On September 11, 2001, the world watched as nineteen men turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass murder. Nearly three thousand people died in the space of a few hours. The perpetrators left no ambiguity: they acted in the name of Islam, citing the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad as they struck what they saw as the heart of unbelief. For a brief, clarifying moment, the mask slipped. The ideology that had animated centuries of conquest, subjugation, and doctrinal absolutism stood exposed in the dust and fire of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Here was Islam as a political system that commands its followers to fight until the religion of Allah reigns supreme.
Within days, President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed the sentiment. European leaders followed suit. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A tiny fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims too, victims of misunderstanding, of prejudice, of the very terrorists who claimed to speak for them.
The exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations of offensive warfare, of abrogation, of the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet fear overrode clarity. There was the immediate terror of backlash: the FBI recorded a seventeen-fold spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, from 28 incidents the previous year to 481. Media outlets amplified every reported slur, every mosque vandalism, every suspicious glance. The narrative solidified: Muslims were now the vulnerable minority in the West, and any criticism of their faith risked igniting pogroms. Geopolitical calculus reinforced the denial. The United States needed allies in the Muslim world for the coming invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, none could be alienated by the suggestion that their state religion was the problem. Oil flowed. Bases were secured. Coalitions were built on the polite fiction that the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.
So the script was written: terrorism was “radical,” “extremist,” the work of a handful of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. The term “Islamist” had not yet been massaged into its modern usage, but the distinction was already being drawn. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed them not merely tolerance but active protection and accommodation.
The consequences unfolded. Doors that might have been narrowed after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor were instead flung wide open. In the United States, the Muslim population, already growing through the 1990s, accelerated. Pew Research data show roughly 2.35 million Muslims in 2007; by 2015 the figure had climbed to approximately 3.3 million. In Europe the surge was even more dramatic. Between mid-2010 and mid-2016 alone, an estimated 3.7 million Muslims entered the continent, more than half through regular migration channels rather than refugee status. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, each saw its Muslim population swell by hundreds of thousands in the decade following 9/11. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for halal food in public institutions, prayer rooms in workplaces, gender-segregated swimming sessions, and exemptions from standard curricula became routine bargaining chips in the politics of “inclusion.”
This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the uncomfortable thought that Islam might be the issue; having quickly repented of that heresy, it now paid penance through policy. Every new mosque became a monument to atonement. Every accommodation, Sharia councils in Britain, taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany, university prayer spaces in Canada, was presented as proof of moral superiority.
Muslims, sensing the opening, doubled down. The very grievance of being “unfairly accused” after 9/11 became the lever. Innocence declared, they pressed their advantage. Integration was reframed as oppression. Criticism of any Islamic practice was recast as racism. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.
And the attacks kept coming.
Madrid 2004. London 2005. Beslan. Mumbai. Fort Hood. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. The Bataclan. The Pulse nightclub. The Manchester Arena. The list stretches across continents and decades. Trackers such as the French think tank Fondapol have documented more than 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, the overwhelming majority occurring after 9/11, claiming at least a quarter of a million lives. Yet each fresh atrocity triggered the same ritual: swift condemnation of the act, followed by even swifter exculpation of the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” officials repeated like a catechism. “The vast majority of Muslims reject violence.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “mentally ill,” “radicalized online,” anything but faithful executors of a fourteen-hundred-year-old command to fight the unbelievers until they submit.
To sustain the illusion, Western academia and institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They invented “Islamism.” The term, once a neutral descriptor for the political application of Islamic doctrine, was repurposed as a firewall. Islam, we were told, is a beautiful faith of peace and justice. Islamism is the regrettable political distortion practiced by a minority. The distinction allowed policymakers, professors, journalists, and NGOs to defend the faith while condemning its most visible consequences. It shielded the source code, Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, the doctrine of abrogation, the example of the Prophet, from examination. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were an “Islamophobe,” a bigot, a threat to social cohesion. The very act of noticing the pattern became evidence of prejudice.
By the mid-2010s the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted total immunity. Sixty thousand-plus attacks across more than seventy countries, rivers of blood from Mindanao to Mali to Manhattan, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. To suggest otherwise was not merely controversial; it was eccentric, almost indecent. The West had convinced itself that the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming: the religion itself.
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The Perfect Target
October 7, 2023, was the day Islamic terrorism finally hit its perfect target.
Not office workers in New York. Not commuters in London or Madrid. Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update. It only needed a new stage, and Hamas delivered it in living color, bodycams, livestreams, babies burned in ovens, women paraded naked, elderly Holocaust survivors dragged into tunnels. Barbarism so pure it should have ended every conversation. Instead, it became the moment both Islam and the radical left dropped the mask together.
