25 years after 9/11, the millions of innocent Muslims killed in the “war on terror” still go unremembered

Muslim victims of US-led wars felt terror no different from that felt by those in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Their deaths were just as violent, yet their suffering is treated as something to be buried, ignored, or rationalized.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article is also available on Substack.

Twenty‑five years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans will once again gather in New York City at the side of the former World Trade Centre, at the Pentagon, and in the quiet fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania to honour the 2,977 lives lost on that terrible day. The ceremonies will be solemn and nationally televised. Political leaders will speak of unity, resilience, and the sanctity of innocent life. News networks will replay archival footage of the Twin Towers burning before they collapsed, they will interview survivors, and remind the public of the trauma that reshaped the country.

Yet as these commemorations unfold, another truth—far more uncomfortable, far more morally urgent—remains absent from the public consciousness. For a quarter century, the United States and its allies have waged a global campaign that has killed more than 4.5 million Muslims, made refugees of more than 38 million, and devastated entire societies from Iraq to Libya to Pakistan. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, US‑led wars since 2001 have killed Muslims on a genocidal scale and created one of the largest refugee crises in modern history. These victims receive no annual remembrance, no televised tributes, no official mourning. Their deaths exist in a political void.

This disparity is not accidental. It reflects a hierarchy of human worth embedded in Western political culture—a hierarchy in which Muslim lives are treated as expendable, forgettable, and undeserving of grief.

A war on terror that became a war on Muslims

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, fear and anger swept across the United States, creating a political climate in which grief quickly fused with militarism and vengeance. Rather than limiting its response to the perpetrators of the attacks—Al‑Qaeda—the US launched a decades long global military campaign that rapidly expanded far beyond any plausible definition of counterterrorism. Afghanistan was invaded and occupied for two decades. Iraq was invaded and its civilian infrastructure destroyed. Drone warfare was normalized in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Libya was bombed into a failed state. Syria was destabilized. Across each of these nations, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians who had no connection to the crimes of September 11th.

The human toll of these decisions has been staggering. In Iraq alone, more than one million Iraqis were killed as a direct result of the US invasion and occupation in the first few years of the Iraq War, according to multiple studies, with later estimates placing the number of Iraqi dead as high as 2.4 million by 2018. The US drone program—marketed as a precise, surgical tool—killed 40,201 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen in extrajudicial murders, including at least 25,835 civilians whose deaths were never acknowledged by the American administrations responsible. When all theatres of conflict are considered together, US‑led wars since 2001 have killed millions of people, with death toll numbers that dwarf the 9/11 death toll by more than 1,500 times, yet they occupy no space in Western public memory.

Despite the scale of this devastation, the victims of the “war on terror” remain unnamed, unacknowledged, and ungrieved by those that killed them. Their deaths are treated not as human tragedies but as abstractions—statistics buried in academic studies, collateral damage rationalized as unfortunate but necessary, and lives erased from the moral landscape of Western political consciousness. This erasure is not incidental. It reflects a deeper ideological pattern in which Muslim suffering is rendered invisible, and the humanity of Muslims is consistently devalued in Western discourse.

How the war on terror reshaped global norms

The expansion of the war on terror reshaped global norms around acceptable violence, legality, and accountability. It normalized forms of warfare that operate outside the laws of war and the international rule of law—drone strikes conducted without due process, assassinations based on secret intelligence, and military operations justified by elastic definitions of “imminent threat.” It entrenched a worldview in which entire Muslim‑majority societies were framed as breeding grounds for extremism, making mass violence against their citizens not only permissible but also justifiable.

This worldview created a geopolitical environment where Western military action became both continuous and unrestrained. It allowed governments to wage war indefinitely, without public debate, without legislative scrutiny, and without acknowledging the toll of innocent human lives. It also ensured that Muslim casualties would remain invisible, because acknowledging them would require confronting the moral consequences of policies pursued for decades, and facing calls for those who instigated the attacks to be held legally accountable.

