What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us - After 25 years, it is time for the West to face the true cause of 9/11

In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on earth.

Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. “I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”

There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. There is only a young Muslim man, in a German apartment, arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come. The will was witnessed by fellow believers at the al-Quds mosque, where Atta prayed in Arabic, grew his beard, and where, four years later, he would meet the men he would die with.

The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.

Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed both sensible and necessary. After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience, and belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point.

Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism. If Muslim populations suffered from a democracy deficit, elections would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, or diplomacy.

American leaders then added a second layer of denial. President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition.

After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.

As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. The failure of the Western secular faith in material reality to transform these shattered societies was dismissed as an accident, or as a consequence of how broken and needy these societies actually were. Surely the faith would prove its worth once the refugees arrived in America.

As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. By 2026, NYC had become a parade ground for Islamic terror groups, run by a foreign-born Muslim mayor who supported “globalizing the intifada” and whose wife celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Israelis. Nor were such attitudes unusual in a city where Muslim immigrants nearly outnumbered the city’s native Jewish population. A Pew Research poll released in July 2026 showed that 44% of Muslims in America held a favorable view of Hamas.

Stated differently, if America and the West went to war against an elite vanguard of Muslim extremists who used terrorism as its principal tool, it ended 25 years later with a self-inflicted defeat caused by misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible demographics that could be utilized by that vanguard, as well as by other political vectors, both domestic and foreign. After failing to defeat Muslim terrorists abroad, the West now finds itself fighting the same enemies at home, while watching their own countries transformed by the mass immigration of people who decidedly do not share the common Western fantasy that religion and culture are the source of merely superficial differences. The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside the gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it.

Twenty-five years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the United States needs to do more than commemorate a past atrocity. It should undertake a serious stocktaking: not only of the threat posed by violent Islamism, but of the wider threat ecosystem that has matured around it in the quarter-century since 2001. The central reality is that Islamism was never only a matter of terrorist cells and spectacular attacks. It has also been a civilizational project rooted in the memory of the caliphate, the ambition to reorder politics, society, and law according to Islamic norms, and the long-term effort to build institutional footholds inside Western societies.

I can speak to this ambition from my own personal experience, which in some ways parallels that of Mohamed Atta. When I was a Somali refugee teenager living in Nairobi, Kenya, at the age of 15 and 16, I became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Being a member of the movement is hardly like becoming a member of the YWCA or the Girl Scouts. You don’t pay a membership fee, or wear a uniform. Rather, you undergo a process of comprehensive self-transformation, in which you are taught to discard the layered identities of family, clan, region, and nationality in favor of a single, universalizing identity as a Muslim believer—a member of the ummah.

As an eager young proselyte, it was no longer enough for me to pray and fast at the appropriate times and to identify myself as a Muslim, in the way that my father and mother had raised me. Our teachers were serious people, Africans who had been trained abroad, in Saudi Arabia and in Iran. They required us to read the Quran and the Hadith, and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, and to analyze the texts, in order to deepen our faith. Under their tutelage, Islam was transformed from a matter of customary practice to something deeply felt, which we could argue without fear, and used as a weapon against unbelievers. One of the main ways that we were taught to practice our faith was to clarify the relationship between ourselves as Muslims and non-Muslims, whom we defined as our enemies.

Now Kenya at that time was a Christian country, and most of my classmates were Christians or animists. Some of them were my friends, whom I walked home with after school, and shared food and confidences with, as was normal among teenage girls, regardless of sectarian influences. When I protested to my teachers that “I can’t see my friend as an enemy,” I was told, “no, you have the duty to convert her, and if she refuses to be converted then she’s your enemy.”

These newfound enemies, my classmates, were only minor, local enemies, though. My teachers also introduced me to the greater enemies of Islam—the great Satan, being the United States of America, and the little Satan, being Israel, the Jewish state. A distinction was made between Israel as a state and Jews, who embodied a type of metaphysical evil. The Jew was synonymous with the word Satan. He was behind all evil things, and had designated Islam and Muslims as his enemy, and was hell-bent on destroying us all. In all of our prayers, and in all of our dua is the supplication that God would destroy and eliminate the Jews.

Fast-forward to my life in the West, in Holland, where I enrolled in the University of Leiden to study political science. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was working for a think tank within Holland’s main center-left party, the equivalent of the Democratic Party in the United States. The party leadership, made up of people I admired, was trying to make sense of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon through the categories that were familiar to them. The attack was a response to the injustice of U.S. policy in the Middle East more generally, or to the Israeli-Palestinian question in particular. Yes, the attack was brutal and inhumane, but at the same time it was important to recognize the injustice of American foreign policy, which had impelled the terrorists’ actions. Meanwhile, it was being reported that Mohamed Atta was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The other 9/11 terrorists were also members of the Muslim Brotherhood, we discovered, in the form of a terrorist organization called al- Qaida.