For twenty-two years the West had clung to the fiction that jihad was the work of “Islamists,” a political perversion, not the faith itself. That firewall had protected Islam from scrutiny after every terrorist attack. But on October 7 the target was Jews, and suddenly neither Muslims nor their new leftist allies could afford the old distinction. They did not want to distance themselves from the slaughter. They wanted to celebrate it. They wanted to own the triumph.
So Muslims claimed Hamas outright. Not as a “radical faction.” Not as “extremists who hijacked the religion.” As Islam. Pure, unadulterated, straight from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. For the first time since 9/11, the theology was not denied. It was embraced. The chants were not “Not in our name.” They were “From the river to the sea,” “Globalize the intifada,” and open calls for more October 7ths. Imams and influencers who had spent decades parsing “Islam versus Islamism” dropped the parsing. Hamas was not a distortion. Hamas was the faith in action. The mask was not just off; it was thrown away because the victims were Jews and the victory felt too sweet to disown.
The radical left, which had spent the same two decades polishing that same “Islamism” distinction to shield its favorite victim group, did not hesitate either. It claimed Hamas too. Immediately. Enthusiastically. The very people who had once called bin Laden’s followers “deviants” now marched with the same killers’ flags. Why? Because the target was Jews. Because Israel is not merely a country to them; it is the living symbol of the West, its competence, its resilience, its refusal to apologize for existing. To both ideologies, Israel is the final proof that the old order still breathes: Judeo-Christian roots, Western values, individual dignity, technological triumph grafted onto ancient soil. Smash it, and you smash the West without firing a shot in Manhattan.
So the left supplied the language the Muslims had always lacked in polite society. What Hamas filmed as religious ecstasy, jihad, conquest, humiliation of the infidel, the left translated into “resistance,” “liberation,” “anti-colonialism,” “decolonization.” The rapes became metaphors for “settler violence.” The baby-killings became “context” for 1948. The massacre of festival-goers became “armed struggle against occupation.” Suddenly the oldest hatred on earth had a progressive gloss. Jihad was no longer medieval; it was intersectional.
This was not alliance. It was convergence. Two anti-Western projects, Islam with its fourteen-century mandate of submission, Marxism in all its postmodern, critical, decolonial flavors, had hunted for a common symbol for generations. They found it in the Jews. Demonize Israel and you delegitimize the entire Western project. Legitimize violence against Jews and every other anti-Western grievance becomes instantly righteous.
The proof came fast. Within weeks, Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” the manifesto that had justified 9/11 by blaming US support for Israel, went viral on TikTok, racking up tens of millions of views. Young Westerners who had never read a page of history suddenly declared it “eye-opening.” The murder of three thousand Americans was retroactively reframed not as religious fanaticism but as righteous blowback against “Zionist imperialism.” What al-Qaeda could never achieve in the years after 9/11, mainstream legitimacy, was handed to them on a platter by the very people who had once called the attacks un-Islamic. October 7 did not just justify itself; it reached back in time and justified everything that came before it.
The demonization of Israel never stopped. Israel was not defending itself after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a “genocidal settler-colonial state,” the last outpost of Western empire. Every targeted strike on Hamas infrastructure became “indiscriminate bombing.” Every civilian death, deliberately engineered by Hamas’s human-shield doctrine, was proof of Israeli sadism. The West itself was on trial by association. Support Israel and you support colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, every sin on the progressive ledger. Oppose Israel and you stand with the oppressed, even if the “oppressed” are openly calling for your own civilization’s erasure.
In that single inversion, both ideologies won. Islam got its theological victory celebrated in the streets of London and New York without having to hide behind “Islamism.” The radical left got its moral cover to mainstream conquest while pretending it was still fighting “oppressors.” Together they produced the perfect hybrid: jihad with a human-rights vocabulary, medieval barbarism dressed in academic jargon. Hamas’s crimes were not crimes; they were justice. Bin Laden’s massacre of Americans was not fanaticism; it was anti-imperialism. And any defense of Israel, or of the West that still dared to stand behind it, became proof of complicity in original sin.
The streets told the story. Palestinian flags flew beside rainbow banners and Che Guevara icons. Queers for Palestine marched beside people who would throw them from rooftops. Feminists chanted “globalize the intifada” while women in Gaza were still being stoned for “honor.” Marxists who had spent decades denouncing religion suddenly discovered that one particular religion was sacred when it killed Jews. The shared symbol had done its work. Israel had become the hinge on which two dying civilizations could briefly unite to tear down the one that still worked.
What happened after October 7 was not merely the repackaging of Islamic terrorism. It was the mutual legitimization of two irreconcilable projects that hate the West more than they hate each other. By claiming the same enemy, they claimed each other.
