The Re-Zionization of the West

 

On September 11, 2001, the world watched as nineteen men turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass murder. Nearly three thousand people died in the space of a few hours. The perpetrators left no ambiguity: they acted in the name of Islam, citing the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad as they struck what they saw as the heart of unbelief. For a brief, clarifying moment, the mask slipped. The ideology that had animated centuries of conquest, subjugation, and doctrinal absolutism stood exposed in the dust and fire of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Here was Islam as a political system that commands its followers to fight until the religion of Allah reigns supreme.

Within days, President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed the sentiment. European leaders followed suit. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A tiny fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims too, victims of misunderstanding, of prejudice, of the very terrorists who claimed to speak for them.

The exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations of offensive warfare, of abrogation, of the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet fear overrode clarity. There was the immediate terror of backlash: the FBI recorded a seventeen-fold spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, from 28 incidents the previous year to 481. Media outlets amplified every reported slur, every mosque vandalism, every suspicious glance. The narrative solidified: Muslims were now the vulnerable minority in the West, and any criticism of their faith risked igniting pogroms. Geopolitical calculus reinforced the denial. The United States needed allies in the Muslim world for the coming invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, none could be alienated by the suggestion that their state religion was the problem. Oil flowed. Bases were secured. Coalitions were built on the polite fiction that the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.

So the script was written: terrorism was “radical,” “extremist,” the work of a handful of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. The term “Islamist” had not yet been massaged into its modern usage, but the distinction was already being drawn. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed them not merely tolerance but active protection and accommodation.

The consequences unfolded. Doors that might have been narrowed after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor were instead flung wide open. In the United States, the Muslim population, already growing through the 1990s, accelerated. Pew Research data show roughly 2.35 million Muslims in 2007; by 2015 the figure had climbed to approximately 3.3 million. In Europe the surge was even more dramatic. Between mid-2010 and mid-2016 alone, an estimated 3.7 million Muslims entered the continent, more than half through regular migration channels rather than refugee status. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, each saw its Muslim population swell by hundreds of thousands in the decade following 9/11. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for halal food in public institutions, prayer rooms in workplaces, gender-segregated swimming sessions, and exemptions from standard curricula became routine bargaining chips in the politics of “inclusion.”

This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the uncomfortable thought that Islam might be the issue; having quickly repented of that heresy, it now paid penance through policy. Every new mosque became a monument to atonement. Every accommodation, Sharia councils in Britain, taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany, university prayer spaces in Canada, was presented as proof of moral superiority. Muslims, sensing the opening, doubled down. The very grievance of being “unfairly accused” after 9/11 became the lever. Innocence declared, they pressed their advantage. Integration was reframed as oppression. Criticism of any Islamic practice was recast as racism. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.

And the attacks kept coming.

Madrid 2004. London 2005. Beslan. Mumbai. Fort Hood. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. The Bataclan. The Pulse nightclub. The Manchester Arena. The list stretches across continents and decades. Trackers such as the French think tank Fondapol have documented more than 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, the overwhelming majority occurring after 9/11, claiming at least a quarter of a million lives. Yet each fresh atrocity triggered the same ritual: swift condemnation of the act, followed by even swifter exculpation of the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” officials repeated like a catechism. “The vast majority of Muslims reject violence.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “mentally ill,” “radicalized online”, anything but faithful executors of a fourteen-hundred-year-old command to fight the unbelievers until they submit.

To sustain the illusion, Western academia and institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They invented “Islamism.” The term, once a neutral descriptor for the political application of Islamic doctrine, was repurposed as a firewall. Islam, we were told, is a beautiful faith of peace and justice. Islamism is the regrettable political distortion practiced by a minority. The distinction allowed policymakers, professors, journalists, and NGOs to defend the faith while condemning its most visible consequences. It shielded the source code, Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, the doctrine of abrogation, the example of the Prophet, from examination. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were an “Islamophobe,” a bigot, a threat to social cohesion. The very act of noticing the pattern became evidence of prejudice.

By the mid-2010s the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted total immunity. Sixty thousand-plus attacks across more than seventy countries, rivers of blood from Mindanao to Mali to Manhattan, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. To suggest otherwise was not merely controversial; it was eccentric, almost indecent. The West had convinced itself that the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming: the religion itself.