The world is preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the beginning of the long “war on terror” launched by the United States and its allies.
There is little doubt that the event marked a major turning point in contemporary history. But how deep was its impact, and what precisely did that impact look like? Did September 11 ultimately strengthen the West and its allies, or did it accelerate their decline?
The shock of September 11 immediately reshaped two distinct dynamics. The first concerned relations between the “Western world” and the “Arab and Islamic world”. At a broader global level, it also affected the internal democratic performance of the United States, with consequences that extended across the countries then operating within Washington’s political orbit.
In the West, the “war on terror” followed an increasingly entrenched trajectory that turned it into a “war on Muslims”, contributing to the gradual erosion of individual rights and freedoms. At the same time, and with comparable severity, many Arab and Muslim-majority countries saw the indiscriminate criminalisation of opposition movements described as “Islamist”, often among the most popular opposition forces, in coordination with Western governments. This obstructed or postponed fragile processes of democratic opening that had begun to emerge.
The condition that took shape after 2001 became a fully developed rhetorical deception, shifting responsibility for authoritarian failures from rulers and dominant powers onto the political language of those being ruled and those opposing them.
The Globalisation of Anti-Islamist Politics
September 11, 2001 accelerated identity-based hostility towards Muslims across the West and, more broadly, hostility towards the Global South.
Why did this happen?
The defining feature of the September 11 attacks was not simply their scale or technological complexity. Their first major distinction, in contrast with the historical pattern established by European powers and their naval artillery, was that the attacks targeted dominant powers in the North rather than populations dominated in the South, as had historically been the case.
For once, “the pilots were Arabs” and “the victims were Westerners”.
September 11 therefore helped establish a new category of violence, one that would be reinforced over subsequent decades in France and elsewhere in Europe through other events described as “terrorist”.
From 2001 onwards, a rhetorical deception became entrenched: responsibility for the authoritarian failures of rulers and dominant powers was displaced onto the language and political discourse of the ruled and the opposition.
This deception later reached an even more striking peak in the response to the counter-attack launched by the full spectrum of Palestinian resistance factions from Gaza against their Israeli colonisers.
Twenty-two years later, this invites comparison between the US response to September 11 and the Israeli-American response to the events of October 7, 2023.
If an earlier historical precedent is sought for this repressive convergence, it could be found in France’s brutal response to the Sétif events of 1945 in colonised Algeria.
The events are not comparable in nature or scale, but they share one central characteristic: the tendency to detach the violence of dominated peoples from the wider structures of domination in which it occurs, then to treat that violence as inherently illegitimate regardless of its causes.
They also share the violation of the same political taboo: the absolute rejection of the legitimacy of counter-violence by colonised and dominated peoples, together with an increasingly unapologetic application of double standards.
September 11 did not invent this pattern. Colonial wars, and the broader history of Western expansion across the world since 1492, had already exposed it.
But the response to September 11, particularly through the cynical dehumanisation of those resisting the invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq, demonstrated how readily Western powers could disregard the very rights they claimed to champion.
This continued even after the formal end of the colonial era, despite persistent claims, particularly by France as the self-described “homeland of human rights”, that Western states were not only the originators of human rights but their principal defenders.
In the United States, this shift was reflected in the Patriot Act and later in the dehumanising detention regime at Guantanamo Bay.
The same logic spread across Europe, where political leaders from across the ideological spectrum translated the rejection of “terrorism” into legislation directed both at collective organisations associated with dominated populations and at individuals within Western societies themselves.
The American response to September 11 produced two major effects.
First, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the attack on the Pentagon consolidated the political use of a new bogeyman, one increasingly identified above all as “Islamic”.
Where anti-colonial insurgents had once been identified primarily by ethnicity, such as “Arab”, or simply dismissed as “fellagha”, meaning bandits, they were now increasingly identified through their affiliation with the most prominent religion of the Global South.
The consequences of the attacks on New York extended beyond the dehumanisation of the “other”. They also dramatically expanded the political reach of this framing.
