by James O’Donnell, M.B.A.
What have we learned from the 9/11 terrorist attacks? I fear very little.
I fear Western leaders and elites make a tragic mistake treating religion as an individual, private, secondary matter of human life, completely irrelevant to mature life. Those many of those leaders and elites may feel such, wrongly, they insist jihadist violence has nothing to do with Islam. Of course, just as there are millions of lapsed or lazy Catholics, Protestants and Jews, there are, surely, many casual Muslims. In fact, over 1.8 billion Muslims globally practice the faith in vastly different cultural, peaceful and secular contexts, viewing commands for jihad primarily as an internal spiritual struggle against sin. These people identify as Muslims, culturally or more, but have little connection to the harshest tenets of the historic Islamic faith. Many have long ago ,or more recently, assimilated into the warmth, permissiveness and comfort of life in the Western World.
These people are not Islamists, the political and economic arm of Islam that follows the severe vision of early Islam, a vision of conquest and the creation of a worldwide caliphate. That part of Islam is not merely a network of violent terrorist cells and their occasional eruption, but a comprehensive civilizational project seeking to reorder society, law, and politics according to Islamic norms.
Many powerful Western leaders still trivialize the threat of this “project.” “After all,” might they say, “most Muslims in America and the West are peaceable, law-abiding people. They mean no harm to others. They want only, like us, to live their lives quietly, raise families, and share in the opportunities the West affords so many. Maybe, there are just a few bad eggs, but don’t overreact to those few.”
But history shows it doesn’t take many.
- In France, during the July Revolution of 1830, a relatively small group of Parisian students and laborers utilized the narrow typography of Paris to build barricades, successfully neutralizing the professional army of King Charles X. The rest of rural France simply accepted the regime change after Paris fell.
- In 1917, the Bolsheviks, a highly disciplined political party numbering just a few hundred thousand in Russia, out of a population then of 150 million, successfully seized power because the party prioritized strict organizational compliance over many coalitions.
- In 1959, amid the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro’s “26th of July Movement” began with only 82 men on the Granma yacht never becoming a massive conventional army. Castro succeeded because Fulgencio Batista’s regime was so corrupt, demoralized and hollowed out that it collapsed from within, allowing Castro’s small force to march into Havana unopposed.
Small groups can have powerful effects on society amid a largely indifferent population, jaded by fraud and political corruption, filled with apolitical people who may or may not vote, are more focused on their comforts and entertainments, and do not have strong personal moral or religious anchors to guide their lives.
Even among Muslims, we may overestimate the divide I alluded to earlier between the true believers and the merely casual. Take, for example, the cover story in the Sept. 10th, 2026 issue of The Economist, entitled “The Truth and the Lies about Islam in Europe.” That contains survey data from Europe that suggests Muslims, in generally, and not merely those who claim to be jihadists may have similar views about Western freedoms.
- 52 percent state same-sex relationships are morally wrong.
- 62 percent believe women should wear a hijab in public.
- 33 percent believe Islamic principles should guide public life and government.
- 20 percent place Islamic teaching above British law in case of a conflict.
- 32 percent believe violence can be justified if the Prophet Muhammad is insulted.
Many Western Leaders and their elite supporters assume that secular pluralism is a universal default. It is not. Too many have been led to pursue misguided nation-building abroad and uncritical mass migration policies at home. Instead of assimilating Western liberal democratic values, recent incoming populations often establish separate communities, enabling long-term institutional capture and shifting domestic politics, build on the naive assumption that we should welcome “our neighbors and strangers.” Yet, many of these new arrivals have no desire to assimilate into Western beliefs values. But some may be willing to harvest from the generosity of the Western welfare system in the interim.
The West now faces a hybrid, civilizational challenge involving demographic strain, institutional subversion and ideological polarization. Preserving the liberal-constitutional order requires Western societies to abandon “well-meaning lies,” recognize that not all cultures share Western secular values and confront the cultural and theological reality of Islamism directly.
Religion is not the quaint habitat of uneducated dopes. It forms the DNA of many more inhabitants of this planet than its secular counterpart. However, all religions are not the same, hard though that may be for unreligious people to understand. Christianity, for instance, at its root, centers on the God/man Jesus who died on a Cross to save humankind. Islam, on the other hand, was founded by a warrior who set out to conquer all who did not follow his beliefs. Verses in the Quran and passages in the Hadith (the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad) command warfare against non-believers, such as the famous “Sword Verses” (e.g., Surah 9:5). Muhammad became both a spiritual guide and a military and political ruler. The rapid expansion of the early Caliphates via military conquest across the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe is evidence that armed expansion (Jihad) was built into the political and religious framework of early Islam.
Islam is structured as a comprehensive system encompassing faith, law (Sharia), and statecraft rather than a strictly private spiritual belief. There is no separation of State and religion under Islam. Classical Sharia jurisprudence contains provisions that allow or mandate corporal punishment, the execution of apostates, laws against blasphemy, and the subjugation of non-Muslim subjects (dhimmi status) under historic Islamic rule. The Islamic system requiring total submission to divine law leaves little room for modern pluralism or religious liberty.
The word “Islam” does not, as some think, translate to “peace” (which is “Salam” in Arabic). Rather, Islam derives from the root word meaning “submission” or “surrender” to the will of God. Any “peace” envisioned within traditional Islam doctrine is conditional upon the world submitting to divine order rather than acceptance of coexistence.
Leaders and others in the West are wrong to think that poverty and social exclusion or oppression breed terrorists. Or that kindness, love, and patience with those who think differently from us will always bring the troubled or the misunderstood around. As a Christian, I am all in favor of kindness, love, and patience, but I am also in favor of rational thought and remembering that God gave me a brain and not just a heart: I have an obligation to the gifts given to me by our noble Western Civilization to preserve them from enemies. There are real people all around us and already within our country who wish to destroy us.
Let me leave you with some thoughts to ponder about Mohammed Atta, who led the 19 Muslim men who turned commercial airplanes into guided missiles on Sept. 11, 2001.
Because his connecting flight from Portland, Maine, to Boston was delayed on Sept. 10, 2001, Atta’s checked bag failed to make it onto American Airlines Flight 11. Recovered by the FBI, the luggage contained flight manuals, a copy of Atta’s actual last will and testament and a four-page handwritten Arabic document. The text of that document contained practical and spiritual steps for the final hours before the attack, advising the men to read specific passages from the Qur’an, pray through the night, purify themselves, sharpen their weapons and maintain absolute outward calm and resolve.
These folks are often very bright and deadly serious in their lethal mission to destroy the West.
James O’Donnell, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review, is the retired, emeritus, Luke J. Peters Professor of Business and Economics and the Executive-in-Resident at Huntington University, Huntington. Before becoming a professor, O’Donnell was an executive vice president at Fidelity Investments in Boston. He is the author of numerous best-selling books in his business field, but also “Letters to Lizzie,” dedicated to his wife, who died in a long struggle with cancer.