The normalization of this violence also produced a dangerous precedent. It signaled to other nations that the erosion of international law was acceptable if framed through the language of counterterrorism. Countries with their own political agendas began adopting similar tactics—mass surveillance, extrajudicial killings, indefinite detention, torture—claiming they were merely following the example set by the world’s most powerful democracies. In effect, the war on terror became a global template for repression, and weakened the very institutions designed to protect civilians, thereby undermining the credibility of human rights frameworks, and emboldened authoritarian governments to pursue their own campaigns of violence under the guise of “national security.” The result was a world in which the boundaries of lawful warfare blurred, accountability mechanisms collapsed, and the suffering of Muslim populations became both normalized and politically inconsequential.

The inequality of grief

Every September 11th, American leaders have spoken of the “innocence” of the 9/11 victims and the “evil” of terrorism. They speak of the “duty to remember.” But they do not speak of the Afghan wedding parties bombed by US aircraft killing hundreds at a time. They do not speak of the Iraqi families obliterated by US missiles resulting in children losing their limbs along with their parents and siblings. They do not speak of the Pakistani grandmother killed while picking vegetables in her garden with her grandchildren being blown to bits. They do not speak of the Yemeni children killed in drone strikes, their body parts scattered across an obliterated playground.

These victims experienced terror no different from the terror felt by those in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Their deaths were just as violent, just as sudden, just as undeserved. Yet their suffering is treated as politically inconvenient—something to be buried, ignored, or rationalized.  This is not merely neglect. It is a form of dehumanization.

The inequality of grief is one of the most revealing moral failures of the past quarter century. It exposes the racial hierarchy embedded in Western political life—a hierarchy in which the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans are commemorated annually with solemn ceremony, while the deaths of more than 4.5 million Muslims are treated as mere background noise. It reveals a profound hypocrisy in Western claims to value human rights and universal dignity. And it demonstrates how easily the language of counterterrorism can be weaponized to justify mass violence against entire populations deemed foreign, threatening, or expendable.

The devaluation of Muslim life

Why is there no annual commemoration for the millions of Muslims killed in the war on terror? Why is there no official recognition for the 38 million refugees created by the US led war on terror? Why aren’t the names of any of these victims carved into memorials, and why are none of their families interviewed by Western news organizations? Why are their stories not taught in schools?

The answer is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Their lives are not valued equally, neither by the governments who caused their death nor by the Western media organizations that dutifully tell the stories of 9/11 victims while ignoring the story of the barbarism of those who joined the US in its global war.

Ignoring the millions of innocent victims of America’s war on terror implies that their lives have lesser value in Western eyes than those of American victims of terrorism. The fact that these victims are overwhelmingly Muslim underscores how deeply anti‑Muslim bigotry has become embedded not only in Western political culture but also in the news media systems that shape public perception. This devaluation did not emerge organically. It was constructed—deliberately, repeatedly, and strategically—through a political narrative that required a compliant media infrastructure to make war palatable to the public.

 

For a war of such scale to be justified, sustained, and normalized, it had to be sold. And it could only be sold if the public was conditioned to see Muslim lives as inherently less worthy of empathy, protection, or moral consideration. That conditioning required a steady stream of Islamophobic narratives—stories that framed Muslims as threats, as extremists, as enemies of civilization. Political leaders supplied the rhetoric while media institutions amplified it.

This partnership between political power and media influence ensured that the dehumanization of Muslims was not merely a by‑product of war but a prerequisite for it. By saturating public discourse with narratives and images of violence committed by a tiny minority of extremists, while erasing the far greater violence inflicted on Muslim civilians by Western militaries, the media helped construct a worldview in which Muslim suffering was invisible, Muslim death was inevitable, and Muslim humanity was negotiable.

This inequality of grief reveals something profound. It reveals racism, because the victims are overwhelmingly non‑white. It reveals inhumanity, because their suffering is treated as collateral damage rather than human tragedy. And it reveals hypocrisy, because the West claims to champion human rights while ignoring the largest civilian death toll of the 21st century.  If the West truly believed in universal human dignity, it would commemorate all victims of terror—whether killed by non‑state actors or by Western militaries. 

Real equality would mean acknowledging that the terror experienced by a child in Fallujah is no different from the terror experienced by a worker in the North Tower. Real equality would mean recognizing that the grief of a Somali mother is no different from the grief of a New York widow. Real equality would mean commemorating the millions killed by US bombs, missiles, drones, and invasions with the same solemnity afforded to the victims of 9/11.

