The politics of remembering – Palestine, Islamophobia and 25 years of Global War on Terror

The politics of remembering – Palestine, Islamophobia and 25 years of Global War on Terror

We often hear it: the attacks ascribed to Al Qaeda on 11 September 2001 changed how the world looks at Muslims. Not only did it lead to increased Islamophobic hate crimes, ordinary Muslims in school, at work, on the street and in the media were suddenly and openly questioned for their alleged propensity to violence, lack of loyalty, a stone age mentality (pre-modern or anti-modern) and whether or not they belong.

No Islamophobia did not come out of the blue, and neither did the attacks

But no, the Global War on Terror is yet another iteration of political, military and religious leaders to exploit, reframe and mobilise an innocent West vs an aggressive Muslim world. And, this framing of those attacks as the origin point of a change in the position of Muslims is, I would suggest, a product of Western, security-centric and integration-centric scholarship. We can trace interpersonal, institutionalized and political bigotry towards Muslims deep into the Western histories of colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence (from the Reconquista to the Bosnian genocide), or the emergence of ‘Europe’ as a political white Christian entity. The attacks did not create Islamophobia out of the blue, they restructured the already existing myth that because of Islamic teachings Muslims were more inclined to intolerant and violent behaviour to outsiders, it provided new vocabulary to turn it into a routine aspect of political campaigning and the attacks itself were placed in an alleged long traditions of Muslims hating and attacking the West.

It would therefore be more accurate to say that the attacks of 11 September 2001 have been used to routinize and institutionalize, as well as to accelerate but also to hide Islamophobia in the West as well as the atrocities committed by the US, Israel and their allies. Bin Laden himself was quite clear about it in his Risāla ʾIlā al-Shʿab al-ʾAmrīkī; also known as Letter to America in which he critiques the US as an aggressive imperial power which continues to attack Muslims in a total war against Islam. The Letter is first and foremost a propaganda tool justifying the violence after the facts and coats a broad range of global injustices and phenomena under an ethical-political umbrella presenting Al Qaeda as the vanguard of a Muslim world under continuous siege: “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” One of the questions that stands out is the US support for the state of Israel in Palestine and Lebanon (besides US interference in Somalia, support for Russian intervention in Chechnya, Indian oppression in Kashmir in ways that target Muslims militarily, economically, politically, socially, and intellectually):

“The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.”

In his 2004 video Bin Laden framed the political violence of Al Qaeda as revenge for, in particular, the destruction caused by the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 and the US support for it. Whereas we definitely need to be critical about these statements and regard them as examples of social movement framing (blending ethics, politics, antisemitic stereotypes and global justice) after the fact, the statements do indeed point to the consequences of the aggressive politics of the US, Israël and their allies and are highly consistent with for example the 1998 statement.

The Global War on Terror, Race and Risk: a racialized governance of security

On a global level, through the Global War on Terror (GWOT) the positioning of Muslims as outsiders, invaders, cultural threats and threats to national security has solidified and divided Muslims basically into three groups: the terrorist (unacceptable) Muslim, the risky Muslim (radicalized) and the Muslim at risk (vulnerable, acceptable Muslim). GWOT strengthened and tapped into the historically grown hyperpresence of Muslims as threats while at the same time Muslims as part of the nation. It is a racialization of danger, as I have noted earlier, which is highly gendered with the men being targeted as aggressive and potential terrorists and women as cultural threats (whether they are a victim of Muslim men or dangerous such as women wearing the face-veil). In all cases they have been targeted through doubts about their loyalty and (for example) ‘Americanness’, threats to the nation’s independence and national security and the national way of life and  as collaborators with or as terrorists and jihadists, as corrupt and corrupting democracy and secularism.

The GWOT, instigated by the US, has led to a mass surveillance and policing of Muslims on a global scale, the UN’s Security Council took on a motion only weeks after 9/11 that obligated all members of the UN to implement domestic laws and policies to fight against terrorism and emphasized the need for more international cooperation. Many such local policies come from only a few sources such as the Dutch counter-radicalization policies that provided a blueprint for the British Prevent policies which in turn contributed the US Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policy. At the same time, the implementation of these policies works and emerges within the national local socio-political context. 9/11 was used by the Chinese government as a legitimization to designate the Uyghurs as terrorists where previously they had been labelled as separatists. Here the racial terrorist label contributed significantly to the establishment of camps, forces marriages of Uyghur women to Han men and the Uyghur genocide. Also, in India GWOT changed the wording and the labels; after a series of violent attacks in Mumbai, the perpetrators of such violence were increasingly dubbed terrorists by the international communities. The term terrorist contributes to the ongoing racialization moreover as it reduces a person to mere evil and without need to explain his or her histories, ideas and practices. Border security is tightened and dissent delegitimized through their association with the perceived need to fight terrorism.[1]

