In some of his past reflections on the attacks of September 11, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, suggested that our commemorations should attend more to “the war against brown Muslim folks over there” that America subsequently waged. “When we talk about 9/11,” El-Sayed added, “we often fail to center them.” This apparent demand for greater sympathy for the suffering of others contains a not-so-subtle judgment about the proper object of remembrance. Accordingly, the “brown Muslim” supposed victims of the U.S. acquire an interpretive precedence through which the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans becomes the occasion for examining the country’s guilt. For El-Sayed, guilt, not mourning, is the main note that should be sounded on the anniversary. That the United States declared war on jihadists and on brutal governments and not on “brown folks” or Muslims, who are by no means the same, is, of course, irrelevant.
Likewise, the online agitator Hasan Piker, whom El-Sayed kept by his side during the primary campaign, went one step further by declaring that, in fact, America deserved the 9/11 attacks, a statement that follows inevitably from El-Sayed’s own twisted logic: American culpability furnishes the attacks with retrospective moral warrant.
From the other side of the aisle, we find a right increasingly obsessed with accusing American institutions of treachery and backstabbing. Last year Tucker Carlson produced a five-part series, the 9/11 Files, inviting the viewer to entertain all manner of conspiracy theories about the CIA, dancing Israelis, and an inside job.
Of course, a vast space separates El-Sayed’s statements, which at least try to maintain the respectability and prestige of post-Christian academic moral huckstering and displays of sympathy for the victims, from Carlson’s straightforward conspiracism. Yet, what makes the coexistence of both important is that, 25 years later, a growing number of Americans seem to have been persuaded that the memory of 9/11 is primarily about American wrongdoing and thus have reorganized the meaning of the attacks in a way so novel that it is incompatible with the accounts of the jihadists who committed them. An occasion of national mourning has been converted into an obligation to account for national guilt in which al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks, including the purposes for which its leaders selected American civilians for death, becomes progressively less necessary to the explanation of the event itself.
Did anyone in the immediate years after 9/11 ever expect that within two decades the perception of that day would become entirely about American villainy? What happened?
There are a few developments, I believe, that coalesced to produce this outcome. We may start by pointing out the most obvious: the influence of the academic left on the culture and worldview of the college-educated American middle class, which made multiple generations automatically receptive to any message that centralizes a reading of American intentions as evil to the exclusion of any other factor. There is also the widespread consensus that the war in Iraq was a mistake—going back to debates that occurred even before the invasion began—and the war’s failure to fulfil the most ambitious goals of some of its proponents. Even today, American voters have not forgiven their politicians for this long and costly foreign adventure. For some, the war supplies 9/11’s dominant meaning, turning the attacks themselves into little more than the opening episode in a drama about their country’s hubris and violence toward others.
Taken as a whole, the war on terror, especially because of its broad and often ill-defined scope, gave the academic left and its fellow travelers from the Third World endless occasions for critique of American empire and even Western civilization. Iraq is thus merely a continuation of the Crusades and then the destruction of Native Americans, fitting cleanly within a millennium of Western imperialism, colonialism, and criminality. From this neat conceptual structure it follows that America’s enemies must be the embodiment of sheer otherness: indigenous, Muslim, brown, diverse, etc. When Turkey’s pro-Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently claims that Turkish history contains no colonialism, oppression, or imperialist rule, he is merely throwing our words back at us.
In narratives of this kind, America is granted an extraordinary monopoly over historical agency and violence. America acts; others experience the consequences. America makes choices; others express grievances. American violence requires ideological explanation, but jihadist violence doesn’t, since it is fully intelligible through the injuries that supposedly produced it. Iran’s Islamic Republic is the reaction to the 1953 CIA conspiracy to oust Prime Minister Mossadegh (itself a historical myth rooted in an American official’s eagerness to take credit). The more awful the violence directed at Americans, the deeper their own guilt must be. Entire societies become nothing but the settings for the consequences of evil American power. Their own ideas, tyrannies, religious movements, struggles, and sovereign will to destroy receive attention only when they can be blamed on American conduct. Muslim fanatics throw homosexuals off rooftops because of the social distortions created by conditions ultimately determined by American imperialism—and its agent, Israel.
Among the many arguments Edward Said advanced in his notorious Orientalism was that the Orient in European letters was never a real place to be known but a compositional device; its peoples exist in European books not as populations with their own thoughts and purposes but as representational material through which Europe composed a portrait of itself. The actual Oriental never appears on the page; the page was never about him. Said emerged from the very conspiracy he was exposing, confirmed its existence, and returned inside, which is to say that having identified the device, he taught a generation to deploy it in reverse, but even more effectively. His most consequential bequest is paving the way for the orientalization of America and its conversion into a literary figure of unbroken malignity, a total agent, unmoved mover, and the source of all consequence against which the secular humanist, brave in his opposition to Jewish particularism and Christian mysticism alike, authors his own goodness and heroism.
