The Lies of 9/11 & The War on Terror EXPOSED | Prof. Irfan Ahmad

## Terrorism in Question The conversation reorients a worn debate: terrorism is not a natural category awaiting discovery but a politically manufactured frame that has shaped twenty-first century global order. Over the past quarter century, the label “terrorism” has been wielded to justify wars, securitize societies, and normalize extraordinary state power. The discussion challenges the assumption that 9/11 created a sui generis phenomenon called “new terrorism,” and instead locates our current uses of the term within longer histories of colonial and neocolonial political imaginaries. This reframing invites us to treat “terrorism” not as an objective description of actors and acts, but as a discursive and institutional tool that produces enemies, hierarchies, and policy choices. A central move in the exchange is to unmask claims of novelty. The insistence that post-9/11 violence is uniquely religious — and therefore incomprehensible, irrational, or beyond dialogue — is not simply an empirical claim about motivations. It is a political strategy that delegitimizes political grievances and forecloses non-kinetic responses. By painting violence as the product of immutable religious fanaticism, states and experts can locate the problem outside of social, economic, and historical contexts and treat it as a security threat requiring military solutions. The effect is not accidental: reducing violence to a pathology of religion makes populations into objects of management rather than interlocutors. This interrogation matters because language shapes response. When states start from the premise that an adversary is driven by timeless religious fanaticism, the only plausible policy becomes elimination rather than engagement. The conversation implies that to grapple ethically and effectively with political violence we must first recover a politics that sees grievances, power relations and historical injustices as central, and that treats communities as capable of political agency rather than simply sites of radicalization. ## Versicherheitlichung und der Feind The shift from policing to militarized responses — securitization in the classic sense — is presented as a structural pivot with catastrophic consequences. What begins as a change in terminology becomes the pretext for reassigning problems from civilian institutions to the instruments of war. Once terrorism is cast as primarily a security problem, military logics govern decision-making, budgets, and public imagination. The result: long wars, mass casualties, and devastation across the Global South framed as necessary defenses of liberal societies. The conversation traces the genealogy of this shift to the end of the Cold War and the search for a new antagonist. Liberal polities, it is argued, often construct their identity against enemies; without the Soviet Union a space opened for new binaries. The relocation of the “enemy” to Islamist actors did not emerge ex nihilo after 9/11. Rather, the idea of Islam as a geopolitical foe had intellectual and policy precursors in the 1980s and earlier. The securitization of Islam and Muslims therefore operated through both rhetorical invention and institutional continuity: existing security architectures, intelligence practices, and foreign policy habits were repurposed to confront a newly framed threat. This logic also explains policy paradoxes: actors who are lauded as allies at one historical moment — for example, militant fighters supported to counter imperial rivals — can be rebranded as terrorists when politics shift. The cyclical reallocation of “friend” and “enemy” serves strategic objectives more than moral consistency. The securitized state, the discussion suggests, requires such malleability of categories to sustain its cohesion and to legitimize ongoing interventions abroad. ## Manichäisches Denken und Islamophobie A striking theme is the persistence of Manichaean binaries in modern political thought: a demand for simple divisions between good and evil, friend and enemy, civility and barbarism. Such binary structures are convenient for media narratives and policy-making because they compress complexity into moral certainties. But they are also dangerously dehumanizing. When Muslims are collectively racialized as potential enemies, the social consequences are immediate: discrimination, surveillance, and the erosion of civil liberties for entire communities. The book and the discussion foreground Mahmood Mamdani’s useful distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims to show how Western states have historically manufactured distinctions that serve geopolitical aims. “Good Muslims” are those who align with Western interests or who adopt a secular posture; “bad Muslims” are those who are seen as resistant, political, or inconvenient. Yet this binary itself corrodes moral clarity, because the “good Muslim” emerges through repudiation of communal solidarity or religious identity — in effect, through assimilation to an anti-Muslim stance. The exchange further explores how Islamophobia operates as a political technology: it polices borders (both territorial and civic), disciplines dissent, and legitimizes outsized security budgets and military campaigns. Racism here is not merely individual prejudice but a system of knowledge and governance that reproduces inequality under the guise of universal protection. The deleterious impact is visible in both foreign policy — wars with devastating humanitarian costs — and domestic politics — laws and practices that target Muslim populations for exclusion and punishment. ## Epistemische Weißwaschung One of the most powerful interventions in the conversation is the critique of what might be called epistemic whitewashing: the clearing of inconvenient knowledge from the intellectual and policy record so that certain narratives can hold. This process operates across institutions: academic disciplines, think tanks, media, and state bureaucracies collaborate to shape what counts as legitimate evidence, plausible interpretation, and acceptable explanation. When inconvenient facts — such as the role of Western interventions in producing insecurity, or the political grievances that animate violence — are sidelined, a sanitized and self-serving story becomes hegemonic. Prof. Irfan Ahmad emphasizes that anthropology and the social sciences often participate in this epistemic closure by failing to interrogate the political functions of their categories. A decolonizing anthropology, he argues, must not simply diversify study populations or include previously marginalized voices; it must critically examine the production of knowledge that sanctions violence. This requires methodological humility, historical breadth, and a willingness to trace how expertise itself can be complicit in projects of domination. The conversation calls for an epistemic reorientation that restores the social and political embeddedness of violence. Doing so would mean resisting the tendency to treat terrorism as a technical problem to be solved through surveillance, prediction, and counterinsurgency. Instead, scholars should foreground histories of extraction, intervention, and dispossession that make organized violence intelligible in context. Only by refusing the erasures of whitewashing can alternative policy imaginaries — ones oriented toward justice and reparation — become thinkable. ## Krieg, Neoliberalismus und Wissenschaft The dialogue situates the war on terror within broader neoliberal transformations. Military campaigns have not been isolated acts but part of an assemblage linking privatized violence, market-friendly governance models, and the commodification of insecurity. Contractors, surveillance industries, and lucrative security infrastructures have flourished under the logic that perpetual threat justifies perpetual profit. War and marketization thus become mutually reinforcing, with catastrophic human consequences and durable geop