The day after Sept. 11, 2001, The Wall Street Journal published an article of mine seeking to explain the incredible mass attack, the horror movie that seemed to open a Third World War.
It was titled “How Suicide Bombers Are Made,” adapted from an article I had written for Commentary magazine.
The question was simple and terrifying: How is it possible for a human being to massacre men, women and children, using his own body as a bomb and deliberately choosing his own death?
The same desperate astonishment descended upon us on Oct. 7, 2023, whose third anniversary we will soon mark.
For 25 years, we have refused to accept the naked truth. We would prefer explanations based on compromise, economic deprivation, grievances and misunderstanding.
But the global struggle against terrorism has fractured. Part of the West increasingly identifies terrorism with a struggle for freedom and imagines that Islamist fundamentalism is ultimately a demand for prosperity, dignity and acceptance.
When I wrote that article 25 years ago, my experience was already shaped by the terrorist massacres in Munich, Ma’alot and Rome, and by the Palestinian terrorism of the Intifada.
On Palestinian television, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi blessed “whoever activates an explosive belt on his body or on the bodies of his children in the midst of a crowd of Jews.”
Only months before 9/11, 21 young people had been murdered in the suicide bombing at Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium discotheque. Palestinian society celebrated the attack.
One Palestinian reporter ecstatically described the suicide bomber as a “human missile” with a soul yearning for martyrdom, a heart embracing Palestine and a body trampling the invaders.
After 9/11, President George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him repeatedly sought political solutions to the conflict. Israel, acting in the same spirit, withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
What followed was not peace.
Today, Palestinian children continue to be exposed to educational material glorifying violence and martyrdom. Palestinian Media Watch has documented mathematics exercises using hypothetical numbers of Israelis killed and Hamas terrorists deployed in Israeli communities.
Elementary-school girls have been taught to recite, “We desire martyrdom; the enemy fears us.”
The glorification of terrorists also continues within Palestinian society. Mothers praise sons who murder Israelis and encourage others to follow their example.
And on Oct. 7, the world heard the horrifying recording of a young Hamas terrorist calling his parents from southern Israel to boast that he had killed Jews with his own hands.
Of course, this does not describe all Muslims. But from Al-Qaeda and ISIS to Hamas and Hezbollah, a radical Islamist ideology has demonstrated its ability to spread far beyond the Middle East, including among radicalized second- and third-generation Muslims living in Western democracies.
Today, it has also found allies among elements of the pro-Palestinian left and Green movements.
Islamism views the disappearance of the caliphate as a historic dispossession. Its extremists reject the secular and liberal order, women’s emancipation and sexual and political freedoms as manifestations of a corrupt society.
They may live within Western democracies and even participate in their political systems. But for the most radical, another vision remains paramount: the restoration of Islamic supremacy, with martyrdom promising its ultimate reward.
Osama bin Laden portrayed the nearly 3,000 people murdered on Sept. 11 as victims of America’s own imperialism.
But consider Mohammed Atta.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, before flying an airplane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Atta left detailed religious instructions concerning his death. No woman was to approach his grave. Those washing his body were to wear gloves. His shroud was to consist of three pieces of cloth, and his body was to face Mecca.
Atta had lived in Germany. He was young, educated and neither impoverished nor excluded from Western society.
Yet he became a mass murderer in the name of a radical vision of the Islamic ummah.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we are still far from understanding what that means.
Oct. 7 should have ended the illusion.
Instead, the strengthening of pro-Hamas and pro-Iran movements, accompanied by increasingly open hatred of Jews, Israel and America, sends precisely the opposite message to those who seek the West’s defeat.
They see our refusal to understand them not as tolerance, sophistication or compassion, but as weakness—and an invitation to strike again.