If the West is sincere in its commitment to human rights, then it must expand its circle of mourning. It must honour not only the victims of one act of terrorism, but the victims of the state terrorism carried out by the US and its allies in response to the 9/11 attacks. It must recognize that all innocent lives have equal worth.

Whether such a remembrance happens on September 11 or another day is immaterial. What matters is the moral principle, that all victims of terror deserve to be remembered.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

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.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

25th anniversary of 9/11 also marks 25 years of the West’s long war against Muslims

Since 9/11 Western wars have killed up to 4.7 million Muslims, and created over 38 million Muslim refugees—genocide level horrors that are never commemorated, or mourned the way 9/11 is.

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

This is Part I of a two part analysis about the decades long Western war on Muslims. Part II will be published tomorrow.

As the United States marks the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in a few days, it is also marking something far more tragic and dangerous—twenty‑five years of a Western war that has overwhelmingly targeted Muslims. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, between 4.5 million and 4.7 million Muslims have been killed in US-led wars since 2001, and 38 million have been displaced. These are staggering numbers—genocide‑scale numbers—that unlike 9/11 ceremonies, receive no annual commemoration, no solemn speeches, no national mourning. They exist in a political void, unacknowledged because acknowledging them would require admitting a truth Western governments have spent decades avoiding: the so‑called “War on Terror” has been, in practice, a war on Muslims.

 

This war has unfolded across continents—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen—and across Western societies themselves, where Muslim citizens and immigrants have been surveilled, stigmatized, detained, tortured, and treated as perpetual suspects. It is a war that did not begin on September 12, 2001. Its roots stretch back to the Cold War, when the United States first began constructing the ideological and military architecture that would later be weaponized after 9/11 against Muslim nations.

And Canada, despite its self‑image as a humanitarian nation, has been deeply complicit—politically, militarily, and ideologically. Islamophobia is not an aberration in Canadian politics. It is embedded in policy, normalized in (right wing) media, and expressed openly by certain political leaders.

The West’s war on Muslims is not metaphor. It is measurable, documented, it continues today, and has expanded under every US administration since 2001.

The Cold War origins of the war on Muslims

The official narrative claims the “War on Terror” began after 9/11, as a defensive response to an unprecedented attack. But the historical record tells a different story.

Beginning in the 1980s, the United States waged a cold war against Iran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the January 1981 release of American embassy staff held hostage by Iranian radicals. Washington was also quick to align itself with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after he launched the invasion of Iran in September 1980, initiating the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. Throughout the conflict the US provided Iraq with billions of dollars in economic assistance, dual‑use technology, non‑US weaponry, military intelligence, and specialized training. The conflict—marked by trench warfare and mass civilian casualties reminiscent of World War I—killed more than a million people. Throughout the war, the US also offered diplomatic cover as Iraq deployed chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. This was not counterterrorism. It was geopolitical engineering, and Muslims on both sides paid the price.

In the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, the United States imposed crushing sanctions on Iraq that restricted everything from medicines to basic humanitarian supplies. The result was catastrophic—an estimated half‑million Iraqi children died prematurely as a direct consequence of these sanctions. When confronted with this reality during a 1996 60 Minutes interview, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the deaths were “worth it” to achieve Washington’s geopolitical goal of containing Saddam Hussein. Her remarks exposed the underlying logic and anti-Muslim bigotry of America’s Middle East policy, a policy where Muslim suffering on an unimaginable scale was acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of Western dominance.

These pre‑9/11 policies were not isolated. They were part of a broader pattern of bigoted policy, propaganda, and racialized paranoia that had already taken shape. The modern war on Muslims began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, when that nation became the West’s primary military outpost in the Middle East and Western governments panicked over the economic impact of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The crisis instigated by the actions of the Arab oil producing nations revealed a terrifying truth for Western elites—that a handful of Muslim-majority countries had the power to disrupt the West’s capitalist ambitions.

