How Sept. 11 changed American life

Fresh Air

In this episode of Fresh Air, Richard Beck discusses how the September 11 attacks reshaped American life, exploring the rise of government surveillance, increased

Key takeaways

• Islamophobia has become one of the most tolerated forms of bigotry in the U.S., persisting for 25 years after 9/11.
• The War on Terror created contradictory narratives: Muslims as violent fanatics and as helpless victims needing American liberation.

Main topics

• Impact of September 11 on American society
• Rise of government surveillance post-9/11

Notable quotes

"Since September 11th, Islamophobia has become the most tolerated, most accepted form of bigotry in the United States."

Conclusion

Twenty-five years after September 11, the U.S. continues to grapple with the lasting effects of the War on Terror—ranging from

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This message comes from Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin. In this podcast, the Today Show anchor talks with A-listers and athletes about the moments that shaped them. Listen, and you might get a fresh perspective. Search Glass Half Full wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:15) This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. 25 years ago this week, we were left trying to understand what September 11th would mean for our lives. 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial planes, flew two into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The attack brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people. In the weeks that followed, President George W. Bush urged us to go back to work, get on planes, go shopping, take our families to Disney World. The message was that even as the nation went to war, Life at home would go on as normal. It did not. My guest today, writer Richard Beck, traces how the country we live in now was shaped by the nation's response to that morning. Cameras scan our faces at the airport. Flock cameras log our license plates. Many of the top-grossing films of the last 20 years are about armored men saving cities from terror. And ICE, an agency that did not exist before the attacks, built to fang terrorists. now sends agents into courthouses, workplaces, and homes to carry out immigration arrests, with more people in detention than at any point in the agency's history. This week, a petition signed by nearly 100,000 people want Zoran Mamdani, New York's first Muslim mayor, to be excluded from the Ground Zero ceremony on the anniversary. Richard Beck was 14 on September 11th. and came of age in the America built afterward. He's a senior writer at N Plus One and the author of Homeland, The War on Terror and American Life. And Richard Beck, welcome to Fresh Air. Speaker 7 (2:02) Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1 (2:05) So Zoran Mamdani makes September 11th an official day of remembrance, and almost immediately there's a fight over whether New York's first Muslim mayor should even be at ground zero. What does that tell you about where we are 25 years later? Speaker 7 (2:24) I think the first thing it tells you is that since September 11th, Islamophobia has become the most tolerated, most accepted form of bigotry in the United States because nothing else could explain people's objections to Mamdani being at this ceremony. He's the mayor of the city. He's an extremely popular mayor of the city. You know, it's outrageous, the suggestion that he should be excluded for no reason other than the fact that he is a Muslim. I think that there have been periods since September 11 where the depth and the intensity of the Islamophobia that pervade the country have receded somewhat or people have just tried to ignore it. But it has been there steadily for the last 25 years and it has not yet been confronted with sufficient force to root it out. Speaker 1 (3:24) You know, I actually can still see the image of former President Bush standing at a mosque. It was several days after the attacks and telling the country that Islam is peace. And then we fast forward to today and there was this Pew Research study just released that shows in March of 2002, that was six months after 9-11. 25 % of Americans believed Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. And today, that number is 51%. Why do you think that it got worse? Speaker 7 (4:01) I think that the generalized bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement has played a major role. You know, of course, you remember that one of the first things Trump did when he became president for the first time was... to announce his Muslim ban, the travel ban, on people from several majority Muslim countries. I think that when you talk about George W. Bush and the Islam is peace speech that he gave, it gets at one of the real contradictions of the war on terror as a whole, which is that, on the one hand, the war on terror clearly had elements of a revenge mission, you know, and Islam was portrayed as an inherently violent religion. And the hijackers who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks had to be understood as motivated solely by the religious fanaticism and by nothing else. So there was this effort to portray Islam and Muslims as this group of sort of unthinking savages who you couldn't reason with, you couldn't persuade, you couldn't bring them around to, you know, seeing things in the American way. And so they just had to be dealt with using force. At the same time, Because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a contradictory simultaneous effort to portray Muslims as helpless victims of their fanatical governments who were yearning to be liberated by the Americans and then live just as Americans did. I think that those two impulses, these simultaneous ideas that Muslims are incorrigible savages while also being victims in need of American rescue, that has never really been resolved. And to some extent, you can still see both elements working in the country's politics. Speaker 1 (5:47) You