Sheryl Saperia: 25 years on, what would bin Laden see?

For those of us who are old enough to remember where we were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it is hard to believe that 25 years have passed. On this anniversary, I can’t help but wonder what Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind those infamous terrorist attacks, would make of the world today.

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Bin Laden knew he could not defeat the United States by conventional military means, but he could terrorize, demoralize and try to persuade the West that it did not deserve to win. In his 2002 “Letter to the American People,” alongside the expected demands about Muslim lands and Israel, he attacked Americans for usury, drugs, gambling and sexual licence, blamed them for AIDS, denounced corporate money in election campaigns, condemned the atomic bombing of Japan and reproached Washington for refusing to sign the Kyoto accord.

As the Hudson Institute’s Paul Marshall has observed, bin Laden had spent a decade issuing statements that mentioned none of these things. But in this letter, bin Laden submerged his theology and borrowed the West’s own case against itself, attempting to appeal to western audiences through their own grievances. The gambit failed in 2002. But 25 years after 9/11, we seem to have become much more receptive to the case bin Laden was trying to make against the West.

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The West now instructs its own children to hold it in contempt. Its classrooms, newsrooms and cultural institutions run a permanent seminar on western sin, while non-western societies whose conduct is immeasurably worse are treated as victims and granted a standing exemption from judgment.

Hudson Institute researcher Zineb Riboua calls this ideology “Third-Worldism”: the belief that world politics is fundamentally divided between a dominating North and a dominated South, with conflicts understood through the binary of colonizer and colonized. The categories carry their own moral verdict: those assigned the status of oppressed are granted legitimacy, while those deemed powerful are presumed guilty, regardless of who is actually exercising power or perpetuating oppression in a particular conflict.

Changing sympathies towards Israel is where the growing Third-Worldism is easiest to see. For most of this century, Americans overwhelmingly sympathized with Israel over Palestinians: according to Gallup, between 2001 and 2018, “Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies, with the gap averaging 43 points.” Today, a plurality of Americans sympathize with the Palestinians. Among Democrats, 65 per cent now sympathize with the Palestinians and just 17 per cent with Israel. And independents have crossed over, too. Last year, they favoured Israel by eight points; today they favour the Palestinians by 11.

But Riboua’s point is that the argument does not stop there. Anyone persuaded that Israel is a colonial imposition has already accepted the premise that convicts the United States, Canada and every other western country. Israel is simply the first stop.

For bin Laden, a worldview that cast his enemies as oppressors and their adversaries as victims would have been an extraordinary gift.

Jew-hatred is foundational to Islamist ideology, and bin Laden did not conceal it. The fatwa he issued in February 1998, three years before the attacks, was titled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” It ruled that killing Americans and their allies, civilian and military, was a duty for every Muslim able to do it, anywhere in the world, “in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque (Mecca) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

It is not hard to imagine that bin Laden would have loved the October 7 attacks in Israel and the world’s reaction to it. Around 6,000 Gazans invaded the Israeli border, resulting in the rapes, kidnappings and murders of Jewish families in their homes and at a music festival. And the celebrations in western cities came within hours.

Antisemitism has permeated western life. The J7 task force, covering seven countries that contain the majority of the Jewish diaspora, documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025. In comparison to 2021, the number of total antisemitic incidents had risen 137 per cent, while violent incidents rose 78 per cent.

America’s enemies understand the power of this hatred better than we do. As Eliana Aiken, a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, has documented, Russia, Iran and China have found since October 7 that antisemitism is an especially effective weapon for weakening the United States from within, through information warfare aimed at American opinion.

Antisemitism works so well because it can be attached to almost any grievance, offering people across the political spectrum a single culprit for otherwise unrelated frustrations. It is therefore effective on the far right and the far left, particularly among people who feel the American system has failed them and are looking for a convenient scapegoat.

The scale is industrial. In the month after October 7, Kremlin-linked Telegram channels posted about the Israel-Gaza war 9,000 times and drew 865-million views, according to Aiken. At its peak, Israel-related content on American TikTok was 98.6 per cent anti-Israel. The strategic goal need not even be hatred for its own sake, as long as America no longer trusts its institutions, no longer believes its power abroad is legitimate and no longer coheres enough to defend anything. Aiken’s warning is ultimately strategic: if Americans can be turned against one another, America’s adversaries can prevail without confronting it militarily.

Bin Laden needed 19 men and four aircraft to weaken the West. His successors need only our credulity.

The western commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism, noble in its origins, has hardened into a reluctance to do anything that might be mistaken for prejudice. CSIS actively avoids calling Islamist terrorism by name, instead labelling it “religiously motivated violent extremism.”

The United Kingdom’s commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross, reviewed Britain’s Prevent program, a counter-radicalization initiative that relies on individuals in education, health care, criminal justice agencies and police to report those in danger of becoming radicalized. His research found that there was a “cultural timidity” and an “institutional hesitancy” to confront Islamism for fear of accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity.

Many media outlets appear to have adopted the same nervous approach to naming Islamist terror. When a man drove a van into Berlin’s Pride parade in July, killing a woman and injuring 29 others, the New York Times informed its readers that a car had plowed through a park. British commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray argues that in stories involving an Islamist perpetrator, the vehicle is always granted a will of its own. The Pride organizers held a press conference at which one female participant acknowledged having hoped the perpetrator would turn out to be a white Christian man.