The response in subsequent years was swift—coups, occupations, sanctions, propaganda, and alliances with dictatorships and authoritarian leaders. The ideological groundwork for justifying post-9/11 wars was laid long before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The expansion of a pre‑existing project

After 9/11, the US did not suddenly invent a new Middle East policy, it simply widened and intensified one that had been decades in the making. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were presented as defensive wars, necessary to protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, conveniently ignoring the fact that the citizens of those nations had been abused and manipulated by the US and its allies for years. But these wars rested on a much older ideological foundation—a long‑standing Western narrative that cast Muslim societies as inherently violent, irrational, and barbaric. That narrative made it easy for Washington to sell the Iraq War to Americans on the basis of lies and fabrications about weapons of mass destruction—claims that were later proven false but had already served their purpose. By the time the first bombs fell on Kabul and Baghdad, the emotional and political groundwork had been laid. A worldview had taken hold within the West where Muslim-majority societies were portrayed as perpetual sources of danger, instability, and civilizational threat. Within that worldview, military intervention did not need to be justified with evidence, it only needed to be framed as the next logical step in containing an imagined Islamic menace that threatened Western civilization.

For generations, Western publics were conditioned to absorb and accept whatever anti‑Muslim narratives that came their way. Long before 9/11, the cultural groundwork had already been laid. Since the earliest days of Hollywood, Western popular culture churned out hundreds of films that caricatured and dehumanized Arabs and Muslims, teaching audiences to see Muslim societies as violent, backward, and alien. As documented by scholar Jack Shaheen in Reel Bad Arabs, these portrayals were never mere entertainment—they functioned as cultural indoctrination, normalizing the idea that Muslims were foreign, dangerous, inherently unstable, and barbaric.

By the time the War on Terror began in the fall of 2001, Western publics had already been desensitized to decades of Muslim suffering at the hands of Western nations. They had been trained—through movies, news coverage, political rhetoric, and academic discourse—to view more than 1.6 billion people as a civilizational threat against whom mass violence was not only permissible but necessary. In that climate, even the blatant lies used to justify the Iraq War were readily believed, because they fit seamlessly into a narrative that had been cultivated for years. This cultural conditioning made it easy for Western publics to accept the slaughter of Muslims abroad and the mass surveillance of law‑abiding Muslims at home, leaving a legacy of distrust and fear.

The consequences of that conditioning are evident in both the scale and the character of the violence that followed. In the twenty‑five years since 9/11, US-led wars have killed up to 4.7 million Muslims and made refugees of more than 38 million, a level of destruction, chaos and human suffering that would have been politically unacceptable without Western publics already primed to see Muslim lives as expendable. What happened was not an unforeseen tragedy but the predictable outcome of a worldview in which Muslim societies had long been portrayed as backward, disposable, and merely providers of critical resources or geopolitical assets whose governments could be manipulated to the advantage of the West.

The devastation of entire nations across the Middle East and North Africa was not an accident. It was the direct result of policies pursued with full knowledge of their outcomes. Washington and its allies understood that invading, occupying, and destabilizing multiple Muslim‑majority countries would shatter political systems, collapse economies, and tear apart social fabrics. They knew it would turn vast regions into permanent refugee corridors, but they simply did not care. Countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen were not merely attacked—they were pushed into such profound instability that their pollitical and social institutions destabilized, their infrastructures disintegrated, creating openings for extremist groups like ISIS, and their populations were left to navigate Western inflicted chaos that continues to weaken their societies to this day.

At the same time, new forms of warfare were normalized. Drone strikes—marketed as precise tools for eliminating “suspected terrorists”—became routine, even though the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians, and they operated outside any meaningful legal framework. Torture, once universally condemned, was openly justified as a necessary instrument of national security. Secret prisons were established across multiple continents, places where innocent people were detained, brutalized, and denied due process. And while Muslims abroad were subjected to military violence, Muslims in Western countries faced their own form of warfare—mass surveillance, entrapment operations, discriminatory policing, and the constant presumption of guilt.

None of this emerged spontaneously after 9/11. The War on Terror was not just a sudden response to an unprecedented attack—it was the continuation and expansion of a project that had been decades in the making. The cultural narratives that dehumanized Muslims, the political ideologies that framed Islam as a civilizational threat, and the foreign policies that treated Muslim‑majority nations as disposable had all been firmly in place long before the Twin Towers fell. The 9/11 attacks did not create the war on Muslims, they merely provided the pretext for accelerating it and making it state policy in many Western nations. What changed after 9/11 was not the underlying ideology, but the speed, scale, and brutality with which it was finally unleashed on Muslims around the world.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

West is the main source of global Islamophobia, and has been waging “war” against Muslims for decades

The evidence is overwhelming—Western political and cultural portrayals, amplified by conservative media and leaders, are the primary drivers of the explosion in Islamophobia.

