How 9/11 Changed The World

By Fatima Bhutto|Zeteo

Photos: Wikimedia Commons

Less than a week after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush went to a mosque in Washington, DC, and declared that “Islam is peace.” He then proceeded to invade two Muslim countries that had nothing to do with the attacks on the twin towers in 2001.

9/11 changed the world, and it did so in two dramatic ways.

First, it forever tore the mask off the West, empire, imperialism, and rapacious capitalist exploitation – a continuous process over the last 25 years. But the shattering is now complete. The West contorted and desecrated every value that it claimed to espouse in its response to 9/11 – no more was there liberty, freedom, equality. Now, you could be held for decades at Guantanamo Bay without charge, forget conviction; there was the Patriot Act that expanded surveillance into what you read and who emailed you and what you studied, and its eerie British counterpart, Prevent, where anyone could pick up a phone and doxx a Muslim they knew and destroy their life forever by claiming that they were extremists.

There were CIA black sites in dozens of countries, where many innocent men were tortured, such as Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani taxi driver and cook who was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a term two psychologists working for the U.S. military appear to have borrowed from the Gestapo, who used what they called verschärfte vernehmung, or “enhanced interrogation.” Rabbani’s questioning often began with lit cigarettes being put on him. Also in Cobalt, the black site north of Kabul known to its abductees as “the Darkness” or “Dark Prison,” was Gul Rahman, an Afghan detainee taken while living as a refugee in Pakistan. Rahman died in the black site when he was kept in freezing water until hypothermia set in. He was then forced to spend the night sitting on the frozen ground without trousers in the middle of November. He had been chained and kept naked or nearly naked during his entire three weeks in the Dark Prison. The CIA didn’t notify Rahman’s family of his death. They reportedly found out seven years later from human rights advocates and the Red Cross.

From ‘Bad Commies’ to ‘Very Bad Muslims’

The second seismic change of 9/11 was that it took a baseline Western Islamophobia – let’s face it, the West has long been a geography of phobias, of Black people, Asian people, trans people, and more – and institutionalized it. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam didn’t haunt the Western world – they had communists to contend with. Their collective fears were a sweeping red wave. Communists were godless followers of Lenin and Marx and other dead men, and if they took over your country, you couldn’t wear blue jeans or listen to punk; you’d have to wear grey overalls, give up your mansions and businesses to live in public housing and work the same job regardless of whether you had been a CEO or a janitor.

Hollywood made sure you knew how frightening this was, and heroes from James Bond, Rambo, and ice hockey teams fought the scary Soviets. But with the Communists gone as enemy number one, how would the Western world’s war economies run? The transition from Bad Commies to Very Bad Muslims was swift and seamless. Now the danger was not a red wave but “creeping shariah law,” a term no one was able to quite explain except that it implied everyone in the world would be forced to become Muslims and grow a beard. “Jihad” was coming for Western capitals, and it was going to be carried on the backs of migrants and Muslim fifth columnists who had hidden in Paris and London and New York, the radical Islam in them just percolating dangerously until it would explode. Hollywood again played its deceitful role: ‘American Sniper,’ ‘The Hurt Locker,’ ‘Homeland,’ and a hundred more titles portrayed valiant CIA officers and snipers crying while they tortured and blew up people in the countries they invaded.

Israel’s holocaust of Gaza is the logical culmination of both these processes; the easy scrapping of international law follows the loss of other legal rights once supposedly held sacred and the unrepentant Islamophobia that the West has disseminated through its media, politics, and culture. The utter dehumanization of Palestinians to the point that we can watch them be murdered and ethnically cleansed for nearly three years straight without batting an eye is the natural conclusion of systematized and accepted Islamophobia.

It is no longer embarrassing in polite company, on television or in business to be an Islamophobe. On the contrary, it is highly profitable. Donald Trump might not be president were it not for his indisputably racist views about Muslims. Long before his ascent to the White House, he spoke to fellow Islamophobe Bill O’Reilly on Fox, “I don’t notice Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center… There is a Muslim problem in the world, and you know it, and I know it.”

