9/11: HOW JIHADISM ESCAPED THE JIHADISTS
Bin Laden didn't need millions of Muslims to become terrorists. He needed them to inherit the grievance.
BIN LADEN'S REAL VICTORY
Twenty-five years after 9/11 we still misunderstand the war he started, and what our response helped create.
On 11 September 2001 nineteen men hijacked four passenger aircraft and flew them into the heart of America. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered. We know the story. Islamist terrorists. Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden. Global jihad.
The story we have told ourselves about 9/11 gets something important the wrong way round. 9/11 did not begin as the attack of the global Islamist movement we recognise today. Our response to 9/11 built that world.
It starts in Saudi Arabia, not New York.
THE SAUDI CIVIL WAR THAT ESCAPED
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the Saudi royal family faced the possibility that Iraq might continue south. They turned to America. Hundreds of thousands of American and coalition troops arrived in Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina.
Osama bin Laden was furious. He had returned from Afghanistan believing that the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets represented something historic, and he offered the Saudis his own veterans instead. They rejected him. The Americans stayed.
From there, bin Laden's relationship with the Saudi state deteriorated dramatically. He left the country. His Saudi citizenship was revoked. By August 1996 he was publicly declaring jihad against American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
America was not some random distant land full of non-Muslims that bin Laden suddenly decided needed attacking. America was the military superpower propping up an Arab political order he despised. Saudi Arabia was part of that order. Egypt was part of it. For bin Laden and those around him, these were Muslim societies ruled by governments they regarded as illegitimate and sustained by Western power.
The jihadists called them the near enemy. America was the far enemy.
Seen from there, 9/11 was a Saudi civil war that escaped Saudi Arabia.
AL-QAEDA WAS NOT ISIS
We now hear the words Islamist, jihadist and caliphate and immediately imagine ISIS. Black flags. Raqqa. Territory. A self-declared Caliph. People being instructed to leave Birmingham, Brussels and Bradford and migrate to an Islamic State.
That was not al-Qaeda in 2001. Bin Laden was not trying to plant the black flag over Washington. He was trying to provoke Washington into a war across the Muslim world.
Why keep striking the local regimes when America was keeping them alive? Hit the far enemy. Humiliate it. Provoke it. Draw it into Muslim lands and bleed it. Demonstrate that it could be beaten. Turn Muslims against the governments allied to it. Awaken the wider ummah.
America responded almost exactly as he hoped it would.
WE GAVE HIM HIS WAR
First Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Then came the images. Guantánamo. Abu Ghraib. American troops kicking down doors. Dead civilians. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits. Bombed cities. Occupation.
The far enemy was now inside the Muslim world, and bin Laden no longer had to describe the war he had warned about.
The Islamists now possessed everything they needed to tell an eighteen-year-old Muslim sitting in Birmingham, Paris or Brussels that bin Laden was right. This was not America fighting al-Qaeda. This was the West fighting Muslims.
Conflicts that had different histories, different actors and different causes were collapsed into a single story. Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia. Different places. One story. Muslims are under attack.
That story was enormously powerful. The Islamists supplied the narrative. We supplied the pictures.
ASK THE HEROIN DEALER
Go and ask the committed Islamist sitting inside some private study circle about Osama bin Laden. He can give you the theology. Jihad. The ummah. Apostate rulers. The far enemy. Palestine. Eventually, the Caliphate.
Now leave the study circle. Go onto a council estate and ask the Pakistani heroin dealer about bin Laden. The lad selling drugs. Driving a fast car and dnking whisky. Never praying. Knowing bugger all about Islamic jurisprudence. Ask him, and you will hear that Osama was a hero.
Not because he has studied Sayyid Qutb. Not because he understands Wahhabi theology. Not because he has worked through the jurisprudence of jihad. Because he stood up to America. Because he fought the West. Because he was the enemy of the people he believes is his enemy. The British state.
That is when something changed. Jihadism escaped the jihadists.