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

 

For decades, Western governments and societies—particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, and France—have waged a war against Islam and Muslims. This is not a conflict of tanks and missiles but of narratives, policies, and cultural framing that have systematically portrayed Muslims as hostile, perpetual threats, incompatible with Western values, and inherently suspect. Through political rhetoric, conservative media amplification, negative portrayals in films and on TV, and institutional bias, these forces have cultivated hostility toward Muslim diasporas, Muslim-majority societies, and the Islamic faith itself. The result has been an explosion of Islamophobia since the mid-1970s, a surge after the Persian Gulf War in 1990, a sharp escalation after the 9/11 attacks, and a renewed torrent following Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which experts and respected global human rights organizations describe as genocidal. This manufactured fear doesn’t serve security or truth, but rather political expediency, cultural dominance and oppression.

The roots of the Islamophobia seen today in Western society and globally has a long history, but traces back to the mid-1970s. The 1973 oil crisis, the Iranian Revolution, acts of resistance to Israeli occupation by the Palestinian Liberation Organization were all used by Western governments and news media to frame Muslims as geopolitical adversaries in Western discourse. Academic analyses documents how US and European media shifted from neutral coverage of Muslim societies to one dominated by “Islamic threat” narratives. A foundational 1997 report by the Runnymede Trust in the UK identified this as “Islamophobia”—a form of prejudice rooted in negative media stereotypes and institutional exclusion that viewed Muslims as monolithic in their thinking, inferior, and violent. By the 1980s and 1990s, narrative shifts in Western journalism—documented in studies of US and European outlets—recast “Islam” as synonymous with extremism, laying the groundwork for widespread hostility towards people practicing the faith, even if they had lived in Western societies for generations.

The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 supercharged this dynamic. What followed was not balanced news coverage but agenda-driven media narratives that equated Islam with terrorism. A 2024 computational analysis of over 10,000 articles in major US and UK newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Daily Mail, etc.) between 2003–2018 found systematic biases in how Muslims were portrayed.  Muslims accused of planning violent attacks but not carrying them out received 700% more media coverage than attacks that resulted in death by non-Muslims, with the reporters using more fear-inducing and violent descriptive language. This framing, echoed in a 2020 analysis of Western media from 2011–2019, created a feedback loop, with negative portrayals fuelling public anxiety, which was exploited by politicians through their own anti-Muslim rhetoric and social media posts. In the US, post-9/11 policies like the Patriot Act and FBI surveillance programs disproportionately targeted Muslim communities, reinforcing a public image that the community was suspect. Similar patterns emerged in France, where laïcité (secularism) was weaponized against visible Muslim practices, and in the UK, where Prevent programs cast Muslim communities as breeding grounds for extremists.

Recent events have intensified the attacks against diaspora Muslim communities in the West. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in October 2023—widely condemned internationally as disproportionate and inhumane—Islamophobia has surged globally. In the US, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) documented thousands of bias incidents, linking the rise directly to media and political narratives that conflate those criticizing Israeli actions as enemies of the West. Canadian data mirrors this, with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) reported a 1,800% spike in hate incidents targeting Muslims and Palestinians between October 2023 and August 2025. European studies, including those on France, show parallel increases tied to Gaza coverage that frames Muslim anti-genocide protests as threats while downplaying Palestinian suffering. These events did not create Islamophobia, they exposed and amplified a pre-existing infrastructure of prejudice that had been built over decades.

Key instigators of this metaphorical war against Muslims are Western political leaders, especially from right-wing or conservative parties, and conservative-leaning media outlets. They platform and amplify far-right voices and issue vilifying statements that normalize hate against Muslims. In the United States, Donald Trump’s 2015 call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” exemplified this, framing them as an existential threat to Americans, while Conservative media amplified it. Additionally, there are Republican figures, like Representatives Randy Fines openly and unapologetically calling for hate targeting Muslims, Andy Ogles saying that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville posting on social media, “The enemy is inside the gates,” in reference to Muslims in the US. CAIR has repeatedly condemned such rhetoric as fanning “anti-Muslim bigotry,” noting in reports that it renders Islamophobic language “socially acceptable” among conservatives.