What America did or did not do in the Middle East is not the subject of post-Said scholarship. Dwight Eisenhower forcing the British and French out of Suez in 1956 doesn’t belong to it; neither do the missionary colleges from which the founders of Arab nationalism graduated, nor Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 fact-finding mission that concluded that Arabs preferred an American administration to a British or French one because America held no colonial stakes. These facts are not arguments against any particular Saidian claim. They simply don’t belong in any literature informed by Orientalism.
Thus, the interpretation of September 11 through the history of American foreign policy, which was part of bin Laden’s own justification for the attacks, was already available before the wars whose consequences would subsequently occupy so much of the discussion. The Americans murdered on that morning are easily absolved into an abstraction and a narrative of Western domination. A mere day after the attacks, Noam Chomsky published a response that immediately blamed them on U.S. policy, including the Clinton administration’s bombings in Sudan. In other words, this interpretation is an a-priori assumption that does not require investigating events. Blame America and Israel first is in reality an uncritical jerk of the knee rather than the final outcome of a critical thought process.
Carlson's conspiracism, while different, has the same functional result. The progressive account of 9/11 places America at the center as the guilty agent; the new right’s account places America at the center as a deceived victim, manipulated by its own elites, foreign governments, and above all Israel and an imagined “Epstein class” into a war someone else designed for purposes someone else defined. While the two narratives are opposites—one has America as total culprit and the other as total victim—they have the same structure. The al-Qaeda terrorists who boarded the planes become secondary characters in a plot whose principal authors are elsewhere. Now these principal authors, both in the case of El-Sayed, who blames AIPAC money for bad American policies, and Carlson, who blames Israel, seem always to resolve in the identification of the same particular agent behind the curtain, the same terminal explanation of otherwise inexplicable events. History records no other point on which the left and right so reliably converge.
The reader needs no reminder that the accusatory dynamics and the inexplicable reactions to 9/11 turned out to be a rehearsal for the reactions to the Hamas attacks of October 7. Already within hours of the attacks, the same exact inversion was performed for Hamas and the worst anti-Semitic mass murder since the Holocaust was seamlessly translated into sterile, academic language. Hamas’s own stated motives—the religious imperative to slaughter Jews and obliterate the Jewish state—were dutifully ignored and instead the violence was reinterpreted as the mechanical, almost involuntary spasm of the oppressed against "settler colonialism." Once again, the perpetrators of jihadist violence were treated not as political actors making conscious, genocidal choices, but as a force of nature, a mere symptom of the victim's own sins.
If September 11 was gradually converted into a referendum on American guilt, October 7 was instantly converted into a referendum on Zionist evil. The only real difference is the speed of the inversion. What took years of progressive conditioning to accomplish with the former took only hours to accomplish with the latter, ending in the same convergence of the far left and far right upon the same conclusion. The accusation, it seems, is the last bipartisan consensus.
In both cases, we witness a narcissistic and self-serving refusal to look the enemy in the eye. To accept that al-Qaeda and Hamas act upon their own independent, deeply held religious and geopolitical imperatives would shatter the hermetically sealed worldview of the post-colonial left. It would require acknowledging that Western imperialism is not the only force shaping global affairs, and that deeply illiberal, world-historic forces exist that seek destruction on their own terms. It would require doing what Edward Said scolded the academy for failing to do yet never did himself: to see the “other” on its own terms, as a civilization with its own concerns, internal conflicts, and ideas, rather than merely projecting onto it Western preoccupations.
By successfully rewriting an act of unprovoked mass murder as a justified response to American sins, the Chomskys and the Carlsons and the El-Sayeds ensured that when the next great slaughter arrived, the victims would already be in the dock, ready to stand trial.
Now we face an even more frightening possibility: that this convergence of the radical left and right means that American political culture is losing its capacity to confront the messy reality of the world as it actually is. If we cannot tolerate the existence of an independent, external enemy who is acting upon its own complex theological and geopolitical imperatives, we must invent a puppet master to fill the causal void. Thus we end up with Israel as the vanguard of Western colonialism and the guiding hand of American empire or as the shadowy globalist architect manipulating America into fighting its wars. Both myths allow Americans to avoid looking into the abyss of a world that is chaotic, troubled, and mostly unfree on its own terms.
There is an almost tragic solipsism here that masquerades as superior historical consciousness. By reducing jihadism to a secondary characteristic of either tragic victims of American power or dupes of deep-state CIA operations, we engage in an ironic form of American exceptionalism—a kind of hyper-orientalism of which Said himself might have ironically approved. It is an exceptionalism of guilt and victimhood, where America remains the sole agent of world history. To take bin Laden at his word, to accept that he ordered the murder of 3,000 civilians in the service of an explicit, world-historic vision that is a pastiche of religious fanaticism and revolutionary apocalypticism, would require acknowledging that America is a lonely actor on a stage crowded with hostile forces and chaotic worlds, and that the madness that consumed those Muslim men’s minds is a madness to which our own minds, and our children’s, are no less prone—a realization that, had it been reached in time, might have done something to prepare us for our current moment.
