On September 11, 2001, I was saying goodbye to my best friend in Lebanon. I had graduated that year and was preparing to leave Beirut for college abroad. My friend’s mother had the television on when her soap opera was suddenly interrupted by a news broadcast: a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers in New York. The footage, the plane disappearing into the building, the smoke pouring from the tower, the anchors trying to describe what was happening in real time… all of it felt absolutely surreal.

We were watching from Lebanon, a country where chaos had become painfully familiar, as the seemingly untouchable United States—and New York, its towering cultural capital—was struck by what, in those first moments, we thought was some incomprehensible accident. We were breathless. And yet, somewhere underneath the shock was another feeling: we knew that whatever had just happened would eventually result in consequences from the United States, regardless of whether we had anything to do with it, or not . There is an instinct a child develops when they grow up around violence. A child accustomed to being beaten with a belt learns to read the emotional weather of the person wielding it. If something terrible happens to the violent parent—if they are humiliated, frightened, wounded, or enraged—the child knows that sooner or later that pain may travel downward, transformed into punishment, regardless of whether the child had anything to do with what happened.

Watching those towers burn from Lebanon, that is what I remember feeling. We did not yet understand what had happened or what would follow. But I understood, almost instinctively, that the violence would not end in New York. The belt would eventually swing outward. That sense of doom did not come out of nowhere. I was watching September 11 through eyes that had both lived and inherited a history. For generations, Lebanon and the wider Arab world have lived and died by the consequences of decisions made in Washington, London and Paris, and, increasingly, through the ever-expanding military power of Israel. Borders, governments, military alliances, weapons, occupations, and wars had taught us that decisions made thousands of miles away could reorganize or end our lives with extraordinary force and indifference.

In 1958, Lebanon became one of the early testing grounds of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Cold War policy through which the United States asserted its willingness to intervene in the Middle East against communist influence and threats to Western-aligned governments (the irony of that same president later on giving a departing speech about the American military-industrial complex is lost on no one). Lebanon was experiencing a political crisis involving President Camille Chamoun, opposition to his government, and the growing influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism. Chamoun’s government requested American military assistance, and beginning on July 15, approximately 14,000 U.S. military personnel were ultimately deployed to Lebanon. The official justification was the defense of Lebanese sovereignty and stability. But American diplomatic records reveal Washington’s broader concern with preserving U.S. influence and preventing a political shift that could strengthen Nasserism and weaken the Western position in the region.

“Stability”, or self-interested self-preservation and self-enrichment, is the seemingly mild and justifiable purpose of empire. A generation later, Lebanon would again become an arena in which interests collided: American and Israeli against Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese. Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 and laid siege to Beirut. The Reagan administration involved itself in negotiations over the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization from the city. U.S. Marines arrived as part of a multinational occupying force alongside French and Italian troops to oversee the evacuation, then initially withdrew after the PLO fighters departed. Then, after the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, Israeli forces entered West Beirut and surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Lebanese Phalangist militiamen entered the camps and massacred Palestinian and Lebanese civilians while Israeli forces controlled the surrounding area. The massacre precipitated the return of American, French and Italian forces to Beirut.

What had begun as a limited multinational mission became increasingly entangled in Lebanon’s civil war. American naval forces shelled positions in Lebanon and U.S. aircraft carried out strikes. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American military personnel. By early 1984, Reagan ordered the Marines redeployed offshore.

For Lebanese people, these were not chapters in an American foreign-policy textbook. They were our lived–and massacred–experience. So when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, I did not need to know what the United States would do next to understand that the consequences would travel—and that our region as a whole—our innocence be damned–would bear them. History had taught me that American fear rarely remained contained within America’s borders. And it didn’t. September 11 ushered in what the Bush administration called the “War on Terror”: the invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the 2003 invasion of Iraq; sprawling counterterrorism operations; torture and indefinite detention; extraordinary rendition; drone warfare; surveillance; immigration restrictions; and an enormous national-security infrastructure whose consequences extended across the Middle East and into Muslim communities around the world. But another war was taking place simultaneously. It was a war over meaning. The category of the “terrorist” expanded far beyond the people responsible for September 11 and became embedded within a much older Western imagination of Arabs and Muslims as inherently threatening. Brown skin, Arabic names, Muslim faith, political anger, migration, resistance—even criticism of American foreign policy—could be made adjacent to suspicion. Soon after, in 2003, ICE was established as part of the Homeland Security Act, with the severe rise of post-9/11 Islamophobia as its driving motivation.