know, going back to Mayor Mamdani, this petition that is out there. His answer to all of this has really been reassurance. I think he said during his last speech in the days before this upcoming ceremony that I will proudly honor the families and we will never forget. And that's actually the only message a Muslim, as you write, can make publicly since 9-11. to reassure, not to argue, not to be critical of the war on terror. You describe Muslim student groups who wanted to debate the war on terror and found that they couldn't. What happens to a Muslim in this country if they argue? Speaker 7 (6:31) Yeah, one of the immediate effects. of the way the country reacted to September 11 was there was this broad-based political and social effort to essentially make it impossible for Muslims to act as citizens, by which I mean, as you point out, participate fully in political debate, discuss and criticize the country's law enforcement practices, discuss and criticize its foreign policy. You mentioned Muslim student associations at universities. Many of them found the kinds of events they could put on. We're sort of anodyne, you know, here's the holidays we celebrate. Look how non-threatening we are. Here's why Muslims are just as American as anybody else. Speaker 1 (7:14) You know, I'm just thinking also maybe how two things can be true at once, because at the same time. Muslims have also never been more visible in American politics. So we have Zoran Mamdani, who runs New York. We have Abdul El-Said, who won a Senate primary. There are Muslims in Congress who are critical of Israel on the House floor. And yet Americans have never been more likely to say Islam encourages violence. What do you make of this? I mean, is it basically that the second thing is a reaction to the first as well, in addition to what you were saying about... rhetoric from MAGA? Speaker 7 (7:54) Yeah, I think that's probably fair to say. Certainly back in the 2000s, you did not have nearly as many prominent Muslim Americans holding elected office. And I think that the emergence of these prominent figures like Mamdani, like Abdul El-Sayed, Ilhan Omar, I think that... Part of the recent reintensification of Islamophobia is a reaction to those people. And, you know, the idea that Mamdani should be criticized because he hasn't said enough, spoken out enough against Islamist terrorism, it almost feels like a throwback. You know, that's the accusation that used to be thrown at anyone who criticized the Bush administration's policy in the early years of the war on terror. More recently, the accusation that you see getting thrown around. constantly is this kind of cynical deployment of anti-Semitism accusations. You know, the really intense effort to make Abdul El-Sayed look bad because, you know, the streamer Hassan Piker, who is also not anti-Semitic, has supported his campaign. The anti-Semitism allegations today are what is primarily being used as the cudgel to say, keep your mouth shut. Don't talk about this stuff. Speaker 1 (9:10) Abdul El-Sayed called Israel's war in Gaza a genocide. And so Speaker 8 (9:15) then after a synagogue attack in Detroit, he said, hurt people, hurt people. And now he has basically spent the last two weekends apologizing to Jewish Democrats, some of whom say that they'll now vote Republican. And the vice president is calling him very, very evil. Speaker 7 (9:32) Yeah, I mean, again, you notice that it's a tricky line he has to walk. If he feels that he wants to apologize for those remarks, that's fine. But I don't think he should expect that that will satisfy the people who have been coming after him. I also think that it's really telling the intensity of the Islamophobia, the demonization, not just criticism or we have political differences, but Vice President Vance's use of the word evil, right? Like that's moved beyond the discourse of. We disagree about America's policies with respect to Israel. We have different views on whether the U.S. should support Israel. We have different views about whether Israel's actions in Gaza have been legitimate war crimes, etc. Calling him evil is something else entirely. And I think it's something that has roots, deep roots that go back to the immediate post 9-11 period. Speaker 1 (10:24) I want to ask you the question we've all asked each other for the last 25 years. Where were you on September 11th? Speaker 7 (10:33) I was a freshman in high school in suburban Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. It was the end of my first period class, which had a very lazy teacher who would usually get tired of teaching about 10 to 15 minutes before the bell rang, and so would put on a sports center so that he could watch sports highlights from the previous evening. So on September 11, he did that like normal, but instead of SportsCenter, it was a live feed from ABC News. And it was surreal because we had no context. We didn't know what was happening. And it was just this helicopter shot of the Twin Towers with smoke coming out of one of them. And just a couple minutes before the bell rang, we watched the second plane smash into the second tower live. Then the bell rang. We were sent off to... the rest of the school day. And my high school's administrators made the kind of crazy decision, I think, not only to have the rest of the school day as normal, but they told teachers that they were not to discuss what was happening with students, not to have the TV on. And so all of us spent the day trading rumors in the hallways between classes trying to find out what was going on. And I remember quite vividly that by the time I finally got home, which would have been, I don't know, maybe three in the afternoon, my understanding was that the Twin Towers, the White House, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon had all been completely destroyed. And then, of course, you know, my parents had come home from work. We put the TV on and just watched the news for the rest of the day until 11 or midnight or so. Speaker 1 (12:17) You understood. the