Ayaan Hirsi, a former Muslim, is a courageous intellectual who pays a heavy price for her outspokenness and warnings about Islam. She has around-the-clock bodyguards and remains in hiding. What she has to say matters. She wrote a long but well-worth-reading essay in The Tablet about the future of Islam. The hijackers preceded the drones, the wars, and theirs was not a political or economic rebellion. Their religion tells them to spread throughout the world by any means necessary.
Mohamed Atta al-Sayed, an Egyptian who led the September 11 attacks. Picture from his Florida driver’s license. It appeared on the FBI’s website shortly after the attacks.
State of Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles
She began with Mohamed Atta, a 27-year-old architecture student at the Technical University, son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living in affluence.
Hirsi writes that he put pen to paper in a will while at the university. “Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse,” she said.
“I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”
Hirsi continued.
“There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. There is only a young Muslim man, in a German apartment, arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come. The will was witnessed by fellow believers at the al-Quds mosque, where Atta prayed in Arabic, grew his beard, and where, four years later, he would meet the men he would die with.”
“The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.”
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The Demographic Capture
“Twenty-five years later, ignorance is no longer a tenable excuse. Yet even among those who acknowledge that violent Muslim extremists are not simply reacting to injuries inflicted by the West, and that Muslims themselves were some of history’s greatest colonizers, a substantial blind spot remains.
“We in the West are so fixated on the military arm of the Islamist movement that we often fail to pay attention to the methods of institutional capture and demographic transformation that are equally part of the Islamist strategy. This habit of denial is particularly acute among Americans on both the left and the right….
“What I hear is the same inability that I heard in Europe 25 years ago to accept the magnitude of the threat posed by a hostile foe, or even to admit the reality of cultural differences. The reality is that we don’t have another 25 years to get this right. We don’t even have another 10 years.
The Red-Green Alliance
“The strategic environment confronting Western nations has changed dramatically. The West now confronts a broader hybrid battlespace in which hostile states and movements rely less on classical warfare and more on cyber operations, disinformation, migration pressure, institutional subversion, and the exploitation of domestic polarization, facilitated not only by tech platforms, but also by the rise of a secular leftist vanguard that has forged an alliance with politicized Muslim cadres that have learned to speak the common language of third-world sectarianism in order to mobilize migrant communities. Each side of the so-called red-green alliance that is now contesting elections not only in Europe but also from New York City to Michigan no doubt believes that it is using the other in order to gain power. But only one half of that alliance is likely to win.
“I personally would bet on the side that has an army of 1.6 billion believers that it can potentially mobilize, backed by the wealth of the world’s leading oil producers, over the university students from comfortable homes for whom politics means dorm-room banners of Karl Marx and Che Guevara. By the time they find out otherwise, it will probably be too late.”