“Bin Laden has won, but not in the way he thought”

“They won, just not in the way they thought they would,” writes Jochen Bittner, the London correspondent for *Die Zeit*, Germany’s leading weekly. “To provoke the West into an overreaction against Islam: that was the real plan of al-Qaeda’s masterminds twenty-five years ago. But the West did not fall into the trap of overreacting against Muslims worldwide – and especially not against those within Europe and the United States. Instead, it fell into another trap: that of intellectual and ideological underreaction. Precisely because Western societies were afraid to accuse Islam, they pursued a policy of appeasement towards radical Islam.”

This appeasement stemmed from a tendency to treat Islam with particular leniency. For him, the same critical standards that Western societies applied to other worldviews simply did not apply. A supposedly progressive orthodoxy has taken ever deeper root in universities, NGOs, newsrooms and political parties over the last twenty years: identitarianism, intersectionality and Critical Race Theory have merged into the simplistic doctrine that the world consists of oppressors and the oppressed.

Muslims are at the bottom of this pyramid of victims, which means that critical questions about their faith are seen as microaggressions, if not expressions of white, colonial perspectives. ‘Anti-Muslim racism’, in fact (…) The fear of confronting Islam as the ‘wrong’ religion has even permeated the knowledge base of artificial intelligence. Try this test: ask your AI app to tell a nasty joke about Jesus. You’ll get loads of suggestions, some of them quite scathing. The response is different if you ask for a nasty joke about the Prophet Muhammad: ‘I don’t make jokes that disparage Muslims as a group’. All this means is that the willingness to criticise Islam has diminished to the same extent that Muslim immigration to Europe has risen sharply.

At precisely the moment in history when it would have been more important than ever to ask whether diversity is truly a value in itself, Western societies lacked the self-confidence to set out clear requirements and, yes, even to make uncomfortable demands of immigrants. The consequences of this failure to act are now becoming increasingly clear for all to see.

If the late Bin Laden could still see all this – including Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban – what would he say? Probably: ‘What great, significant interim victories all of this is! From now on, it can only get easier. Yallah, friends!’