Op-Ed

Democracy, Terror, and the Lines We Refuse to Draw

BY Benjamin Reed

Liberal democracies did not fail because they defended themselves after 9/11, but because they spent the next two decades pretending that ideology, borders, and integration no longer mattered in a world where all three still kill people.

9/11/2001, the day that changed everything. Image Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica

The Strategic Blind Spots Fueling Islamist Extremism

I remember September 11 clearly. I was in middle school. The teachers didn’t tell us what had happened. Classes continued as normal, as if routine might anchor the world. I learned the truth on the school bus, from another kid who said a plane had hit a building in New York. By the time I got home, the towers were already gone.

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That day began a war that shaped my generation. More than twenty years later, watching the aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre, I felt the same hollow shock. Different country; the same realization that liberal societies remain vulnerable to ideological violence that arrives without warning.

After 9/11, the United States responded in familiar fashion. We fought Islamic extremism abroad, poured blood and money into Afghanistan and Iraq, and expanded surveillance and executive power at home. The Patriot Act was framed as temporary. Much of it became permanent. We paid a collective price for the actions of a few, yet the underlying problem never disappeared.

What lingers now is not only the threat itself, but a growing fatigue with democracy as it is practiced. Liberal systems move slowly, hesitate to draw lines, and struggle to confront ideological movements that exploit openness as a shield.

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The temptation is to abandon restraint altogether: to treat entire communities as suspect, to empower the state without limits. That impulse is seductive and wrong. It would accomplish what jihadist movements have failed to do on their own: the erosion of liberal society from within.

But paralysis disguised as tolerance has been just as corrosive.

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The Core Distinction: Islam as Faith vs. Political Islam as a Power Project

The vast majority of Muslims living in Western democracies are not the problem. They work, raise families, and seek ordinary lives. Denying this is immoral and strategically incoherent. Acknowledging it, however, does not absolve the state of responsibility to confront political Islam, which is not a faith but a political project.

Political Islam is an ideology that uses religious language to mobilize grievance, build parallel institutions, and challenge the supremacy of civil law. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood do not operate like religious congregations. They operate like political machines: through charities, student organizations, advocacy groups, and foreign funding networks. They advance incrementally, positioning themselves as the authentic voice of Muslim communities while marginalizing dissent within those same communities.

Western governments have consistently refused to name this distinction. Political Islam has been treated as a matter of cultural sensitivity rather than organized power. That error has allowed political movements to shelter behind protections designed for belief, not influence.

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Belief is protected. Infrastructure is not.

A serious democratic response does not require mass surveillance or theological policing. It requires focus. Follow the money. Enforce charity and tax law. Shut down front organizations that function as political actors under humanitarian cover. Criminalize knowing material support and coordination with designated extremist groups. Use courts, not executive fiat. Regulation, not repression.

Yet there is a reality the United States has never confronted honestly.

Hardening Democracy Without Abandoning It: Integration Leverage, Enforcement, and Strategic Trade-Offs

In the decades after 9/11, the United States did not reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries. In aggregate, it expanded it, through refugee admissions, family reunification, and humanitarian pathways embedded in a broader post–Cold War immigration surge. This was not malice. It was denial.

It was as if the country decided that the safest response to Islamist terrorism was to demonstrate, through policy, that it had learned nothing from it.

Immigration does not cause extremism. But large-scale immigration without integration leverage amplifies risk. When states import people from societies where political Islam is normalized, where the separation of religion and state is alien, and where antisemitism is ambient, they are importing social realities that demand serious integration capacity.

For decades, American policy prioritized moral signaling over social cohesion, volume over integration, sentiment over statecraft. Then it expressed surprise when parallel societies formed and radical networks found fertile ground.

This is not racism. It is arithmetic.

Poverty alone does not radicalize. Poverty combined with humiliation, cultural dislocation, and ideological entrepreneurs does. Liberal values are not absorbed automatically. They must be taught, enforced, and reinforced. Too often, they were not.

A serious immigration policy would slow intake to match integration capacity, impose firm civic requirements tied to residency and citizenship, enforce zero tolerance for ideological intimidation, and remove non-citizens involved in extremist facilitation. But enforcement alone is not enough. States must also confront youth unemployment in at-risk migrant communities, where economic marginalization and social isolation create ideal conditions for radicalization. Across ideological movements, it is young men without work, status, or future prospects who are most susceptible to recruitment. Liberal values do not transmit themselves automatically; they require economic inclusion as much as cultural enforcement. None of this violates liberal principles. Other democracies already select for language, education, employability, and civic buy-in. The barrier is not capacity. It is political will.

The far right exploits this vacuum by offering crude answers. Much of the left refuses to answer at all. Meanwhile, the state absorbs the cost downstream through surveillance, policing, and emergency powers that erode civil liberties for everyone.

The Israel Variable: When Foreign Policy Becomes Domestic Fuel

There is one more variable Western societies must confront honestly: Israel.

Islamist movements themselves insist on making Israel their central grievance. That grievance is used to justify violence far beyond the Middle East, against civilians with no connection to the conflict. The ideological claim is not opposition to Israeli policy, but rejection of Israel’s existence.

At the same time, Western governments must ask whether unconditional support for every Israeli action, indefinitely, is worth the cumulative cost to domestic cohesion and internal security. This is not a moral argument against Israel’s right to defend itself. It is a strategic assessment of trade-offs.

Blanket alignment eliminates leverage. It allows jihadist movements to frame Western states as co-belligerents rather than external actors. That framing matters because perception drives mobilization. Supporting Israel’s security does not require endorsing every operational decision. Allies are not clients. Loyalty is not silence.

None of this is easy. Democracies are built for legitimacy, not speed. They assume good faith where none exists. But abandoning liberal norms is not strength. It is surrender by other means.

The task is not to replace democracy, but to harden it. To accept that pluralism requires boundaries, that integration requires leverage, and that free societies must defend themselves actively.

I was a child when the towers fell. I am no longer naïve about the costs of overreaction or inaction. The lesson of the past quarter century is not that democracy is weak, but that it cannot survive on moral aspiration alone.

Lines must be drawn. Laws must be enforced. Trade-offs must be acknowledged openly.

That is not authoritarianism.

It is self-preservation.

 

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