You no longer needed to subscribe to al-Qaeda's theology to consume its grievance. Bin Laden became more than the leader of a terrorist organisation. He became a symbol. And the idea that there existed a single global Muslim political us, under attack by a Western them, travelled far further than al-Qaeda ever could.
That was bin Laden's breakthrough. He no longer needed you to become a jihadist. He only needed you to inherit the grievance.
They are counting on you doing nothing
Every council that buried a rape gang did it on one assumption. That you would read it, shake your head, and go back to your day.
Oldham. Rochdale. Rotherham. Telford. Manchester. Different towns and cities, different councils, different police forces, same decision. The children were expendable and the votes were not.
Nobody has gone to prison for that decision. Nobody has lost a pension. The politicians, police and public officials who made it are still in office, or retired on the public purse, or sitting in the Lords, or even Prime Minister.
These people are not frightened of the BBC. They are not frightened of the Sunday papers. They are not frightened of an inquiry, because they write the terms of reference. The only thing that has ever put a name in front of a court, a document in front of a council chamber, or a councillor out of a seat, is a small number of ordinary people paying a few pounds a month so that I can keep doing this without asking anyone's permission.
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Because this is the arrangement, and I do not resent it. You read this at your kitchen table. I write it knowing who will read it next. I am the one who the police have a file on. I am the one whose name goes on every accusation in the mainstream media. I am the one they call a racist for saying out loud what they do not want said out loud.
I am the one the mainstream press will not touch because I said it first and I said it about their friends. The letters from lawyers come to my address. The threats come to my phone. If they ever find a way to shut this down, it is my door they will kick down, not yours.
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BRITAIN LEARNED THE WRONG LESSON
And what did Britain do? We spent twenty-five years obsessing over Muslim anger. Muslim alienation. Muslim grievance. Muslim offence. What will Muslims think? How will Muslims react? Who are the Muslim community leaders? How do we stop Muslims feeling marginalised?
Britain got one thing wrong and everything else followed. It confused protecting Muslims with protecting Islam.
Muslims have rights. Islam has ideas. Islam can be criticised. Mocked. Ridiculed. Rejected. Offended.
Britain abolished its blasphemy laws. We have spent years rebuilding them under other names. Westminster calls it tackling anti-Muslim hatred, or community cohesion, or whatever else lets it sleep. It is blasphemy law by the back door. In April 2026 Stephen Gray, a 65-year-old retired Cleveland Police officer, was convicted under the Communications Act after reposting a Facebook joke referring to Muhammad's marriage to Aisha. Gray is appealing his conviction.
Max Thompson
Twenty-five years after Islamist terrorism forced Britain to confront questions of integration and religious extremism, a retired policeman has a criminal conviction for posting a joke about Muhammad.
FROM GAZA TO GLODWICK OLDHAM
And nowhere is this communal politics more obvious than Palestine. British governments make decisions about Israel and the West Bank knowing that they will reverberate through British constituencies thousands of miles away, because Palestine has been turned from a foreign cause into a domestic Muslim political cause.
I watched this happen in Oldham. In 2021 Arooj Shah, then the new Labour leader of Oldham Council and a close ally of Andy Burnham, the man who is now Prime Minister, addressed a pro-Palestinian rally in Oldham town centre. Debbie Abrahams MP stood alongside her. The audience was predominantly Pakistani Muslim. I wrote about it at the time. I was arrested for doing so. They even charged me and tried to imprison me. That they failed was not the point.
A foreign conflict was being presented as a Muslim cause to a Muslim political constituency. The point is not solidarity with Palestinians. The point is that solidarity was being turned into a Muslim political identity, and the people doing the turning ran the town.
Around that same mobilisation were people involved in the campaign against Elbit's factory in Oldham. That campaign did not remain confined to placards and speeches. It moved into unlawful direct action, repeated incursions and criminal damage. Shah did not take part in those attacks. That is not the allegation. The allegation is that the Labour leader of the council and the Labour MP stood on a platform in Oldham town centre in support of a cause whose activists were, in the same months, breaking into a factory in their own town and being arrested for criminal damage.