The Betrayal from Within
October 7 did not just expose the Red-Green alliance. It pulled in a third, far more dangerous partner: segments of the American right who call themselves patriots, America Firsters, realists, and defenders of Western civilization. These were not the usual suspects from the campus left or the Muslim diaspora. These were voices that had once stood against cultural surrender. And yet, when the moment came, many of them did exactly what their enemies hoped they would: they joined the chorus demonizing Israel, laundering jihad as “blowback,” and treating the Jewish state as the root of every American problem. How does a man who claims to love his country end up carrying water for the very forces that want to bury it?
They are useful idiots in the classic Leninist sense, except this time they wear MAGA hats and quote the Constitution. Some did it out of cowardice. Some out of something uglier. Some out of genuine delusion. And some because the money was too good. Each group reveals a different fracture in the right’s soul, and together they show how even those who swear they are defending the West can become the instruments of its undoing.
The largest contingent, and the most disappointing, were the cowards who once professed love for Israel. These were the people who had cheered the Abraham Accords, who had mocked the left’s obsession with “Zionist influence,” who had correctly identified radical Islam as the civilizational threat of our time. After October 7 they watched the propaganda machine go into overdrive: campus encampments, TikTok floods, legacy media footage of Gazan children framed as victims while Israeli children lay in morgues. Suddenly “pro-Israel” became a political liability. The polls shifted. The donor class wavered. The online right began calling anyone who defended Israel a “neocon” or a “dual citizen.” And these men folded. They did not deny the massacre, they simply stopped talking about it. They pivoted to “What about Gaza?” They discovered a sudden interest in “civilian casualties” they had never shown when Muslims slaughtered Christians in Nigeria or Yazidis in Iraq.
They told themselves they were being “consistent” or “anti-interventionist.” What they were really doing was dropping the one frontline state that still fights the enemy on its own soil. They failed to understand that Israel is not a favor the West does for Jews. Israel is the West’s proof of concept: a nation rebuilt from exile, armed with the Western values that Jerusalem gifted the world, and unapologetic self-defense. Abandon Israel in the face of this assault and you are not saving American blood or treasure. You are signaling to every jihadi and every decolonial theorist that the West no longer has the will to defend its own principles. You are handing the enemy the moral high ground they could never seize on their own.
Others needed no conversion. They had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. The old antisemitism, never fully extinguished on the fringes of the right, finally found respectable cover. For decades it had been socially radioactive to say the quiet part out loud. Now the left had made hatred of Israel the central moral cause of the age. Suddenly the same tropes that had once been confined to 4chan comment sections were being mainstreamed by Ivy League professors and CNN anchors: “Zionist lobby,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “dual loyalty.” The antisemites on the right did not have to invent new language. They simply borrowed the left’s. They could now post memes about “Zionist Occupied Government” and be retweeted by millions who thought they were merely criticizing “forever wars.” October 7 gave them the perfect alibi. They were not bigots; they were “anti-Zionists” fighting the same empire the progressives were fighting. The fact that their new allies would happily throw them into the same ditch once the Jews were gone never seemed to register. Hatred is a powerful solvent. It dissolves principle faster than any ideology.
A smaller but vocal group genuinely believed the propaganda. These were the sincere realists, the paleoconservatives, the libertarians who had spent years warning against neoconservative overreach. They watched the same footage the rest of us did, but they swallowed the narrative whole. Hamas’s atrocities became “resistance.” Israel’s response became “genocide.” They convinced themselves that if America simply cut off support for Israel, the jihad would evaporate and the Muslim world would suddenly become a partner in peace. They ignored fourteen centuries of doctrine. They ignored the Muslim Brotherhood’s own words. They ignored what every former Muslim from the Middle East has been screaming for years. Instead, they listened to Dave Smith explaining that the attack was “predictable” or Tucker Carlson wondering why we care so much about a country “the size of New Jersey.” They believed the Muslims when the Muslims told them the problem was Israel. They believed the leftists when the leftists told them the problem was “colonialism.” They flipped because they mistook tactical grievance for strategic truth. In doing so they became the perfect marks: patriots who thought they were saving America by betraying its strongest ally in the only theater where the enemy is already engaged.
Then there are the ones who were never sincere to begin with. The paid actors. Qatar, Turkey, and their Gulf proxies have spent billions building influence networks inside the American right. Think tanks quietly funded, influencers on retainer, podcasts with suspiciously large sponsorships. Some of these voices suddenly discovered a deep concern for Palestinian children right around the time their bank accounts got fatter. The money does not buy outright lies; it buys selective blindness. It buys the decision to platform certain guests, to soft-pedal certain doctrines, to treat Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than a death cult. Foreign funding has always been the quiet corruption of American discourse. After October 7 it simply found a new cause célèbre.
