West’s response to 9/11 expanded its decades long war on Muslims at home

The West built a security apparatus based on bigotry and paranoia where Muslims citizens were treated as foreign dangers in their own countries.

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

This is Part II of a two part analysis about the West’s decades long war against Muslims.

As the United States and other Western nations mark the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this week, they must confront a truth that has long been buried beneath patriotic ritual and political convenience. The Western response to 9/11 did not simply target foreign battlefields, it stigmatized and vilified Muslims living within Western societies themselves, deepening a war on those observing the Islamic faith, that had begun decades earlier. What followed was not only a military campaign abroad but a sweeping political, cultural, and legal assault on Muslim citizens at home.

Post‑9/11 policies made this domestic front unmistakable. Muslim communities in the US, Canada, and Western Europe were treated as internal enemies, subjected to suspicion, surveillance, and discriminatory laws that cast their faith as inherently incompatible with Western values. Anti‑Muslim narratives became embedded in government policy, shaping everything from immigration enforcement to counterterrorism doctrine. The War on Terror was not simply fought in Kabul, Baghdad, or Mogadishu—it was waged in airports, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and mosques across Western societies, where ordinary Muslims found themselves viewed not as neighbours or citizens but as potential threats.

In the US, this pattern did not begin in 2001, but rather has deep historical roots with the surveillance of Black Muslim communities stretching back to the 1930s, when the FBI targeted them with what the historical record describes as surveillance and infiltration campaigns. These efforts had nothing to do with terrorism, and shows that Islam was treated as a political danger long before it was framed as a national security threat. The post‑9/11 era did not invent this hostility—it expanded it, institutionalized it, and applied it to the millions of Muslims who made the US and other Western countries their home.

After 9/11, this domestic war expanded dramatically. Muslims across the US, Canada, the UK and other European nations were placed on secret watchlists and routinely flagged when attempting to board flights, despite having no criminal history and no evidence of wrongdoing. The scale of this targeting was staggering. In the US the Council on American‑Islamic Relations reported that of the watchlist entries they were able to review, they estimated that more than 1.47 million of those—over 98% of those on the list—were Muslims. Members of the American Muslim communities were also subjected to aggressive entrapment operations and a wave of anti‑Sharia legislation designed to portray their faith as inherently subversive and incompatible with Western values has been put forth by various state legislatures. Together, these policies created a climate in which Muslims were systematically dehumanized and the Islamic faith itself was cast as a threat.

In the aftermath of 9/11 new recruits within the FBI were taught from their first days that the enemy was not merely a fringe group of disaffected individuals and extremists, but Islam itself. This framing shaped every aspect of domestic counterterrorism after 9/11. Airport profiling of Muslims became routine, and FBI informants were dispatched into mosques to monitor ordinary religious life, treating worshippers as potential terrorists rather than citizens.

Massive surveillance programs—over which there were numerous lawsuits against the FBI by Muslims—blanketed Muslim communities, reducing people living their faith to data points in a security apparatus built on suspicion rather than real evidence. In this climate, Muslim citizens across the West were routinely treated as foreign dangers in their own countries, marked as suspects in a war that had little to do with genuine security and everything to do with racialized fear.

Islamophobia in Canadian politics

Canada mirrored this trajectory in its own political culture and policymaking. The country’s political establishment has long aligned itself with US and Israeli geopolitical interests, even when doing so meant supporting policies that harmed Muslim populations abroad and marginalized Muslim communities at home. As documented in the historical record, Canada has defended Israeli military actions in Gaza despite empty claims of being a defender of international law. In the case of Gaza it has ignored genocide warnings from dozens of human rights organizations, appointed individuals with well‑documented Islamophobic records to senior advisory positions, and consistently treated Muslim concerns as politically inconvenient. This pattern is not incidental or peripheral—it illustrates the structural nature of Islamophobia in this country. It reflects a political culture where anti-Muslim bigotry is normalized, where Muslim lives are routinely delegitimized, and where the rights and dignity of Muslim communities are willingly sacrificed to maintain geopolitical alliances and domestic political support from certain unsavoury elements of the electorate.