This is exactly the political consciousness Islamist movements spent decades trying to construct.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, THEY CAME FOR THE JEWS
In the first six months of 2026 the Community Security Trust recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in Britain. That was 21 per cent higher than the first six months of 2025. Greater Manchester alone recorded 222. The monthly rate of antisemitic incidents was almost double the rate recorded in the six months before the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
On 2 October 2025, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a terrorist attacked Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue. Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed. The Home Secretary later described it in Parliament for exactly what it was. An act of antisemitic terrorism carried out by a man pledging allegiance to Islamist ideology.
Manchester. Yom Kippur. A synagogue. Two Jews dead. An Islamist terrorist at the gates. And we still cannot bring ourselves to ask who taught him.
BIN LADEN'S REAL VICTORY
We have spent twenty-five years asking what makes Muslims angry. We should have spent that time asking who was teaching British Muslims that the anger of Muslims everywhere belonged to them.
Because that was the proposition. You are not simply British. You belong to something bigger. Afghanistan is yours. Iraq is yours. Palestine is yours. Kashmir is yours.
An attack on Muslims anywhere is an attack on Muslims everywhere. Especially when that attack is carried out by the West. Jackpot if Israel is involve.
Once you accept that proposition, the next question becomes obvious. Who is doing the attacking? That is how completely different disputes, countries and histories become one global conflict.
Bin Laden lost almost everything. Al-Qaeda was smashed. He was shot dead in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The Saudi monarchy survived. America was never defeated.
But something escaped.
The enemy within is Islamism. The idea that a British Muslim's first political loyalty belongs to a global ummah, that every Muslim grievance is his grievance, every Muslim war is his war, and that Britain itself can therefore become the enemy.
Bin Laden's real victory was not that he persuaded millions of Muslims to become jihadists. He didn't. It was that, twenty-five years later, the heroin dealer, the university student, the street activist, sectarian politician and the Islamist preacher can know almost nothing about one another's lives and still recognise the same political story.
Bin Laden could never have built that world alone. We built it for him.
I publish everything for free. There are no paywalls on any of my work. Between January and September 2026, nearly 250,000 different people read an article on this newsletter. On 6 September 2026, our total membership, paid and free combined, passed 15,000. Admittedly, a small step BUT just look again at how many people are actually reading the articles. Our social media engagement figures for the year so far are in the tens of millions.
It has taken me eight years to get this far. I am unique in this space because I came from inside it. I am a Muslim of Bangladeshi heritage, raised in Oldham to immigrant parents. I spent years advising government on community cohesion and counter extremism. When I write about Islamists, the Biraderi or how Labour learned to buy its postal votes, I am describing what I grew up beside and later watched the state pay to manage.
I come at this from the inside. Inside the communities where these crimes are committed and from inside the government that facilitated the cover up.
If Andy Burnham and his Labour Party had their way, I would be in prison. If many in Reform and Restore had their way, people would place no value in my work, because my work adds pressure on them to do the right thing.
I do not just educate people on the rape gang cover up. I put the pieces together and expose the rot that allowed it to happen. I evidence and explain the Pakistani Mafia, the Biraderi, that has infiltrated our democracy and its use of postal vote fraud to rig elections. I document and share my insights into the growing Islamist threat and how the Labour Party and the liberal metropolitan elite are complicit in the demise of our democracy.
Politicians have tried to imprison me. Pakistani gangsters follow me home. The police have dawn raided my home on numerous occasions and have been exposed in the High Court for protecting those that want me taken care of. No one should be surprised that Islamists have tried to incite my murder or how the legacy media have run hit piece after hit piece desperately trying to smear my good name.
Despite everything, eight years later, I am still here, and so are you.
I take this to a place from which there is no coming back. Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison and we will save the place we call home. Even if there is only the smallest of chances in achieving this, is it not worth your support?
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It is why they have done what they have done to try and silence me. To try and stop you.
Raja Miah MBE
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Thank You
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