Finally, the most human and most tragic category: those who have nice Muslim friends. They know Ahmed from the gym, Fatima from the PTA, the friendly imam down the street who always smiles and talks about “peace.” These people cannot square the images of October 7 with the pleasant, assimilated Muslims in their daily lives. So they perform the mental gymnastics required: “My Muslims are different. This is just politics. This is not real Islam.” They have never read the Qur’an. They have never sat through a Friday sermon in Arabic. They have never asked their nice Muslim friends what they really think about apostates, about Jews, about the caliphate. Personal experience becomes the ultimate authority, and the doctrine is dismissed as “extremist.”
All of them, cowards, antisemites, true believers, paid voices, and the willfully naïve, share one fatal misunderstanding. They think the war is about Israel. It is not. Israel is the symbol, not the cause. The real war is between two competing projects, Islam’s total submission and the radical left’s total deconstruction, against the last remnants of the West that still refuses to kneel.
The Re-Zionization of the West
Zionism began in the late nineteenth century as a desperate Jewish political project: a movement of exiles who had been hunted across continents, stripped of their land, their dignity, their right to exist as a people. Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists were not dreaming of empire or supremacy. They were trying to survive. They wanted one small patch of earth where Jews could finally stop running, stop apologizing, stop dying for the crime of being Jewish. A nation-state. A refuge. A place to plant vineyards, build hospitals, and raise children who would not have to hide their names or their prayers.
That project succeeded beyond anything Herzl could have imagined. Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, from pogroms and expulsions, from the centuries of dhimmitude under Islamic rule. It became a miracle of resilience: a democracy in a sea of theocracies, a technological powerhouse in a desert of failed states, a people who turned swamps into cities and turned “never again” into actual policy. But somewhere along the way, Zionism outgrew its original skin. It stopped being merely a Jewish national movement and became something far larger, far more universal.
It became the Western civilization project itself.
Because what Israel defends on the front lines of the Middle East is not just Jewish land. It is the last unapologetic outpost of everything the West once claimed to believe in: the sovereignty of the individual, the rule of law rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, the right to defend yourself without begging permission from the international community, the refusal to submit to tribal theocracy or postmodern relativism. Israel does not apologize for its borders. It does not apologize for its strength. It does not pretend that every culture is equally equipped to build free societies. It simply exists, thrives, and wins, under the most hostile conditions imaginable. In doing so, it proves that the West’s ideas are not historical accidents. They are superior. They work. Even when surrounded by enemies who want to erase them.
This is why the alliance we have watched form since October 7 hates Israel with such primal intensity. It is not about settlements or checkpoints or the size of the country. It never was. Islam sees in Israel the theological insult of a dhimmi people who refused to stay dhimmi. The radical left sees in Israel the living rebuke to its entire worldview: a nation that rejects victimhood, rejects deconstruction, rejects the idea that history is nothing but a chain of oppressions. Both projects, Islam’s total submission and Marxism’s total dismantling, require the West to kneel. Israel refuses. And because it refuses in full view of the world, it has become the symbol of everything the West must still be if it wants to survive.
That is the re-Zionization of the West.
It is not about ethnicity. It is not about converting Christians or secularists into Jews. It is about rediscovering the unapologetic civilizational confidence that Zionism now embodies. The West was once Zionist in spirit long before the word existed. It was the civilization that believed that borders mattered, that strength was not a sin, that history could be bent toward justice instead of endless grievance. It was the civilization that was not ashamed of excellence. Israel is that same root system transplanted into hostile soil and still bearing fruit. To defend Israel today is to defend the West’s own possibility of renewal.
Look at what the enemies are really attacking when they attack “Zionism.” They are attacking the idea that a nation can prioritize its own citizens without being called supremacist. They are attacking the idea that some values, liberty, truth, self-defense, are worth dying for and not everything is negotiable. Islam demands submission; the left demands deconstruction. Israel says no to both. It is the living proof that the West can still say no.
The re-Zionization of the West needs is therefore not military or territorial. It is moral and civilizational. It means stopping the endless apologies. It means recognizing that not every migrant is a future citizen, that not every culture is compatible with open societies, that not every grievance is sacred. It means understanding that Israel’s fight against Hamas is not a “regional conflict” but the West’s fight against the same forces that are already inside Western cities, inside it’s universities, its governments, it’s streets.
Re-Zionization of the West is the recognition that the war is not about land in the Middle East. It is about the soul of the West itself. Israel is not asking the West to save it. Israel is showing the West what it must become again if it wants to save itself: clear-eyed, unashamed, willing to name the enemy and willing to defeat it. It is showing that a civilization can be both particular, rooted in its own history and people, and universal in its defense of the ideas that made it great.
Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.
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This is a brilliant article, well worth spreading around.
Dan this essay is simply outstanding. It is a profound synthesis, a historical survey, and a call to action. I cannot thank you enough!