September 11, 2001 marked a turning point in my life. I woke up that morning to the news that two planes had struck the Twin Towers in Manhattan. As a naïve middle schooler —and embarrassing as it is to admit now—I honestly thought planes crashing into buildings was a fairly common occurrence.
As the days and weeks passed, though, I kept hearing about this thing called “terrorism.” It belonged to a reality so foreign to my own that I scarcely knew how to process it. Not being religious myself, I couldn’t comprehend how human beings could become so consumed by their religious beliefs that they would commit mass murder against innocent civilians.
To me, this felt as morally unambiguous as the Holocaust. Fanaticism. Extremism. Fundamentalism. Dogmatism. Call it what you will. It was evil.
To me, this felt as morally unambiguous as the Holocaust. Fanaticism. Extremism. Fundamentalism. Dogmatism. Call it what you will. It was evil.
Yet the reaction around me—from my teachers, my friends, and my friends’ parents—in this supposedly enlightened, self-assured Bay Area enclave, seemed more sympathetic to the perpetrators than the victims. The talk around town centered on making sure we didn’t say anything that might be interpreted as offensive or generalizing about Muslims. But I didn’t see anyone being offensive or generalizing about Muslims, so I wasn’t sure where that impulse came from. I was, after all, in one of the country’s great bastions of political correctness.
Viscerally uncomfortable with the explanations being offered for the attacks, I understood, perhaps because I’d been raised to call evil by its name, that 9/11 could not be rationalized as an act of revenge for American grievances. I had learned about Western colonialism in other places aside from the Middle East, and those non-Muslim societies hadn’t turned to a fanatical reading of their sacred texts to justify slaughtering civilians in retaliation for the perceived offenses of their former subjugators.
In trying to make sense of the response around me, I discovered that curiosity can be a far more subversive force than certainty. There were over two billion Muslims in the world—roughly the same number as Christians at the time— compared with just 15 million Jews. Islam was the fastest-growing religion, and Muslims were hardly a persecuted minority.
On the contrary, Christians and Jews had endured centuries of sanctioned oppression, massacres, forced conversion, and exile under Islamic rule, particularly throughout the Arab world. And jihadists were currently carrying out terrorist attacks across the globe–not only in Europe, Canada and South America, but throughout the Muslim world itself, targeting Christians, Yazidis, Hindus, and even Muslim sects they regarded as kuffar, or unbelievers.
But there was one country that had been on the front lines of this struggle for decades. A tiny nation, barely the size of New Jersey, it fought for its existence every day while implacable neighbors repeatedly vowed to drive it into the sea. It was the same country I had visited for my brother’s bar mitzvah when I was nine years old.
The world’s only Jewish state, Israel was surrounded by 22 Arab states and couldn’t always count on American support, not even during her 1948 War of Independence, when the United States imposed an arms embargo. She was the only polity in the region whose ancient identity had survived the Arab-Islamic conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries, during which much of the Middle East and North Africa was conquered and Islamized, reducing Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims to the second-class status of dhimmis.
Yet here was one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, still deeply Jewish in character and unmistakably Western in outlook, breathing new life into the modern age.
The more I came to know Israel, the more she seemed like a miracle. Despite living under constant threat, Israelis consistently ranked among the happiest peoples in the world. Large families. Children everywhere. A fierce sense of national purpose. An irrepressible culture. Military service embraced as a civic duty. Groundbreaking innovation.
Yet here was one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, still deeply Jewish in character and unmistakably Western in outlook, breathing new life into the modern age.
The juxtaposition of all that with my grandmother’s experience of being persecuted simply for being a Jew was jarring to reconcile. Especially when I turned on the news and saw Israel portrayed in an entirely different light.
Occupation. Apartheid. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Jewish supremacy. The entire lexicon of human rights abuses was reserved for her. No accusation was too monstrous.
But was Israel really so much worse than every other nation on earth? Worse than China? Eritrea? North Korea? Belarus? South Sudan? Cuba? Turkmenistan? Iran? Why did this tiny country loom so large in the global imagination? Why was she expected to answer for sins no other nation was asked to bear? Why were the civilizations that had conquered much of the Middle East rarely described as colonizers, while the one civilization that had survived conquest, preserved its identity, and returned to its indigenous homeland was?
It couldn’t simply have been because the United States provided Israel with military aid. After all, this was before the Obama administration negotiated the $3.8 billion Memorandum of Understanding, intended to give Washington greater leverage over Israeli decision-making. Nor did we have boots on the ground there, as we did throughout much of the Middle East.
We still maintain troops in Germany decades after World War II and in South Korea long after the Korean War. American troops were deployed across the globe, including in countries with abysmal human rights records whose leadership often acted against American interests. Yet none of those countries attracted anything close to the same level of international condemnation or moral outrage.
I suspected that Israel was being judged according to a different standard altogether. The world’s obsession with her was not rational. Rather, it was an expression of the disproportionate attention history has always paid to Jews—whether as individuals or as a collective.
Though my Zionist advocacy wouldn’t become a defining part of my life until college, the rise of radical Islam had already crystallized one conviction in my mind: the people committing these acts of terror did not hate America because of Israel. They hated Israel because of America. Israel stood in the way of their stated objective: to dismantle the American-led unipolar order and establish a global caliphate. By their own admission, Israel was the “Little Satan,” America the “Great Satan.”
In high school, I immersed myself in the work of Sam Harris, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Steve Emerson —public figures who analyzed the increasing threat of jihadism and its fellow traveler, Islamism, and who were willing to say what was true but taboo.
From there, I discovered Muslim reformers and former Islamists such as Maajid Nawaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Irshad Manji, for whose book I would later help conduct research during her teaching stint at New York University, my alma mater.
Once I had concluded that the mainstream establishment was lying about Israel, I had to wonder what else it was lying about.
Then came books by Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer warning about large-scale Muslim migration and arguing that changing demographics were eroding the cultural fabric of European nation-states. I learned about no-go zones in Sweden, sharia courts in Britain, Saudi Wahhabism, Twelver Shi’ism, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
As my exploration deepened, so did my gratitude for the uniquely American idea that people should be judged as individuals, not as a collective.
Once I had concluded that the mainstream establishment was lying about Israel, I had to wonder what else it was lying about. That, in turn, led me to question everything my Bay Area elders had taught me about conservatives and the geopolitical world around us. I wanted to know what the other side of the political aisle believed, why they believed it, and who they really were.
How ironic, looking back now, that 9/11 and Zionism were my gateway drugs into conservatism.
Published originally on September 14, 2026.
