{"id":2657340,"date":"2026-09-10T07:39:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T11:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaign9-11-was-the-beginning-of-a-religious-war-that-we-lost\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T07:45:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T11:45:34","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaign9-11-was-the-beginning-of-a-religious-war-that-we-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaign9-11-was-the-beginning-of-a-religious-war-that-we-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"9\/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaign9-11-was-the-beginning-of-a-religious-war-that-we-lost%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2657340&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The article reflects on the optimistic predictions made 25 years ago by historian Stephen Ambrose, who believed that the 21st century would be an era of peace, progress, and internal conflict resolution within the West, dismissing the idea of a future clash of civilizations. However, the events of September 11, 2001, starkly contradicted this optimism, revealing the deep religious and civilizational motives behind terrorist acts like those committed by al-Qaida. Despite clear evidence from bin Laden and others that their motivations were rooted in religious beliefs, Western leadership largely refused to acknowledge the religious nature of the conflict, instead promoting ideas that all religions and cultures are fundamentally the same and advocating for the spread of Western-style democracy globally. This refusal to recognize religion as a core factor contributed to misunderstandings and miscalculations in response to terrorism and geopolitical challenges. The article criticizes the post-9\/11 Western approach of secularism and multiculturalism, arguing that it overlooked the reality that religion, especially Islam, plays a central role in many conflicts and attitudes, which has led to a persistent and often unrecognized religious war. The author calls for a realistic understanding of these issues,urging us to abandon naive illusions and confront the true nature of the ongoing ideological and religious struggles.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Twenty-five years ago this week I listened to the late historian Stephen Ambrose deliver the opening remarks for a conference about World War Two at Hillsdale College. He had good news for us. The 21st century, Ambrose declared, would be an era of peace and progress. He said the major conflicts of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, were fundamentally disputes <em>within<\/em> the West over competing visions for our civilization. The whole century had in a sense been a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/extremely-inappropriate-south-korean-broadcaster-apologizes-for-photos-aired-about-other-countries-during-olympics\/\" title=\"\u2018Extremely Inappropriate...: South Korean Broadcaster Apologizes For Photos Aired About Other Countries During Olympics\">long civil war<\/a>, and now the war was over.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of blood and treasure being sunk into massive wars, the coming century would instead see our efforts spent in research and exploration of the oceans and space. The notion that the post-Cold War era would be a clash of civilizations, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book, was totally wrong, according to Ambrose. There was no coming clash because no one could compete with the West, and the West was now at peace with itself. We could rest easy, our future was bright.<\/p>\n<p>Two days later the planes hit the towers.<\/p>\n<p>Today, it\u2019s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose\u2019s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional.<\/p>\n<p>But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously \u2014 claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape.<\/p>\n<p>Then 9\/11 happened. But instead of shattering this delusion, great efforts were made to shore it up. This proved difficult (but not impossible) because the leaders of al-Qaida were obviously motivated by religious beliefs, and said so repeatedly. In his November 2002 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/osama-bin-laden-letter-america-transcript-full-1844662\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Letter to America<\/a>, Osama bin Laden explained his motivations and aims in great detail. Organized as a series of questions and answers, the letter laid out al-Qaida\u2019s reasons for attacking on 9\/11 and also stated what al-Qaida wanted from us.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first thing that we are calling you to is Islam,\u201d bin Laden wrote. It\u2019s a striking admission. The terrorists\u2019 first priority was not for the U.S. to leave Muslim lands, or halt support for Israel, or stop propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. All of those demands come after what bin Laden says is the <em>first thing<\/em> he wants for America, which is conversion to Islam: \u201cThe religion of the Unification of God \u2026 of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite such an explicit statement from bin Laden, and others like it from jihadist Muslims around the world, almost no one in the West wanted to acknowledge this reality and its implications, because doing so would undermine the animating idea of the post-Cold War project. If sincere religious convictions could inspire Muslims in the 21st century to carry out attacks like 9\/11, then it wasn\u2019t really true that all religions are the same. And if that\u2019s the case, then all peoples and cultures are also not the same, and neither is all labor, and suddenly the entire agenda of creating a borderless world of global free markets is called into question.<\/p>\n<p>So almost immediately after 9\/11 our political leaders and most major media outlets scrambled to declare that Islam had nothing to do with the attacks, that there was nothing to fear from Muslims, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a bad American. <\/p>\n<p>Less than a week after 9\/11, as the rubble of the Twin Towers was still smoldering, President George W. Bush gave his <a href=\"https:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/releases\/2001\/09\/20010917-11.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">now infamous \u201cIslam is peace\u201d speech<\/a> after meeting with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington. \u201cThe face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don\u2019t represent peace. They represent evil and war.