The brutal repression of the Sétif events had not received the “unconditional” backing of the international community, much less the support of leaders from other colonial powers.
The new Islamic bogeyman, however, spread not only throughout Western societies but also across much of the Muslim-majority world.
The West had already reactivated the “Islamic” label as an anti-imperialist threat in Iran in 1979, following the political earthquake created by the fall of the Shah, a compliant, modernising US ally, and the rise to power of anti-Western “Islamic fundamentalists”.
During the 1990s, particularly in France because of its proximity to Algeria, this framing acquired a new role amid the violent repression of supporters of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front.
Two decades later, it would reappear under the black banner of the Islamic State, or ISIS, which positioned itself as both successor to and competitor with Al-Qaeda.
The message that dominant powers have partially succeeded in imposing since September 11, 2001 is both simple and dangerous: if Palestinians resist, and if Arab opposition movements challenge their rulers, it is not because they live under military occupation or are denied basic civil rights, but because they are “Islamists”.
From Sétif to Gaza, From One Occupation to Another
The same political nerve, the absolute rejection of the legitimacy of violence from the Global South, was struck again with exceptional force in response to the attack carried out by the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2023 against the Israeli-American order.
Just as the brief “Sétif events” were separated entirely from the long and brutal colonial occupation of Algeria, and just as anti-Western violence in New York and Washington was detached from the aggressive militarisation of US foreign policy after 1990, when Washington was freed from the counterweight of the Soviet Union, the Palestinian resistance attack of October 2023 was likewise separated from the prolonged and violent Israeli domination of Palestine.
From this perspective, the response generated by the attack, from Israel and even more broadly from its numerous and powerful allies, represented the latest manifestation of the political and strategic model established by Washington after September 11, 2001.
Twenty-two years later, the trajectory inaugurated by George W. Bush intensified in Gaza.
After October 7, 2023, the problem was not merely that violence was stripped of context. In many European states, particularly France and Germany, placing that violence within its political and historical context was effectively excluded from the dominant public narrative.
White supremacy, or the supremacy exercised by white majorities, once again exposed the longstanding contradictions embedded in Western claims to universalism by progressively denying individual freedoms to a particular category of citizens.
Religious and tribal references, from Bush’s invocation of a “crusade” in 2001 to Netanyahu’s invocation of the “chosen people” in 2023, increasingly displaced the universalist language with which Western political systems had traditionally presented themselves.
How did such a regression become possible?
A major part of the answer lies in the emotional and largely unquestioned dominance of the “Islamic terrorism” bogeyman, established globally with extraordinary effectiveness after September 11.
Americans and Europeans aligned on one side, together with their Israeli allies, and were increasingly joined by an overwhelming majority of Arab regimes, including many that had once condemned the repression of Sétif.
Since then, these actors have effectively converged within a single coalition that might be described as “dictators without borders”.
They have used the American condemnation of the attacks on New York and Washington, a condemnation that was in itself understandable and legitimate but entirely stripped of context and presented in one-sided terms, to discredit resistance and opposition movements regardless of the degree of legitimacy or legality they possessed.
The resulting repressive consensus consolidated an alliance between Arab and Western authoritarianism.
This heterogeneous front against “Islamic terrorism” was collectively able to impose a distortion that was not merely political, but ideological and one-sided, targeting the most prominent forms of resistance or opposition to the domestic and external state violence practised by its members.
The message partially imposed by dominant powers since September 11, 2001 has therefore been both simple and dangerous: if Palestinians resist, and if Arab opposition movements challenge their rulers, it is not because they live under military occupation or because they have been deprived of their most basic civil rights, but because they are “Islamists”.
This crude rhetorical deception, widely promoted by Western powers and their followers, has for years clouded the understanding of millions of people around the world.
Perhaps its clearest formulation came in September 2001 from Israeli General Ariel Sharon, who declared: “You have bin Laden… we have Yasser Arafat.”