This is why the cultural consequences of September 11 cannot be separated from the military ones. Before a population can tolerate extraordinary violence against another people, it helps if those people have already been made frightening. And twenty-five years later, the architectures and state infrastructures constructed during the War on Terror have not disappeared; rather, they have expanded.

New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, its first Muslim mayor, after a campaign in which his Muslim identity became the target of explicit Islamophobic attacks. Following his 2025 Democratic primary victory, anti-Muslim rhetoric surged online and in political discourse, including attacks invoking September 11 itself.

Photograph by Jack Califano

Now Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan and, if elected, potentially the first Muslim to serve in that chamber, is confronting an eerily familiar machinery. His Muslim identity has become an explicit line of political attack. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville has called him a “terrorist” and “radical Islamist,” part of a broader effort by some Republicans to turn Muslim identity into a campaign issue in the 2026 midterms.

But focusing only on the most explicit Islamophobia coming from the political right misses the shameful transformation taking place within supposedly justice-based politics itself. Both Mamdani and El-Sayed emerged through grassroots-funded campaigns within Democratic electorates, defeating centrist, establishment-aligned, often PAC, Super PAC, and corporate-funded opponents. Their victories reveal a generational and ideological fracture over economic inequality, corporate capture, Palestine, Israel, and the extreme and long-standing misuse of American police and military power worldwide. And the resistance faced by candidates like Mamdani and El-Sayed from parts of the Democratic establishment raises a larger question: what happens when Muslim and Arab political figures no longer remain silent about the very foreign and domestic policy decisions that helped isolate their communities as objects of xenophobic and racist suspicion, in the first place? This is where September 11, 2001 remains very much the present.

Islamophobia operates beyond the obvious contours of slurs, violence, and exclusion. And even the name is wrong because, out of ignorance, the American popular identity slurs all sorts of unrelated identities with the same brush, affecting not just Muslim people. It also wields its destructive power through political parties’ establishment leaders and the wider press, all of whom enforce the boundaries of what is considered “acceptable” political speech: which Muslim is considered “reasonable”, which Arab is considered “electable”, “likeable”, “relatable”, “articulate”; which criticism of Israel is permitted, which expression of Palestinian solidarity is “anti Semitic”, and how much distance a Muslim public figure must place between themselves and the imagined specter of the “terrorist” before they are granted political legitimacy.

The political struggle of this moment is clearly not the fabled feud between Republicans and Democrats. It is also a struggle over whether American popular culture can cultivate the political imagination to unlearn the racist scapegoating produced by September 11.

Can we unlearn who we have been trained to recognize as the terrorist?

This is the part of September 11 that has never ended. The War on Terror was not only fought through bombs, invasions, prisons and surveillance. It produced and reinforced old cultural tropes we should hope to be done with as a species; categories through which millions of people were taught to understand the world: civilized or barbaric, Western or “foreign”, innocent or threatening, security or terrorism. It is the same tyranny that has flooded the United States itself, with ICE serving as the domestic arm of the same racist and xenophobic worldview.

Twenty-five years later, we are still living in September 11. When I watched the towers burn from Lebanon, I could not have imagined Afghanistan or Iraq, Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, the surveillance of Muslim communities in America, or the political world we inhabit today, yet somehow, I still knew: I knew the colonial belt would eventually come back to lash us. The ways in which the imperial and neocolonial forces that drive American empire today have evolved are multifarious and “will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down”, as Diane di Prima once wrote. But we can all begin from the same place of dismantling the poisonous lessons of 9/11 and starting again.