25 years after 9/11, we still refuse to confront what was lost

Twenty‑five years after the 9/11 attacks we must confront what was lost—the millions of lives taken afterward, the freedoms eroded, the societies destroyed, and the tens of millions of refugees created. 

By Fareed Khan  
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a date impossible to overlook. For days, media outlets have flooded the airwaves with retrospectives, personal testimonies, archival footage, and solemn commentary. And today—on a day seared into our collective memory—the coverage has been relentless, wall‑to‑wall from morning to night. A quarter‑century milestone carries weight, and the attention is understandable. But what is striking—what is damning—is what remains absent. The Western political and media establishment has spent twenty‑five years telling one story about 9/11 while burying another.

Nowhere in the coverage are there adjacent stories about the more than 4.5 to 4.7 million Muslims killed in the US-led “war on terror,” according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Nowhere is it acknowledged that the West’s military campaigns shattered six Muslim-majority societies—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen—leaving behind destabilized states, mass displacement, and generational trauma. The same research project estimates that 38 million people, overwhelmingly Muslim, were forced from their homes and became refugees or internally displaced persons as a direct consequence of these wars.

These numbers are not footnotes. They are not abstractions. They represent human beings—families, communities, entire societies—destroyed in the name of security, vengeance, and geopolitical dominance. Yet in the commemorations of 9/11, they are treated as if they never existed.

The erasure is not accidental. It is political.

Western governments, including Canada’s, have never reckoned with the scale of destruction they helped unleash. They have never acknowledged their role in killing millions of Muslims or in destabilizing entire regions across the Middle East and North Africa. They have not admitted that their policies helped create the conditions for extremist groups like ISIS to flourish. And they certainly have not confronted the moral catastrophe of a war that has lasted a quarter century and shows no sign of ending.

Instead, the narrative remains frozen in time, one where the West is victim, the West is the defender or peace, the West is the righteous actor. Meanwhile, the millions of Muslim victims of Western military power are rendered invisible.

This erasure has consequences far beyond foreign policy. It has reshaped the political culture of Western democracies and indeed the world, and has vilified the West in most Muslims majority societies.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Canada, the United States, and Europe also embraced sweeping national security laws that expanded surveillance, curtailed civil liberties, and normalized state intrusion into everyday life. Rights once taken for granted were quietly stripped away. Entire communities—Muslim communities—found themselves under suspicion, monitored, and targeted. Mosques were infiltrated, Muslim charities were shut down, and Muslim families were surveilled. People were detained without charge, and in some cases sent overseas to be tortured based on false information.

A generation of Muslims in the West has grown up under this shadow. They live with a constant, gnawing anxiety, a fear that the next terrorist attack committed by extremists who pervert Islam’s teachings, will once again make all two billion Muslims around the world the enemy. They know that after every attack, no matter where it occurs, they will be asked to condemn, explain, apologize, and justify their existence. They know that right wing politicians and pundits will rush to paint them as a threat, as outsiders, as a problem to be managed. This fear is not irrational. It is learned from lived experience.

For twenty‑five years, Western political discourse has treated Muslim lives as expendable abroad and suspect at home. The value of Muslim life seems to evaporate the moment Western interests are invoked. Civilian casualties are dismissed as “collateral damage.” Refugees are framed as burdens. Muslim citizens are treated as potential radicals. And when Muslims in the West do speak out, when they demand justice, accountability, or recognition of their suffering, they are either ignored or vilified.

The result is a perpetual war culture. The “war on terror” did not end. It metastasized into a cancer in the heart of Western geopolitical discourse. It became a permanent feature of Western politics, a justification for endless military action, endless surveillance, endless suspicion. It became a lens through which Muslims are viewed not as neighbours or fellow citizens, but as potential threats.

Yet the truth is clear. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide condemn terrorism and attacks on civilians. They have done so repeatedly, publicly, and unequivocally. And collectively, Muslims have been the primary victims of terrorism committed by extremist groups such as ISIS, Al‑Qaeda, and the Taliban—groups responsible for severe harm, loss of life, and human rights violations. These groups have slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims—more than 70,000 in Pakistan alone—destroyed Muslim communities, and targeted Muslim religious institutions and governments. Their violence is a betrayal of Islam, not an expression of it.

And yet this goes unmentioned in the West as the lives of those lost on September 11, 2001 are acknowledged and commemorated annually. Instead, the narrative remains locked in a simplistic binary—Western innocence versus Muslim threat. It is a narrative that erases history, absolves Western governments of responsibility for the carnage they have inflicted, and perpetuates Islamophobia at every level of society.

Twenty‑five years after 9/11, we must confront what was lost—not only the lives lost on that day, but the millions of lives taken afterward. We must confront the freedoms eroded, the societies destroyed, the refugees created, and a political culture warped by paranoia and vengeance. We must confront the fact that Western democracies have built a national security state that increasingly resembles the dystopia George Orwell warned about in his novel 1984.

Commemorating 9/11 without acknowledging the full human cost of the response is not remembrance—it is selective amnesia. And selective amnesia is dangerous because it allows injustice to continue, it allows prejudice to deepen, and it allows constant war to become normalized.

If the West truly wants to honour the memory of 9/11, it must finally confront the outcome of the West’s response to the attack. It must acknowledge the millions of Muslim lives lost. It must recognize the suffering of the displaced. It must dismantle the culture of suspicion and surveillance that has defined Muslim existence in the West for a generation.

Only then can we begin to imagine a future not defined by perpetual war, fear, and erasure.

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