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

Osama bin Ladin Photo by STR/AFP/Getty ImagesArticle contentFor 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.

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.

The National Post newsletter that doesn’t hold back, giving readers the unvarnished truth on media, politics and culture.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Right? will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

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.