In the United Kingdom, right-wing media and politicians also bear primary responsibility for an explosion in Islamophobia. The Centre for Media Monitoring’s 2025 report analyzed over 40,000 articles and found nearly 50% contained measurable bias, with 70% linking Muslims or Islam to negative themes like conflict or threat. Outlets such as The Spectator, GB News, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and The Sun—often aligned with Conservative or Reform Party voices—drove the most egregious distortions. Rizwana Hamid, Director of the Centre, stated: “When nearly half of all articles referencing Muslims or Islam are biased, and almost 70% associate Muslims with negative aspects or behaviours, it points to a systemic problem within our media ecosystem.” Conservative Party politicians have also platformed white nationalist figures like Tommy Robinson, whose anti-Islam activism receives sympathetic coverage in right-wing British media, while at the same time they downplay the dangers of far-right extremism. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has highlighted how this media and political bias manifests itself in “hate crimes, media misrepresentation, and institutional discrimination,” with nearly 40% of religious hate crimes in 2024 targeting Muslims.

Canada also provides a stark North American parallel—the only G7 nation where 11 Muslims have been murdered in a series of Islamophobic attacks in 2017, 2020 and 2021. While the political and media rhetoric is less overtly inflammatory than in the US or Europe, Conservative politicians and media have contributed to rising Islamophobia. A prime example occurred during the February 2017 parliamentary debate on an Islamophobia motion, which took place in the wake of the Quebec City mosque attack that killed six Muslim men. Despite the targeted mass murder of Muslims, Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs spoke against the motion, with some even endorsing or participating in anti-Muslim protests across the country.

There is also the case of audits by the Canada Revenue Agency disproportionately targetting Muslim charities. This despite the fact that they account for less than 0.5% of registered charities but for 67% of audits, reflecting a systemic bias documented by experts like Prof. Jasmin Zine. Conservative political discourse has echoed US-style “invasion” narratives around immigration, while right-leaning outlets amplify stories framing Muslim communities as culturally incompatible with Canadian society. The NCCM has testified before Parliament that such environments fuel violence, noting in 2024 hearings that “being Muslim in Canada is not as safe as it should be,” with post-Gaza surges in incidents tied to political inaction and media framing.

These portrayals do not exist in a vacuum. They generate real hostility toward Muslim diaspora communities, Muslim societies, and the Islamic faith in general. This cultural war extends deeply into entertainment media as well. For decades Western films and television shows have consistently portrayed Muslims negatively or with outright hostility, often as violent extremists, cultural invaders, barbaric villains, or one-dimensional antagonists. These depictions embed Islamophobic narratives into popular consciousness far beyond news cycles, reaching billions through global distribution and normalizing prejudice in everyday entertainment.

Scholarly and advocacy analyses document a century of such tropes in Hollywood and Western cinema, routinely casting Muslim characters as fanatical, culturally backward, or existential threats, with little nuance or positive representation. Classic examples include Disney’s Aladdin (1992), widely critiqued for orientalist stereotypes that depict Arabs and Muslims as dishonest, menacing, and exotic dangers, as well as pre-9/11 films like True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), The Siege (1998), and more recent blockbusters such as American Sniper (2014) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), all of which have been shown to exacerbate anti-Muslim sentiments by framing Islam as synonymous with violence and Muslims as barbaric enemies. Psychological and media studies confirm that repeated exposure to these hostile portrayals heightens public support for discriminatory policies and contributes directly to the surge in societal Islamophobia since the 1970s and especially post-9/11.

National Muslim organizations in Western nations have long warned of this dynamic. In the US, CAIR has stated that conservative media and politicians “fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry” through disinformation and false narratives, directly linking it to extremism and policy harms. In the UK, the MCB has called for audits of media toxicity, asserting that biased coverage “poisons our nation” and demands accountability from outlets and leaders. In Canada, the NCCM has urged governments to address systemic racism and Islamophobia, highlighting how political and media failures exacerbate anti-Muslim hate, and calling for public education campaigns to counter the hostility. These voices—representing millions—underscore that the metaphorical war against Islam and Muslims is not abstract, it inflicts daily harm on communities seeking only dignity and belonging.

