How Sept. 11 changed American life

Tonya Mosley (0:00)

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley.

Twenty-five years ago this week, we were left trying to understand what September 11th would mean for our lives.

Nineteen 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 find terrorists, now sends agents into court houses, 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 in American Life. And Richard Beck, welcome to Fresh Air.

Richard Beck (1:47)

Thank you so much for having me.

Tonya Mosley (1:50)

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?

Richard Beck (2:09)

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. 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 purveyed 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.

Tonya Mosley (3:09)

I actually can still see the image of former President Bush standing at a mosque. He was there 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?

Richard Beck (3:46)

I think that the generalized bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement has played a major role.

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 encourageable 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.