I knew something about the Muslim Brotherhood. I also knew that the attacks had nothing to do with the explanations that these educated men and women took as gospel. Having been steeped in the same doctrines that motivated the terrorists, I understood that what had just happened was civilizational—a new chapter in a conflict that had been brewing for decades, in which Muslims were the deliberate aggressors. Even more shockingly, I knew that the Brotherhood believed that the West was weak, and that they were strong. Osama bin Laden had launched his attack not out of desperation and weakness, but in the belief that he was an agent of history, and that he would win.

All of this was clear to me from my own experience as a teenage believer in Africa. Yet for the people who were close to the levers of power, the ones I could reach, my account of who the attackers were, and what the purpose was behind their “raid,” clearly sounded like science fiction. How could these cave-dwellers imagine they were a superior civilizational force? Time and time again, I saw these same people, and their equivalents throughout the West, discard the plain explanation of who their enemies were and what they wanted in favor of the same condescending belief that all their foes wanted was more jobs, a better economy, a taste of the luxuries of the West, plus a righting of historical wrongs to soothe their primitive sense of honor. Subsequent encounters with the enemy, whose separate yet internally coherent worldview they could never acknowledge, let alone understand, therefore always seemed to take them by surprise.

Honor killings? That type of thing doesn’t happen here. Or maybe it used to happen here but that was a long time ago. Then a series of honor killings would happen in a Western European city, and be reported on in the press, and the politicians would always react with the same honest surprise. Here? It didn’t make sense. How could anyone know? The same was true of the grooming gangs in Britain, and the systematic assaults by immigrant men against non-Muslim women, which were met at first with flat denial and then with the same unfeigned surprise. We didn’t know. How could something so terrible have happened? They knew, but they didn’t know, because knowing would explode their own sense of security and civilizational superiority which grew more fragile by the year.

Twenty-five years later, ignorance is no longer a tenable excuse. Yet even among those who acknowledge that violent Muslim extremists are not simply reacting to injuries inflicted by the West, and that Muslims themselves were some of history’s greatest colonizers, a substantial blind spot remains. We in the West are so fixated on the military arm of the Islamist movement that we often fail to pay attention to the methods of institutional capture and demographic transformation that are equally part of the Islamist strategy. This habit of denial is particularly acute among Americans on both the left and the right, who have convinced themselves that Muslim immigration and deliberate infiltration of institutions in order to spread their beliefs and normalize their practices, many of which seek to limit or destroy the freedoms on which Western societies are built, is strictly a European problem. What’s happening in America, they tell me, is not dramatic enough to warrant any kind of serious change. Muslim communities have a constitutional right to grow and expand, and if they win elections then they win elections. What I hear is the same inability that I heard in Europe 25 years ago to accept the magnitude of the threat posed by a hostile foe, or even to admit the reality of cultural differences.

The reality is that we don’t have another 25 years to get this right. We don’t even have another 10 years. The strategic environment confronting Western nations has changed dramatically. The West now confronts a broader hybrid battlespace in which hostile states and movements rely less on classical warfare and more on cyber operations, disinformation, migration pressure, institutional subversion, and the exploitation of domestic polarization, facilitated not only by tech platforms, but also by the rise of a secular leftist vanguard that has forged an alliance with politicized Muslim cadres that have learned to speak the common language of third-world sectarianism in order to mobilize migrant communities. Each side of the so-called red-green alliance that is now contesting elections not only in Europe but also from New York City to Michigan no doubt believes that it is using the other in order to gain power. But only one half of that alliance is likely to win. I personally would bet on the side that has an army of 1.6 billion believers that it can potentially mobilize, backed by the wealth of the world’s leading oil producers, over the university students from comfortable homes for whom politics means dorm-room banners of Karl Marx and Che Guevara. By the time they find out otherwise, it will probably be too late.

