This story begins the same way: I remember exactly where I was on 9/11. I had just turned 16, living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. 

During break from class in the cafeteria, I glanced over to see my school principal stride through shortly after 9:30. Something was wrong. We were called to the auditorium, and our teachers flanked us on either side as we filed in. We thought a beloved older teacher had died. Instead, our principal told us that two planes had hit the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack. As she spoke, I remember the palpable feeling of a bubble bursting and the world rushing in. 

I returned to class, but other students watched coverage on a television in the library. Later, maybe around lunch, someone told me that the two towers had collapsed. I pictured the indelible arched windows of the lobbies and the towers’ latticed exterior extending like shards into the sky. With buildings of that height, at least a few stories had to be left, I figured. Now, I don’t know how I could have thought that at all. The destruction was so total that the idea of anything remaining from before sounds like the wishful thinking of a teenager.  

Words like “spectacular” and “awesome” don’t seem right to describe the attacks, and yet that’s what they were: the tallest towers in the world turned into an inferno, and then a tomb. We watched together as the attacks unfolded. Without smartphones to broadcast from inside the towers, we were left to imagine the horror inside, pieced together through stories and phone calls. 

A patriotic myopia

Our fury and pain sanctioned a patriotic myopia that shaped my young political consciousness. I watched as the United States subverted domestic laws and international norms to manufacture wars and torture scores of Muslim men and boys in black sites around the world. We bombed Baghdad — which had nothing to do with the attacks — in a shock and awe campaign, a show of military might designed to inflict precisely the same horror that we had experienced. I could no longer ignore this country’s dark side.

Years later, I moved to Syria from 2009 to 2011. I wanted to understand the impacts of our foreign policy for myself and inadvertently became a witness to extraordinary revolutions for freedom that rippled across the Middle East. I rode the wave of disappointment in President Obama as he chose to “look forward, not backward” at the spying, torture and crimes of the previous administration, entrenching the impunity that now pervades our country. I grew to understand how fragile our imperfect republic was after experiencing countries scarred by authoritarianism and corruption. 

READ: The Post-9/11 Infrastructure of Islamophobia

Twenty-five years later, I am still not sure how much really has changed. Guantánamo Bay is still open. The war on terror has morphed into the forever wars, with Trump’s war against Iran and continued U.S. military support for Israel — despite broad public opposition to both — as just the latest examples.

The surveillance state that spied on and infiltrated Muslim communities has now turned on our immigrant neighbors, with ICE becoming a paramilitary squad executing Trump’s mass deportation agenda. As in the post-9/11 world, anyone who questions the administration is labeled anti-American. Debates about American history and identity face censorship in a country where free speech is a foundational tenet. There is a push to shut down any dissenting discourse, just like the days after the attacks of 2001.

Choosing another path

All of this was a choice. During these times, I recall the muted voices who tried valiantly to keep us from choosing the road of violent retribution. As my friend, historian Jeremy Varon, chronicles in his recent book Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War on the movement against the war on terror, activists and intellectuals began organizing within hours of the attacks. As Varon describes, “The first war America fought after 9/11 was a war of ideas seeking to make sense of the destruction” —  a “contest of ideas” that would prove to be “terribly one-sided.” 

Leading intellectuals played out this debate in the media, but any suggestion that the United States “just got a taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis,” as Slavoj Źižek wrote then, was firmly rejected. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “there are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don’t want to see.” A letter to the paper in response called her a “little horror of a human being.” 

Calls for peace also came from some 9/11 families, who later organized as the September 11th  Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Opposition to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq spurred global protests, including the world’s largest antiwar protest ever in February 2003. 

READ: Iraqi Women Endure Horrors of War

Yet these voices were still a minority against the fervent bipartisan appetite for revenge and an American media loudly beating the drums of war. Led by The New York Times, mainstream media laundered the administration’s mercenary reasons to invade Iraq and promoted racist and essentialist views of Islam. This failure permanently stained the journalism industry and contributed to the growing distrust of the media. More than anything, these failures hurt 9/11 families the most, denying them the context necessary to understand the attacks and grieve properly. 

Criticism of U.S. policy invited immediate accusations of treachery and disloyalty. So did opposition to military retribution. This binary sat easily alongside the civilizational war the Bush administration anointed. 

Despite Bush’s statements at the time to Muslim Americans — distinguishing them from the religious extremists behind the attacks — anti-Muslim animus was the backbone of the war on terror. Yet it has never been properly acknowledged and instead treated as a coincidence, a point my friend Mahal Hillal documents in her 2021 book Innocent Until Proven Muslim. 

It remains on grotesque display today, especially through the ginned-up hysteria over figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker and Democratic Senate candidate Abdel El-Sayed. Public figures continue to use 9/11 to make the most nakedly racist and bigoted statements about Muslim Americans with little consequence. It furthers the dehumanization central to the War on Terror and denigrates the memory of such a traumatic event.

New York: Then, now, forever

I now live in New York. In the intervening years, I have listened to countless 9/11 stories. The grief of that day stays with me, as does the extraordinary heroism and courage mustered by thousands on the ground and in the skies. It shaped the rest of my personal and professional life. 

I know names and faces like the back of my hand: the calm words of Betty Ong, the first flight attendant to alert authorities or the man in the red bandana, Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who stayed to help others get out and whose remains were found surrounded by New York City firefighters. I also think about the many immigrant workers who staffed the Windows on the World restaurant with great pride, forming a family far from home. Their lives mean so much more than the violence and death this country meted out in their name.

On such a solemn day like this one, I hope to visit the rushing waterfalls in the footsteps of the towers, a beautiful memorial which defied my fears of some uber-patriotic altar to provide a far more poignant and peaceful space. I hope it is the same for the survivors, the families of the victims, and the public at large.

This article was originally published in Pressing Issues — the twice-weekly Free Press newsletter with ideas and analysis about everything happening at the intersection of media, technology and democracy.