled without removing shoes, surrendering bottles of water, measuring shampoo into tiny containers or routinely submitting themselves and their belongings to elaborate screening. Today we accept identification checkpoints, scanners, metal detectors, restricted areas, security lines and searches as ordinary features of American life. Some of those precautions are reasonable responses to genuine threats, but that does not change why they became necessary. Nineteen terrorists demonstrated that civilian transportation could be transformed into a weapon of mass murder, and hundreds of millions of innocent travelers have lived with the consequences ever since.
The transformation went far beyond airports. Congress created the Transportation Security Administration in November 2001 and the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, producing an enormous federal security apparatus devoted to aviation security, border protection, intelligence coordination, cybersecurity, emergency preparedness and counterterrorism. The federal government acquired surveillance and investigative powers that would have generated extraordinary controversy before September 11. Buildings strengthened security. Public events acquired checkpoints and bag searches. Police departments developed counterterrorism units. Governments spent vast sums hardening transportation systems and potential targets. Whatever one thinks of each particular policy—and some unquestionably prevented or complicated subsequent attacks—the larger historical fact is undeniable: terrorism imposed a tremendous tax on American liberty, privacy, time and money. The passengers standing barefoot in an airport security line a quarter-century later are living, however indirectly, with the consequences of September 11.
There is an additional frustration in the necessarily generalized nature of modern security. A grandmother, businessman, child or mother traveling with breast milk can find herself subjected to rules created because terrorists learned to conceal explosives in shoes, liquids, underwear, electronics and other ordinary objects. (Breast milk is actually exempt from the TSA’s normal 3.4-ounce liquid limit, although it must be declared and may receive additional screening.) The principle of equal treatment means security procedures generally cannot simply assume that someone is harmless because of race, sex or appearance—and racial or religious profiling would also sweep enormous numbers of innocent people into suspicion while potentially missing terrorists who do not fit a stereotype. Yet there is a bitter irony here: law-abiding Americans who had nothing whatsoever to do with Islamist terrorism surrendered freedoms and conveniences because governments had to devise systems capable of detecting the comparatively tiny number of people who might commit it. The terrorists did not merely murder nearly 3,000 people on September 11. They forced an open society to spend the next quarter-century protecting itself against another September 11.
Never Forget Means Remembering All of It
“Never Forget” cannot merely mean remembering collapsing buildings once a year.
It means remembering the people inside them.
It means remembering the firefighters climbing stairwells from which they would never return. The police officers running toward destruction. The passengers aboard Flight 93 deciding that their own lives might have to be sacrificed to save strangers. The husbands and wives who made final telephone calls. The children who went to bed on September 10 with two parents and did not have them both the following night.
And it means remembering why they died.
They were not killed by an airplane accident, poverty, American intolerance or an abstraction called “extremism.” They were deliberately murdered by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists acting in service of a radical Islamist ideology that had declared Americans legitimate targets.
Remembering that fact does not dishonor peaceful Muslims. Blaming peaceful Muslims for September 11 would itself betray America’s principles of individual responsibility and religious liberty.
But refusing to name an ideology that openly seeks our destruction would betray those principles in another way.
Today, at the Pentagon, Ground Zero and Shanksville, Americans are again reading the names of the dead. Twenty-five years have passed, and an entire generation has grown up knowing September 11 only through photographs and recordings.
We owe that generation the truth—neither hatred nor historical amnesia.
On September 11, 2001, Americans saw what radical Islamist terrorism could do.
For a brief period afterward, we also saw what Americans could do when they remembered that beneath every political disagreement, race, religion and region, they belonged to one country.
Twenty-five years later, perhaps the most important words remain the simplest:
Remember the dead. Remember the heroes. Remember the enemy that attacked them. Defend the Constitution that the terrorists could not destroy. And never forget.
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