This structural Islamophobia was laid bare in early 2017 during the debate over Motion M‑103, a symbolic, non‑binding motion calling on Parliament to condemn Islamophobia and study systemic discrimination against Muslims. The motion landed on the House of Commons agenda only weeks after the murder of six Muslim worshippers at the Quebec City mosque, yet the Conservative Party and the Bloc Québécois mounted a vehement campaign against it. Their opposition stood in stark contrast to the House of Commons’ passage of a similar motion—M-587 condemning antisemitism—which was adopted in 2015 without controversy or partisan division. Unlike the antisemitism motion, M‑103 was met with a wave of lies and disinformation by right wing media commentators and political voices. Conservative politicians falsely claimed it would suppress Charter‑protected freedom of expression, criminalize criticism of Islam, or even “bring Sharia law into Canada,” despite the motion having no legal force and containing no language that could restrict rights. The hysteria surrounding M‑103 revealed how readily anti‑Muslim fearmongering could be weaponized for political gain, and how even symbolic recognition of anti‑Muslim hatred was treated as a threat to the nation’s identity. It exposed a political culture in which Muslim suffering—even after a mass murder—was minimized, dismissed, or turned into an opportunity for partisan exploitation.

And then there was the reaction to the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s Special Representative to Combat Islamophobia in February 2023—a role eliminated by Prime Minister Mark Carney in February 2026. It revealed how deeply anti‑Muslim prejudice is embedded at the highest levels of Canadian politics. Quebec’s government, the Bloc Québécois, and the Conservative Party all demanded her resignation because she criticized Quebec’s Bill 21—a so-called “secularism” law rooted in anti‑Muslim bigotry—in an op-ed she co-wrote with Jewish community activist Bernie Farber. The leader of the Bloc even demanded the role be eliminated entirely, despite Muslims being the only faith community in Canada to be victims of hate motivated murders on three occasions in 2017 in Quebec City, in 2020 in Toronto, and in 2021 in London, Ontario.

This political hostility is not accidental. It reflects a culture in which Islamophobia is normalized and weaponized, especially when it aligns with political nationalism or electoral agendas.

Canada’s complicity in the war against Muslims is not abstract or distant, it is written directly into the suffering of Canadian citizens whose lives were shattered by policies rooted in Islamophobia and unquestioning alignment with US security doctrine. In the aftermath of 9/11 Maher Arar was detained and tortured in Syria after Canadian officials shared false intelligence with the US that branded him a threat. Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmad El Maati were also illegally extradited to prisons in Middle East countries, where they were tortured because Canadian agencies fed foreign governments misinformation that cast innocent men as dangerous extremists. Then there is Omar Khadr, a Canadian child soldier abandoned by his own government and left to languish in America’s Guantanamo Bay prison, where he was repeatedly tortured with Canadian complicity, despite Canada’s legal obligations under the UN child soldier protocol.

These cases were not accidents or isolated failures. They were the predictable outcome of a political culture that treated Muslim citizens as expendable in the pursuit of geopolitical alignment and domestic political convenience. As the historical record makes clear, the fact that the government officials who were responsible for the horrors these men suffered were not held legally accountable is a stain on Canada that will never be washed away.

This pattern of discrimination is not confined to foreign policy or intelligence operations. It is embedded in Canadian law itself. Quebec’s above-mentioned Bill 21 stands as one of the most explicit examples of state‑sanctioned Islamophobia in Canada. By banning hijab‑wearing Muslim women from teaching, policing, or serving as judges, the law targets a single religious, stripping them of opportunities and excluding them from public life. It violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, yet federal leaders have repeatedly refused to challenge it, or use federal powers under the Constitution to overturn it, choosing political expediency over defending the fundamental rights of Canadians. Bill 21 makes clear that Islamophobia in Canada is not a fringe sentiment or the product of a few extremists—it is woven into legislation, upheld by political elites, and justified through right wing narratives that portray Muslim identity as incompatible with the nation’s values. In Canada, as in the broader Western world, Islamophobia is not merely a social prejudice, it is a structural reality that Muslims have to navigate on a daily basis.