The evidence is overwhelming—Western political and cultural portrayals, amplified by conservative media and leaders, are the primary drivers of the explosion in Islamophobia. From the 1970s oil embargo era to post-9/11 national security narratives targetting the Muslim community, and the vilification of Muslims protesting the Gaza genocide, this is a deliberate ecosystem of hostility that has been labelled “The Islamophobia Industry.”

Until societies confront this war on Muslims—through media accountability, political courage, and rejection of far-right bigoted narratives—Muslims will continue to pay the price of engineered fear and hate. The path forward demands recognizing that anti-Muslim prejudice weakens the West’s social fabric and its own democratic ideals. Only by dismantling these biased structures can genuine coexistence emerge, and can there be peace within the multicultural societies where members of the Muslim diaspora have sunk their roots and built their lives. 

© The View From Here. © Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Canada's Middle East policies and lack of action to fight Islamophobia at home are endangering Muslim lives

Canada’s apparent indifference to innocent Muslim lives—whether in Gaza, Iran, or elsewhere—cannot be attributed solely to geopolitical considerations.

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

March 15 marks the seventh anniversary of the Christchurch mosque shootings, in which a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand. It is also the fourth International Day to Combat Islamophobia, designated by the United Nations in 2022 precisely in response to that atrocity.  This year, the observance falls during the final week of Ramadan, a time of spiritual reflection, community connection and heightened sensitivity to threats against the global Muslim community.

As Canadian Muslims observe Ramadan nationwide, imams and community leaders are voicing a stark and shared concern--the federal government has not only turned a blind eye to the rise of institutional and structural Islamophobia within Canada but has, through its foreign policy choices, actively defended or even amplified it internationally. Symbolic measures—such as the annual National Day of Remembrance of the Québec City Mosque Attack and Action against Islamophobia, observed each January 29—offer little comfort when juxtaposed against tangible policy failures. These gestures, while acknowledging past tragedies, appear increasingly performative in light of the government's unwillingness to safeguard Muslim rights at home or to accord equal value to Muslim lives abroad, and in fact contribute to the ecosystem of Islamophobia.

At the domestic level, particularly in Quebec, Muslims feel acutely endangered by a series of provincial laws that restrict religious expression and practice. Federal inaction—failing to actively challenge measures like Bill 21's ban on religious symbols for public-sector workers or the more recent expansions of the law under Bill 9, which target collective prayer in public spaces, prayer rooms in institutions, and exclusive halal food options—has contributed to an erosion of Muslim visibility and security without meaningful intervention. The recent elimination of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia by Prime Minister Mark Carney further signals a retreat from dedicated efforts to address systemic anti-Muslim prejudice.

More recently, Quebec’s Bill 9—introduced in late 2025 as “An Act respecting the reinforcement of secularism in Québec”—has escalated these restrictions. The legislation will prohibit collective prayer in public spaces without municipal approval, eliminate dedicated prayer rooms in universities, colleges and other public institutions, and bar public facilities from offering exclusively halal or kosher meals.

Framed as advancing Quebec’s state neutrality, these measures overwhelmingly target religious minorities, particularly Muslims whose daily obligations include five prayers and dietary requirements. Critics describe the incremental layering of Bill 21 and Bill 9 as a targeted erosion of minority rights, drawing parallels to the early legal and administrative exclusions faced by Jews in Nazi Germany. Some analysts call it “ethnic cleansing by stealth”, where racialized Muslims are forced to choose between practising their faith openly while working in public sector jobs, or advancing their careers by leaving Quebec altogether.  The federal government’s inaction in the face of these provincial assaults on human rights leaves Canadian Muslims more vulnerable to harassment, discrimination and social exclusion—precisely the institutional Islamophobia the UN day was created to combat.

This domestic neglect is compounded—and amplified—by Canada’s foreign policy, which has consistently defended or enabled Islamophobia on the global stage. The ongoing Gaza crisis, now more than 29 months old and widely characterised by human-rights experts, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and UN bodies as genocide, stands as the prime example of violent Islamophobia intertwined with genocidal anti-Palestinian racism. Palestinians, who are more than 90% Muslim, have been violently persecuted for decades and since October 2023 have endured relentless bombardment, famine and displacement while Canadian leaders refuse to label the atrocities as genocide, and continue to provide diplomatic cover and a flow of Canadian made arms to Israel. Additionally, Prime Minister Carney’s suggestion of a “Zionist Palestinian state” was widely condemned as dismissive and ignorant, effectively demanding that Palestinians adopt the ideology of their oppressors rather than achieve genuine self-determination.

