Remembering 9/11 Means Remembering Why

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, America is once again remembering the nearly 3,000 people murdered that morning.

We remember the airplanes. The burning towers. The people jumping from impossible heights. The firefighters climbing stairways from which many would never return. The collapse of the World Trade Center. The Pentagon in flames. And the passengers of Flight 93, who learned what was happening and fought back.

We should also remember what happened afterward.

Muslim Americans were subjected to suspicion, hostility and sometimes violence. Sikh Americans, tragically mistaken by some for Muslims, became targets as well. Those stories deserve to be told. Innocent Americans should never be held responsible for crimes committed by people who happen to share, or are mistakenly believed to share, their religion or ethnicity.

But there is another part of the history that increasingly seems difficult to discuss.

Why did 9/11 happen?

The nineteen hijackers were not simply angry young men. They were not generic “extremists.” And they did not randomly select the United States as their enemy.

They were members of al-Qaeda, an organization whose leaders embraced a radical Islamist ideology that fused political grievances with religious extremism and provided a theological justification for murdering civilians.

That is not my characterization. It is essentially the conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, established by Congress to investigate the attacks.

Its report carefully, and importantly, distinguished between Islam and the ideology of the terrorists:

“Islam is not the enemy. It is not synonymous with terror. Nor does Islam teach terror.”

That sentence deserves to be remembered.

But so do the sentences surrounding it.

The Commission warned that the enemy was not merely “terrorism,” which it correctly described as a tactic. The threat was more specific: al-Qaeda and what the Commission called a radical ideological movement that had produced terrorist organizations and violence around the world.

Its conclusion was equally unambiguous:

“The present transnational danger is Islamist terrorism.”

Those two statements belong together.

Islam is not the enemy.

Islamist terrorism is.

What bin Laden believed

The distinction matters because Osama bin Laden did not conceal his worldview.

His grievances included American troops in Saudi Arabia, American policies in the Middle East and American support for Israel. Those political grievances were real components of al-Qaeda’s propaganda.

But the 9/11 Commission found that bin Laden’s worldview went considerably further.

It traced an intellectual lineage through extremist interpretations of Islam, including the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Bin Laden envisioned a struggle between his conception of true Islam and a corrupt, godless world. America was not simply supposed to alter a particular foreign policy. In al-Qaeda’s worldview, America represented something much larger that had to be defeated, transformed or destroyed.

Years before 9/11, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had publicly called for the killing of Americans, including civilians.

The Commission therefore concluded that the United States confronted two related enemies: al-Qaeda itself and the broader ideology capable of inspiring terrorist movements after al-Qaeda’s leaders were gone.

That distinction proved remarkably prescient.

Bin Laden is dead. The original al-Qaeda organization has been severely diminished. Yet movements inspired by radical Islamist ideology did not disappear with him.

ISIS subsequently constructed a self-proclaimed caliphate across large areas of Iraq and Syria and inspired or directed terrorism far beyond the Middle East. Other jihadist organizations have appeared in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Organizations change. Leaders die.

Ideas can survive them.

The danger of forgetting the “why”

There is an understandable reason Americans hesitate to discuss the religious dimension of Islamist terrorism.

We do not want to encourage prejudice against Muslims.

That instinct is decent. But avoiding the subject is the wrong solution.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists, just as the violent extremists produced by other religious traditions do not define those religions. Indeed, Muslims themselves have been among the principal victims of jihadist terrorism.

But acknowledging that fact does not require pretending that religion played no role in al-Qaeda’s ideology.

Quite the opposite.

If we cannot distinguish Islam from Islamism, Muslims from Islamists, and ordinary religious faith from an extremist political theology, we make intelligent discussion almost impossible.

And we inadvertently surrender the discussion to the very people most inclined either to demonize all Muslims or to deny any connection between Islamist terrorism and religious ideology.

There is a better approach: tell the truth precisely.

Two truths at once

Perhaps that is the lesson America most needs on this 25th anniversary.

A mature society should be capable of holding two truths at the same time.

The backlash against innocent Muslim and Sikh Americans after 9/11 was wrong and deserves to be remembered.

And the men who murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11 were motivated in significant part by a radical Islamist ideology that must also be remembered.

Those statements are not contradictory.

Indeed, each makes the other more important.

The first reminds us that liberal democracies must not abandon their principles when frightened or attacked.

The second reminds us that tolerance does not require intellectual blindness about those who reject those principles.

The 9/11 Commission understood this balance extraordinarily well. It rejected the idea that Islam itself was America’s enemy while refusing to disguise the ideological character of the enemy that actually attacked us.

Twenty-five years later, we should be able to do the same.

Remembering what happened—and why

Anniversaries gradually transform history.

Those of us who watched the towers fall remember exactly where we were. But an increasing percentage of Americans were either children on September 11, 2001, or were not yet born.

For them, 9/11 is no longer memory.

It is history.

And history inevitably depends upon what one generation chooses to teach the next.

We should teach about the victims.

We should teach about the extraordinary courage of firefighters, police officers, first responders and ordinary citizens.

We should teach about the passengers of Flight 93.

We should teach about the fear and prejudice experienced by Muslim and Sikh Americans afterward.

But we should also teach what al-Qaeda believed, what bin Laden said, what the hijackers thought they were doing, and why nineteen men were willing to murder thousands of strangers and die themselves in the process.

Leaving that out does not promote tolerance.

It produces incomplete history.

The most fitting memorial to the victims of September 11 is not simply to remember that they died.

We owe them the honesty to remember why.