The Palestinian exception

Nowhere is the war on Muslims more visible than in Gaza (over 90% of Palestinians are Muslim). Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the enclave—supported diplomatically, militarily, and politically by the United States, Canada and other Western allies—is the most transparent and documented genocide of the modern era. Yet Western governments treat Palestinian suffering as politically inconvenient rather than morally urgent.

Palestinians are uniquely denied the rights and protections routinely extended to other oppressed peoples globally. Western leaders generally condemn human rights abuses everywhere except Palestine. Civilian deaths are publicly and officially mourned everywhere except Gaza. This is not accidental. It is ideological and it is based in a racist mindset.

Decades of Israeli hasbara propaganda, repeated ad nauseum by Western media, have conditioned Western publics to see Palestinians as extremists and Islam as incompatible with Western civilization. The Israeli propaganda effort, beginning in the late 1960s, aggressively promoted narratives portraying Muslims in the Middle East as irrational enemies bent on destroying Western civilization. These narratives aligned perfectly with Western geopolitical interests, resulting in the “Palestinian exception”—the clearest expression of how Western political culture has been conditioned to treat Muslim lives as less than human.

The war on Muslims is not limited to Western foreign policy, it has become a global phenomenon. Across multiple regions, Muslim populations are facing systematic persecution that mirrors, reinforces, and is emboldened by Western silence. In north-west China, millions of Uyghurs have been interned in a vast network of concentration camps as the Chinese Communist Party tries to erase their faith and culture. In India, Hindu nationalist politics have fuelled escalating violence and discrimination against Muslims, with some political and religious leaders openly calling for the genocide of more than 200 million people. In Myanmar, Rohingya Muslims have endured a forty‑year slow‑burning genocide marked by mass displacement, state‑sanctioned atrocities, and more than 500 Rohingya communities being wiped from the map.

These violations of basic humanity have all drawn rhetorical concern from Western governments—statements of “deep worry,” calls for “restraint,” and carefully worded condemnations that never translate into meaningful action. Yet the very nations that claim to defend the “international rule of law” have done virtually nothing to stop the brutalization, displacement, and extermination of Muslims in these countries. Their condemnations are performative, not protective, signaling disapproval without imposing consequences. In practice, Western inaction has become a form of permission, allowing these regimes to continue their campaigns of repression with impunity.

The West’s refusal to uphold international law and defend basic human rights is part of the problem. Domestic anti-Muslim policies in the United States, Canada, and Europe that stigmatize Muslims, through surveillance, discriminatory laws, and narratives that cast Islam as a civilizational threat, send a powerful signal to other governments that persecuting their Muslim minority populations is perfectly acceptable. When Western democracies normalize Islamophobia at home, they give license to regimes with Muslim minority communities to escalate their own campaigns of repression. The global war on Muslims is not merely tolerated by the West, it is enabled by the very policies Western nations impose on their own Muslim populations.

Twenty‑five years after 9/11, the West must confront a truth it has spent decades avoiding—the War on Terror has in reality been a war on Muslims—militarily, politically, culturally, and economically. It has been waged in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, in Tripoli and Damascus, and in the rubble that was once Gaza. But it has also been waged in Western airports, classrooms, workplaces, and legislatures, where Muslim citizens have been treated as suspects, outsiders, and threats within their own countries.

This war has reshaped global politics, destabilized entire societies, and normalized levels of violence and persecution that would have been unthinkable had the victims not been overwhelmingly Muslim. It has made Islamophobia politically and socially acceptable wherever Muslims are a minority. It is a bigotry that crosses borders, transcends political parties, and binds together governments that otherwise share little in common.

To continue pretending that this is anything other than a war on Muslims is to perpetuate injustice and inflict continual suffering. As the West marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks it is time to name this war and end it, fully, honestly, and without equivocation.

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