Neither has Trump felt he must moderate his views over time; just look at his Muslim ban in 2017 or his 2016 CNN interview where he casually supposed that “Islam hates us.” When he was asked whether he meant some small group of extremists or 1.5 billion Muslims, the president expanded eloquently, “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define. It’s very hard to separate. Because you don’t know who is who.” He makes fun of Muslim Americans, politicians, names, and considers them un-American. Unfortunately, his views are shared by millions of people around the world who would agree that Black and brown migrants are criminals, that the West is overrun with foreigners and that, as Trump moaned, the Quran “teaches some very negative vibe.” I have heard such views all over the Western world for the last 25 years, espoused by people who would rather die than identify politically with Trump but who parrot his Islamophobia unthinkingly, believing that Islam has “invaded” the West. A laughable concept since it is the West – France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, the U.S., Canada – that has invaded, bombarded, pulverized, and occupied the Muslim world. Nearly 1 million people in Muslim-majority countries were killed under what should be known as the War of Terror. Indirect deaths caused by the West’s wars number a staggering 3.7 million. Thirty-eight million people have been displaced from their homes, and the U.S. has launched over 91,000 airstrikes during its 20-year assault, working off unconstitutional kill lists, blowing up wedding parties, and even striking American citizens.

Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party used this same fear – of migrants, Muslims, and the West being invaded – to achieve electoral success. You don’t need the French National Front to see how vilified Muslims are in France; they cannot even dress the way they like, such is it an affront to the glorious secularism of France. Spain’s Vox, the Swedish Democrats, Germany’s AfD, Geert Wilders, the Proud Boys, and so many more Western political parties, groups, and politicians have blossomed since 9/11 and expanded their once non-existent vote bank. Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli invited small-time felon and big-time racist Tommy Robinson to Israel in 2025 and welcomed him as “a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam.”

Today, in 2026, the frontline against Islam covers the Western world. Let us not speak the language of our occupiers and use the prefix “radical” – it is Islam that the West is at war with. Muslims are either radical or moderate. Moderate according to whom? Bush? Benjamin Netanyahu?

I am a Muslim, period, end of declaration. I will not categorize myself nor my fellow Muslims with definitions set by our pursuers and our killers.

To Whose Benefit?

Cui bono? Who benefited from all this?

It wasn’t the U.S, whose sons and daughters have been sent across the globe to kill – and to be killed – and who will always be remembered by the world’s majority not by chiseled Bradley Cooper sniping Iraqis with perfect hair but by Lynndie England in her military fatigues laughing over the naked and hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib. Our parents’ baby boomer generation still saw America – despite its dirty wars in South America, Vietnam, Laos, and beyond – as cool. No more. Blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and Rock ‘n’ Roll have been replaced with waterboarding, drone strikes, and big brother surveillance. That’s what my generation will remember. I dread to think what the ones after us will recall – Palantir, automated AI warfare, Elon Musk and the normalization of Nazi salutes, and the destruction of Earth by America’s forever wars.

It’s not the UK, which made itself a laughingstock of the world with Brexit – voted in due to a fantastical fear of migrants and foreigners. It’s not France, whose electoral choices for the last few decades have been either neoliberal or racist. It’s not Italy, which is run by an actual fascist. It’s not Canada, whose lakes are being renamed by their great ally, the U.S. It’s not Iraq, which has been raped of its resources. It’s not Afghanistan, whose people are hungry and isolated. It’s not Pakistan, whose ever-powerful military is now unstoppable thanks to the influx of American billions during the so-called “War on Terror” and whose people were terrorized by drone strikes, automated killing from the sky that has today been normalized. It’s not India, which is ruled by a man belonging to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right nationalist organization that Mahatma Gandhi’s killer was a member of.

It will be some time before the ashes of 9/11 are cleared, and the beneficiary stands over the rubble. But the month before its 25th anniversary, Chikli, that friend of Tommy Robinson, appeared on Israeli TV to discuss how to rehabilitate Israel’s image. Antisemitism doesn’t interest your average American or European, he expounded; they don’t really care. No, what really frightens them is “radical” Islam, “very, very much.” And Israel, the minister concluded, must “take advantage of this.” It, along with the U.S., has been taking advantage of this for 25 years, and the world has paid the unbearable price.

Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide,’ a collection of essays she co-edited, and her memoir, ‘The Hour of the Wolf,’ are available now.