The recent US-Israeli military strikes on Iran represent another stark manifestation of Islamophobia.  Since the 1980s Iranian Muslims have been portrayed by the Americans as evil incarnate, with George W. Bush calling Iran a member of the "Axis of Evil" in a speech to Congress in January 2002.  The most recent US-Israeli attack on Iran has been described by legal scholars and international observers as illegal and unprovoked aggression by two nuclear-armed powers. Prime Minister Carney initially voiced support for the campaign to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program (which Donald Trump said the US "obliterated" during the June 2025 bombing), framing it as necessary for global security.  Yet Canada’s willingness to align with allies launching unprovoked attacks on a Muslim-majority nation sends a clear message—Muslim lives and sovereignty are negotiable when politically convenient.

The selective outrage becomes even more glaring when contrasted with Canada’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ottawa has committed more than $25 billion in multifaceted aid—including billions in military assistance—to Ukraine, a country whose population is predominantly white and Christian, and more than 225,000 Ukrainian refugees have been accepted into Canada.  No comparable aid package or refugee program has been extended to Palestinians, and there has been steadfast refusal to impose meaningful sanctions or accountability on Israel despite its genocidal crimes.

The ongoing crises in Gaza and the recent US-Israeli military strikes on Iran represent some of the most severe manifestations of global Islamophobia today. These conflicts echo earlier US-led military interventions, such as the Iraq War—founded on lies about weapons of mass destruction—and the broader "War on Terror."  According to Brown University's Costs of War project, post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and related zones have resulted in at least 4.5–4.7 million Muslim deaths, directly and indirectly at the hands of the US and its allies.

Muslim community leaders contend that this apparent indifference to innocent Muslim lives—whether in Gaza, Iran, or elsewhere—cannot be attributed solely to geopolitical considerations. Rather, it points to a profound and entrenched devaluation of Muslim lives compared with those of white Christians (as seen in the response to Ukraine) or even segments of the Israeli Jewish population, a large percentage of whom support the genocide against Palestinians.

Confidential assessments from former Global Affairs Canada officials and independent reports have long pointed to institutional anti-Palestinian racism embedded in Canadian diplomacy.  The pattern is unmistakable.  When Muslims are under attack by Western allies, Canadian leaders remain silent or equivocate.  When the victims are European and Christian, or Israeli Jews, the response is swift, supportive and unequivocal.  Such double standards do more than undermine Canada’s claim to moral leadership, they actively promote Islamophobia globally by normalising the idea that Muslim suffering is less worthy of intervention.

None of this should surprise observers of Canadian history. A nation founded on Indigenous genocide, slavery and structures of white supremacy has never fully confronted the racism woven into its institutions. These foundational biases continue to shape policy, subtly influencing even leaders who publicly deny prejudice. The refusal to stand on the “right side of history”—whether by challenging Quebec’s anti-Muslim laws or by demanding an immediate end to the Gaza genocide and the illegal strikes on Iran—reveals a political class more comfortable with expediency than principle.

Canadian Muslims, observing this International Day amid Ramadan fasting and global crises are not asking for special treatment. They are demanding consistency with the same human-rights standards applied to Ukrainians, Palestinians, Iranians and other Muslims alike.  The same vigilance against hate at home must extend to foreign policy abroad. The government’s failure to act domestically leaves Canadian Muslims physically and psychologically endangered, and its complicity abroad signals that Muslim lives overseas—defenceless and overwhelmingly racialized—are simply less valuable.

Canadians must make a fundamental choice. Are we willing to accept leaders who offer only rhetorical commitments to fighting hate, upholding international law and defending human rights? Or will we insist on conviction-driven leadership unafraid to challenge allies, confront institutional racism at home and refuse to sacrifice principles for political or diplomatic convenience?

For the sake of social cohesion, international credibility and the lives of Muslims both in Canada and abroad, the latter path is not merely preferable—it is urgently necessary.

© The View From Here.  © Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.