Global Wars – Local Flavours: The Dutch

In the Netherlands, the developments bely 11 September as the year zero. Pim Fortuyn had already published Against the Islamisation of our Culture in 1997, four years before the attacks (and two years after the Bosnian genocide but without mentioning it). The core anti-Islam political current in Dutch public life predates 9/11 and grew out of domestic debates about multiculturalism and integration, not global terrorism discourse. The assassination of Pim Fortuyn who, prior to the attacks of 11 September had called for a ‘cold war against Islam’ in that year, took place in 2002. Although murdered by an by an animal-rights activist, not a Muslim, the killing was still widely absorbed into the anti-Islam narrative. The attacks in Madrid in 2004 proved to be the start of a compelling national counter-terrorism effort again with Muslims being seen as most risky and the murder of Theo van Gogh in November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born member of the Hofstadgroep became the catalyst for a counter-radicalization program aimed at Muslims. Not at the far right even though in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Van Gogh more than 100 arson and assault incidents against mosques and Islamic schools followed van Gogh’s murder.

The Dutch case suggests a three-step domestic escalation by politicians, terrorism experts, media and policy makers: 11 September 2001 attacks were used to create the urgency for a domestic counter-terrorism policy, Fortuyn planted the seeds of already existing anti-Islam politics electorally, and van Gogh (2004) was used to justify the idea that threat did not come from outside only but also, even more so perhaps, from within: the disenfranchised Muslim youth. Salafism was already a flagged as a concern for Dutch intelligence before 2001, but the murder caused a documented surge in surveillance interest specifically.  The literature traces a direct line from Fortuyn through Hirsi Ali’s exit and Wilders’s rise to the PVV’s entry into government two decades later, with polling from the mid-2000s already showing majorities considering Islam “incompatible with modern European life”. How those events were made to work is not to securitize Islam out of the blue, but turn to Islamophobia into political infrastructure, institutionalized policies of suspicion, doubt and surveillance, and routinized political rhetoric based upon already existing historiographies of the West vs the rest,  geopolitical considerations and power play.

Re-Membering

Yet, we keep treating the attacks of 11 September 2001 as falling out of the sky with no prior history, at least not from the West. The annual commemoration of the attacks ceremonialize the attacks as if an innocent West was attacked by barbarians and needed defending freedom and democracy. That this “defence” resulted in millions of civilian casualties and huge numbers of displaced people is buried somewhere under the rubbles of the myth that blind hate and fundamentalism led to an attack that “hit the world in its heart”. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of 9/11” basically means that the only American victims of that day in 2001 will remain in our thoughts. Not Ibrahim Türkmen (tortured after being falsely reported to the FBI), not the shopkeepers who were killed by someone who wanted to kill Arabs, not US Indian citizen Balbir Singh Sodhi (killed because this Sikh man with his skin colour, beard and turban looked like a Muslim according to the murderer), not the far larger numbers killed in the ensuing wars (with an estimated 4.7 million people killed). And it is not the victims of the Bosnian genocide that stand out as the casualties of hatred. The dogma of commemoration reproduces a hierarchy of grievability: some deaths are structurally rememberable, others structurally are not as they do not fit the 9/11 dogma of “we were attacked; we defended freedom and democracy” story.

So, no, the attacks did not come out of the blue, and neither did Islamophobia. To a certain extent the Global War on Terror is nothing less than a continuation of US empire positioning themselves as the freedom fighters of the world and their casualties as opponents who irrationally and fanatically hate freedom and democracy. It is however a more compelling and intensified effort of erasure, one that is more normalized and routinized as part of state building and state control. In order to remember we need to re-member the stories that have been erased.

Selod, Saher, Inaash Islam, and Steve Garner. A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism. John Wiley & Sons, 2023.

[1] This section is taken from Saher Selod et al., A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism (John Wiley & Sons, 2023). And more in particular from my review of their book de Koning, M. (2025). A global racial enemy: Muslims and 21st-century racism: by Saher Selod, Inaash Islam and Steve Garner, Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2024, 227 pp., €18.10 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-509-54020-4. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 26(2), 309–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2025.2479877