The question before us as a society is no longer simply whether America can defeat terrorist organizations. It is whether the American republic can still perceive and answer an interconnected civilizational challenge in which Islamist ambition, hostile foreign powers, demographic strain, cultural capture, and epistemic disorder now reinforce one another. We need to see the Islamist threat in its full civilizational depth and then decide what must be done to preserve the liberal-constitutional order without allowing the freedoms we cherish and celebrate to become instruments of our undoing. 9/11/2026 must be understood as another fork-in-the-road moment in the life of the American republic, as consequential as the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The original lesson of 9/11 was not merely that America had enemies willing to kill civilians on a vast scale. It was that Western elites following the end of the Cold War had failed to take seriously the idea that the liberal order they knew could be seriously challenged. After all, the West had defeated the Soviet Empire, armed with a massive nuclear arsenal and perhaps one-third of the world’s landmass, containing vast resources, without firing a shot. Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History,” now commonly derided, was in fact almost universally accepted as an account not only of reality, but also of the future. A mass embrace of communism after the Soviet collapse seemed as unlikely as the mass resurgence of Nazism that leftists liked to warn against at election time. The suggestion that religion might displace secular ideologies as a mass organizing principle, let alone become the basis on which states would organize themselves, seemed like an even more absurd reversion to phenomena that history had left behind, like blaming witches for crop failures or accusing Jews of drinking the blood of gentile children.

It wasn’t that Western observers were deaf to the logical, organizational, and civilizational dimensions of Islamist movements. What was lacking was the imagination required to believe that they might triumph. After all, Western liberalism, backed by the advent of ever-more-powerful digital technologies, had decisively won the contest between East and West, otherwise known as the Cold War. Western academics, nearly all of them on the left, and many of whom had favored the eventual victory of the Soviet Union and its associated third-world revolutionary movements, therefore emphasized the social, organizational, and political dimensions of Islamist movements as positives—as precursors to democratic political action. Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRGC in Iran, were understood in a strictly Western framework, as evolving Western social democratic parties or actors with leftist characteristics whose more culturally specific features might be safely overlooked, the direction of their future evolution being foreordained by the secular-leaning arc of history. Dwelling on culturally specific features for more than the required minimum amount of time would be to see culture as perhaps determinative, a view that might quickly approximate racism.

The idea that history was moving in one and only one direction, which was known and agreed upon by all enlightened Western academics and policymakers, made it all but impossible for even the most hard-headed members of the elite to imagine so-called “ordinary” Muslims as an internal threat. Furthermore, in a more subtle way, it caused them to overlook the fact that more radical Muslim groups always work within the framework of a Muslim political base, whether in their own countries or in the West.

Message from Jim Robinson:

Dear FRiends,

We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.

If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you,

Jim

So the question is: what's the root cause? Sounds like a trick question to me.

The root cause was...still is...and always will be:

TO KILL ALL INFIDELS

“Mohamed Atta loathed skyscrapers. Newsweek reported that he viewed the emergence of tall buildings in Egypt as an odious surrender to Western values. The most fitting memorial to the victims of the World Trade Center attack is to build the most breathtaking skyscraper in the world on top of Mohamed Atta’s corpse.”

Ann Coulter - June 7, 2002

Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.

It is what it is.................

Atta no doubt went to Hamburg as the treasured, pampered son who all his life was told he was special and of course brilliant. When he got to Hamburg in addition to being culturally bewildered, socially isolated , not only was he forced to seek out other Muslims for emotional and social comfort but probably found he was not up to the intellectual demands of STEM courses at Technical University. Its easy to see how he would project his frustrations on hatred of the West. Wonder if like the surviving jumpers at the Golden Gate Bridge, he had a moment of futile doubt as that jet slammed into the WTC.

Islam is death. It really is that simple. And a simple mind like “W” Bush couldn’t even see that. Idiot will long be remembered as the one who pulled the trigger to kill the greatest nation in the history of the Earth by letting all those muslims in and sacrificing our blood and money for the next 30 years on that god forsaken sh*thole area in the mideast.

Excellent, truthful, exactly right article. Why people can not see this blows my mind. My dad, a 50+ year gospel preacher and missionary to Southeast Asia said, “islam is the most dangerous religion on the face of the earth.”

People don’t know Islam, even now, 25 years after 9/11.

It’s not a “peaceful religion “. It’s a murderous cult........

People don’t know Islam, even now, 25 years after 9/11.

It’s not a “peaceful religion “. It’s a murderous cult........

Islam is a fourteen-hundred year-old political movement, founded by a crazy man and child rapist, pretending to be a religion.

I recently finished reading the Quran. I'm trying to write an essay about it, though I don't yet know to whom I might submit it to for publication. Everything I had heard about it, how much it encourages violence, is not only true but it's more than I was expecting.

As others have said on this thread, Islam is a death cult.

There are instances of blindness throughout human history. Not being able to see Islam for what it is is a current one. Humans hold onto beliefs even when they see conclusive evidence it is wrong. The obvious instance is when debating a leftist. Show them logically they are wrong and you get called a fascist or racist.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.