This past Saturday, while visiting my parents for Rosh Hashanah dinner, I came across some light holiday reading: The 9/11 Commission Report.
My Jewish New Year had everything. Apples, honey, and the complete federal investigation into the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
I had always heard the report “reads like a thriller,” so I started skimming the 567-page slab of federal trauma as one does.
Two things stood out to me right away.
The lead conspirators were not some ignorant wackadoodles. They came from stable, highly educated, well-to-do families.
They were antisemitic AF.
Here’s a snapshot of some of the commission’s findings:
I had always understood 9/11 as simply Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hating America, which of course had the intellectual sophistication of pointing at the Titanic and saying boat, iceberg, sad.
What I hadn’t understood was how elaborate and explicitly antisemitic the worldview behind the attack actually was— and not from some withdrawn loons but from people with a strong western education.
Several of the central hijackers befriended each other not in Afghanistan but as young expats in Hamburg, Germany. Mohamed Atta was studying urban planning. Marwan al-Shehhi studied engineering. Ziad Jarrah studied aircraft engineering. Ramzi Binalshibh was a former bank clerk. Even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the attacks and one of bin Laden’s key co-conspirators, had a mechanical-engineering degree from an American university. These were not some uneducated mountain hermits.
It is almost obscenely ironic that the worldview of the core four took shape in a country that had spent the previous half-century reckoning with what can happen when grievance, conspiracy and antisemitism are assembled into a total explanation for why your people have been humiliated.
Like, really? Germany? We are doing this shit again in Germany?
The report found that al-Qaeda had three central grievances behind the attacks:
Muslim humiliation. Bin Laden believed the Islamic world had been weakened by Western powers, namely American troops in Saudi Arabia. To bin Laden, this was basically sacrilege.
America. He saw the United States as most responsible through its military presence in Saudi Arabia and alliances with governments across the Middle East.
Israel. He treated Israel’s existence and America’s enormous support for it as both a cause and a symbol of that humiliation.
That was the basic pitch bin Laden used to recruit his co-conspirators. Islam had been humiliated, America was the evil empire, Israel was its big swinging dick, and violence was the answer.
Normal stuff!
The scary thing is that, 25 years later, some of bin Laden’s grievances have been sanitized for a younger generation.
You can hear versions of them all over TikTok. America is an evil empire. Its wars are not merely disastrous but proof of something rotten at the country’s core. Israel is even worse, and America’s support for it makes us complicit. The political system cannot fix any of this because the political system is the problem.