The West cannot properly confront a threat it will not name, and bin Laden’s successors are the beneficiaries.

The Twin Towers, destroyed on 9/11, were symbols of American capitalism in a city that stands for western liberalism. That fateful day, New York’s police officers and firefighters were storybook heroes. Less than 25 years later, the city elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Having spent his life, as Murray puts it, marinating in postcolonial politics, Third-Worldism and anti-Zionism, Mamdani is hostile to capitalism, campaigned on the destruction of Israel’s legitimacy and wrote in 2020 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety. At the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2023 national convention, he told delegates that to make people care about Israel, they had to make the issues hyper-local, such as telling New Yorkers that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it has been laced by the Israel Defence Forces.

On his first day in office, he revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and the ban on city officials boycotting or divesting from Israel. He appointed as the city’s chief counsel Ramzi Kassem, who served as lead counsel to Ahmed al-Darbi, the al-Qaida operative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to his role in the 2002 bombing of the oil tanker MV Limburg. In July, he issued an official video denouncing Israel’s prime minister as the “architect of a horrific genocide,” on the strength of casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

Bin Laden would surely vote for Mamdani, if he could.

In 2000, American historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt won her case against Holocaust denier David Irving in a London courtroom, and the verdict held because the machinery that establishes fact still worked: archives, expert testimony, a judge and a press that reported the outcome.

British historian Niall Ferguson and AI futurist and essayist John-Clark Levin argue that this machinery is now useless. Falsehood is no longer the work of a few cranks who can be met with evidence. It is produced deliberately, by states and by the proxies they fund, seeded into social media, amplified by algorithms that pay for fury and multiplied by accounts that are not humans.

This ideological interference is working. The right has been influenced heavily by Russian propaganda and the left by Islamist propaganda. In both cases, isolationism is advancing on both flanks of American politics, each version encouraged by messaging that serves a foreign government’s purposes. The premise, which bin Laden spent his life promoting, is that American power abroad is illegitimate and should be withdrawn.

The various accusations against Israel are case studies of the weakening of truth. On the accusation of genocide, conflict researcher Andrew Fox notes that, “Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7-million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.”

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s famine declaration of August 2025 turned out not to be true. As noted in a report from researchers at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, over a million tons of food aid entered Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 17, 2025, more than the United Nations’ and World Food Program’s estimated requirements. Almost none of this has been reported by the outlets that broadcast the original charges. The accusation circles the world; the correction barely leaves the building.

In November 2023, bin Laden’s letter went viral on TikTok, where it was venerated by young westerners.

Bin Laden went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and regarded communism as godless. Now the red-green alliance has taken hold in the West. The result is two movements holding irreconcilable views on women, homosexuality and God, allied by the shared conviction that the West and Israel are the authors of the world’s suffering.

In 2020, four Arab states normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. On July 16, 2026, the Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya aired an interview in which Israel’s president called peace with Riyadh his dream. Bin Laden’s founding grievance was American troops in Saudi Arabia and the willingness of the House of Saud to deal with unbelievers. He would regard any Saudi normalization as a betrayal by his own country.

Documents recovered in Gaza record Yahya Sinwar telling his political bureau on Oct. 2, 2023, that Saudi normalization with Israel was advancing and that an extraordinary act was needed to stop it. Five days later, his men attacked Israel.

Bin Laden would have recognized the reasoning as his own. He also would have found solace in Arab public opinion. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index, a survey of more than 40,000 people across 15 Arab countries conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, found in that 87 per cent of respondents opposed recognizing Israel.

Treaties are signed by governments. Hatred is taught to populations. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, but over the following two decades, the kingdom began dismantling the ideological infrastructure it had spent a fortune exporting. The religious police lost their powers of arrest, the founder of Wahhabism came out of the national curriculum, most references to violent jihad were stripped from the textbooks and Riyadh announced it would stop funding mosques and religious institutions abroad. Critics say the change is narrower than advertised, but no one seriously argues the Saudi state still teaches what it taught in 2001.

This is the work Gaza now faces. As Israeli diplomat and politician Einat Wilf argues, disarming Hamas of its weapons means little without disarming it of its eliminationist ideology: the fiction that Gazans are refugees with a right of return to Israel, the claim to the land from the river to the sea and the refusal to concede that the war against Zionism has been lost. Saudi Arabia began a process of reform after producing most of bin Laden’s hijackers. Gaza has not begun it at all.

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we should look at the world through bin Laden’s eyes, because our enemies already are. The vulnerabilities he would probe are ones we can close. We must name Islamist ideology as an existential threat to the world, recognize antisemitism and anti-Zionism as tools to weaken our societies, insist that a fact remains a fact even after it becomes inconvenient and teach western values with pride. For all the insults and accusations levelled at the West, the traffic runs one way. Millions risk everything to reach our countries. We need to teach liberalism and democracy and be honest about how frightening the alternatives are.

If we strengthen ourselves that way, a bin Laden copycat will meet a West that is resilient and united rather than unsure of itself, divided and weak.

National Post

Sheryl Saperia is a lawyer by training and national security policy strategist. She was a principal drafter of Canadian counter-terrorism legislation, has advised governments and parliamentarians, and is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and CEO of Pearl Strategic Counsel.

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