Sheryl Saperia: 25 years on, what would bin Laden see?

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It is not hard to imagine that bin Laden would have loved the October 7 attacks in Israel and the world’s reaction to it. Around 6,000 Gazans invaded the Israeli border, resulting in the rapes, kidnappings and murders of Jewish families in their homes and at a music festival. And the celebrations in western cities came within hours.

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Antisemitism has permeated western life. The J7 task force, covering seven countries that contain the majority of the Jewish diaspora, documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025. In comparison to 2021, the number of total antisemitic incidents had risen 137 per cent, while violent incidents rose 78 per cent.

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America’s enemies understand the power of this hatred better than we do. As Eliana Aiken, a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, has documented, Russia, Iran and China have found since October 7 that antisemitism is an especially effective weapon for weakening the United States from within, through information warfare aimed at American opinion.

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Antisemitism works so well because it can be attached to almost any grievance, offering people across the political spectrum a single culprit for otherwise unrelated frustrations. It is therefore effective on the far right and the far left, particularly among people who feel the American system has failed them and are looking for a convenient scapegoat.

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The scale is industrial. In the month after October 7, Kremlin-linked Telegram channels posted about the Israel-Gaza war 9,000 times and drew 865-million views, according to Aiken. At its peak, Israel-related content on American TikTok was 98.6 per cent anti-Israel. The strategic goal need not even be hatred for its own sake, as long as America no longer trusts its institutions, no longer believes its power abroad is legitimate and no longer coheres enough to defend anything. Aiken’s warning is ultimately strategic: if Americans can be turned against one another, America’s adversaries can prevail without confronting it militarily.

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Bin Laden needed 19 men and four aircraft to weaken the West. His successors need only our credulity.

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We don’t talk about Islamism

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The western commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism, noble in its origins, has hardened into a reluctance to do anything that might be mistaken for prejudice. CSIS actively avoids calling Islamist terrorism by name, instead labelling it “religiously motivated violent extremism.”

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The United Kingdom’s commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross, reviewed Britain’s Prevent program, a counter-radicalization initiative that relies on individuals in education, health care, criminal justice agencies and police to report those in danger of becoming radicalized. His research found that there was a “cultural timidity” and an “institutional hesitancy” to confront Islamism for fear of accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity.

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Many media outlets appear to have adopted the same nervous approach to naming Islamist terror. When a man drove a van into Berlin’s Pride parade in July, killing a woman and injuring 29 others, the New York Times informed its readers that a car had plowed through a park. British commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray argues that in stories involving an Islamist perpetrator, the vehicle is always granted a will of its own. The Pride organizers held a press conference at which one female participant acknowledged having hoped the perpetrator would turn out to be a white Christian man.

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The West cannot properly confront a threat it will not name, and bin Laden’s successors are the beneficiaries.

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The rotten apple

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The Twin Towers, destroyed on 9/11, were symbols of American capitalism in a city that stands for western liberalism. That fateful day, New York’s police officers and firefighters were storybook heroes. Less than 25 years later, the city elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Having spent his life, as Murray puts it, marinating in postcolonial politics, Third-Worldism and anti-Zionism, Mamdani is hostile to capitalism, campaigned on the destruction of Israel’s legitimacy and wrote in 2020 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety. At the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2023 national convention, he told delegates that to make people care about Israel, they had to make the issues hyper-local, such as telling New Yorkers that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it has been laced by the Israel Defence Forces.