\u201d The terrorist attacks, he said, \u201cviolate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it\u2019s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It was an absurd thing for an American president to say (as if Bush knew the first thing about the fundamental tenets of Islam), but it was especially absurd, and indeed offensive, as a response to terrorist attacks that had just killed thousands of Americans. Adding to the insult and absurdity was the fact that Bush was surrounded by Muslim leaders who condemned the attacks on narrow grounds but shared the overall religious worldview of the hijackers and their al-Qaida handlers. But in Bush\u2019s version of the world, those people were no different than any other Americans, and in fact \u201clove America just as much as I do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In saying these things, the president was simply expressing the mainstream liberal view, shared by almost all our political and media elite, who were unable to recognize the religious and civilizational nature of the conflict that had erupted. It was inconceivable to them that authentic religious beliefs could ever motivate anyone to commit an act of mass violence like 9\/11. After all, religions were all supposed to be fundamentally the same. They all teach the same things, more or less, and they all lead to peace. Evil and cynical people might try to twist religion and use it to justify their crimes or a political agenda, but such people are not \u2014 and cannot be \u2014 true representatives of religion.<\/p>\n<p>We heard versions of this over and over again in the years after 9\/11 \u2014 and especially in the lead-up to the Iraq War. <em>All<\/em> people, we were told, yearn for liberty, hence we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. <em>All<\/em> nations should be organized along the lines of liberal democracy, hence we should ensure that Afghan women are able to get degrees in women\u2019s studies and Afghan girls are able to attend school. What\u2019s more, we could import democracy to these places, and it would work because freedom and democracy are what everyone, everywhere, really wants. In his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/documents\/inaugural-address-13\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">second inaugural address<\/a>, President Bush stated explicitly that \u201cit is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ending tyranny in the world might sound like a ridiculous thing for a White House administration to tackle, but they were serious about it. I remember a political science professor of mine from Hillsdale being dispatched to Iraq by the State Department in 2004, after we had toppled Saddam Hussein. He was part of a group of scholars the government had tasked with establishing a basis for Western-style rule of law and constitutionalism in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. That such a basis had not yet been established or discovered in the previous 1,400 years of Islam did not dissuade them. They really thought it was possible, and went to great lengths in the attempt, which of course failed.<\/p>\n<p>It never occurred to them that not all religions and cultures are actually the same, and do not produce the same things. It never occurred to them that Christianity, not the act of voting, is why representative democracy created peace and stability in the West. Or that it might not be possible to establish a basis for constitutional democracy in a Muslim nation because of the nature of Islam. Or that not everyone, in fact, yearns for liberty. Some people yearn instead for justice. Some people would rather have vengeance than freedom and prosperity. If you introduce democracy to a place like Iraq, or Syria, or Gaza, the people might not vote for Western liberalism. They might vote for Hamas.<\/p>\n<p>Even if these things did occur to our leadership class, as they might well have, it would have been unwelcome to bring them up at the time. And in fact almost no one said anything along these lines.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, our leaders doubled down on Stephen Ambrose\u2019s version of the world. The cultural mood of the West in the decade before 9\/11 was one of breezy optimism and post-Cold War insouciance. After 9\/11 this mood transformed into official policy. Not only did we think we could bring Western-style democracy to tribal Muslim peoples, we thought we could bring those peoples here and integrate them into American life. <\/p>\n<p>The multicultural propaganda that had been fed to us in school throughout the 1990s took shape after 9\/11, and we began importing Muslims from far-flung countries in record numbers \u2014 people from the same countries that had celebrated and danced in the streets when the towers fell. Pew Research <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/religion\/2026\/09\/03\/25-years-after-9-11-a-portrait-of-muslim-americans\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">estimates<\/a> the number of Muslims in the U.S. grew from 2.4 million in 2007, the first time it performed such a tabulation, to 5.5 million today (likely a low estimate). The number of mosques has likewise increased during those years, from an estimated 1,200 to 2,800.<\/p>\n<p>For the left, this was only fair. A legacy of colonialism and American meddling in the Middle East was after all to blame for the backwardness and economic depression of the Muslim world, they argued. We owed it to those countries to allow mass immigration to the West, and if Muslims in the Third World harbored resentment against America, they had good reason for it. This is now mainstream thinking among Democrats. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly defended calls to \u201cglobalize the intifada,\u201d for example, and has campaigned with the likes of Hasan Piker, who said that the United States \u201cdeserved 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For the right, it took the arrival of Donald Trump even to be able to talk about these things. And even now, if you have the temerity to notice that Muslims in America fail to assimilate because they have no interest in assimilating, or that they recreate versions of their home countries and cultures here in America, or that Islam is clearly incompatible with American society, half the country will call you a racist.<\/p>\n<p>That is the real legacy of 9\/11. It was the beginning of a religious war that we lost because we refused to recognize the religious nature of it. We were committed instead to a secular account of the world in which religion makes no real claims on its adherents and imposes no real costs on unbelievers.<\/p>\n<p>What we owe the victims of 9\/11, all these years later, is to be done with all that nonsense, and to see the world, finally, as it really is.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pagan-America-Decline-Christianity-Dark\/dp\/1684514444\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Pagan+America&#038;qid=1695306441&#038;sr=8-1\"><i>Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come<\/i><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty-five years ago, Ambrose predicted a peaceful 21st century<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2657341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GW-Bush-9-11.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[56199,15847,4919,85416,6039],"class_list":["post-2657340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-9-11-2","tag-conflicts","tag-history","tag-religious-war","tag-terrorism"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GW-Bush-9-11.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2657340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2657350,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657340\/revisions\/2657350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2657341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2657340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2657340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2657340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}