On Wednesday’s Mark Levin Show, Mohamed Atta’s own writings and background suggest that religious conviction and ideological commitment, rather than poverty, foreign policy grievances, or social alienation, were central motivations behind his actions on September 11th. Western leaders and analysts have often preferred socioeconomic explanations while underestimating the role of religious and civilizational factors. After misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible populations, the West now confronts the same threat at home and must undertake a serious stock-taking of violent Islamism and the wider ecosystem around it. Both Islamist and Marxist movements are fundamentally driven by the pursuit of power. Western elites often deny or underestimate cultural and ideological threats. Modern challenges to the West extend beyond terrorism to include demographic change, institutional influence, migration pressures, cyber operations, disinformation, and alliances between secular leftist movements and politicized Islamist groups. Western societies face a broader civilizational challenge and must recognize and respond to it in order to preserve their constitutional and liberal traditions. Later, Rep Claudia Tenney calls in to discuss her letter objecting to a British boycott campaign aimed at Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. Section 999 of the Internal Revenue Code requires the United States to track allied countries that boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel (as in the BDS movement) so American companies are not put at commercial risk; she asked Bessent to review whether Britain’s action interferes with free U.S. commerce and specifically targets Judea and Samaria. The federal government needs to act because unsanctioned international boycotts harm U.S. businesses and the economy.
Tablet
What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us
X
The UK is rallying countries to economically isolate Israel.
Photo by Robert Giroux
The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Podcast page.
Rough transcription of Hour 1
Segment 1
Hello, America. Mark Levin here. Our number 877-381-3811. 877-381-3811 as you well know. Friday is the 25th anniversary of 911. And people who are 35 and under 30 and under don’t know anything about it, don’t remember much about it. And that’s a little worrisome. The further we get away from it, the further memories fade for some people, not for me, but others. It’s like the further away you get from the Holocaust. But I want to read something to you. I don’t think I have time to read the entire piece, but it’s fairly substantial. But even part of it, you’ll get the drift. And I relate this to 9/11 by the incredible thinker and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Who herself at one time was a Muslim, and she’s from Somali. And she is an American citizen. She said, Well, Mohamed ATA was trying to tell us after 25 years, it’s time for the West to face the true cause of 911. This was brought to my attention by my wife, Julie, and I’m glad she did. In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment in Germany and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27. An architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer fluent in German, living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on Earth. Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. He wrote, I don’t want any woman to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter. He didn’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean, unquote, to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth laid on his right side, facing Mecca and buried next to good Muslims, as he put it. His money was to be divided according to the Muslim religion is almighty God has asked us to do. There’s no political program. No mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. And there is only a young Muslim man in a German apartment arranging sacrifice to sacrifice his life for Allah and the confidence that Allah will reward him martyrdom in the life to come. The well was witnessed by fellow believers at the Al-Quds mosque. The Al-Quds mosque. And so I go through this where I prayed in Arabic crews beard and we’re four years later he would meet the men he would die with. The men he would die with. Mm hmm. Now the documents or the document is among the most neglected. This is important pieces of evidence from September 11. Because it contradicts the explanations of the attack. The most Western commentators preferred Arab was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes. That did not yet happened. Nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an Islamist. Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for. Yet. For 25 years, Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seem both sensible and necessary. After 911, intellectuals and policymakers asked what went wrong. As though the source of Carter’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed either men of a religious questions and mass. Since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience and belonging. Religion included had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order. The idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of same causes struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point. Mm. Since then, each time the West collides with Islam. Much of the Western intellectual class reach for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories grievances, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy, frustration, the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were our must be inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland or any place else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled through material means, and given the obvious superiority of Western values as measured through the superior material attainments of the West. Conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, samadhi, a redistribution should be negotiated. This is not. Sound familiar, Mr. Producer, with our envoys. Should be negotiated. Let me see where I left off. Would the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power thanks to the inequities of European colonialism? If Muslim population suffered from a democracy deficit, elections would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, or diplomacy. What she’s saying, ladies and gentlemen, is. This is not negotiable. This is theology and culture. American leaders then added a second layer of denial. George W Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washing to insist that, quote, The face of terror is not true faith of Islam, unquote. Following Bush’s lead after later atrocities in Paris and Brussels, Manchester and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had nothing to do with Islam, unquote. At the same time, the notion of Abrahamic faiths was was revived or normalized as though Judaism, Christianity and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family. Separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition. After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage or private consolation. Politics will be conducted in the cooler register of interest. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local sentiments, not universal defaults. And so assume that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed. It translated theology into categories it far more manageable. As a result, for a quarter century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies with the goal of rectifying what went wrong. Simultaneously, they open their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts and boots on the ground. The failure of the Western secular faith and material reality to transform these shattered societies was dismissed as an accident or as a consequence of our broken and needy Those societies actually were. Surely the faith would provide its worth. Once the refugees arrived in America. And as it turned out, the prediction that a large scale encounter between the populations of Western nations of Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. By 2026, New York City had become a parade ground for Islamic terror groups run by a foreign born Muslim mayor who supported, quote, lives the intifada, unquote. And his wife celebrated Hamas’s massacre of Israelis. Nor were such attitudes unusual in a city where Muslim immigrants nearly outnumbered the city’s native Jewish population. A Pew poll released in July 2026 showed that 44% of Muslims in America held a favorable view of Hamas. That’s about half. Stated differently in America and the West. Went to war against an elite vanguard of Muslim extremists who use terrorism as its principal tool. It ended 25 years later with a self-inflicted defeat caused by misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible democracy. Demographics, I should say, that could be utilized by the vanguard as well as by other political vectors, both domestic and foreign. After failing to defeat Muslim terrorists abroad, the West now finds itself fighting the same enemies at home while watching their own countries transform by mass immigration of people who decidedly do not share the common Western fantasy that religion and culture are the source of merely superficial differences. The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside their gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it. You’re not allowed to think that way. We open our doors to everybody, Muslims from all over the world. 25 years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, The United States needs to do more than commemorate a past atrocity should undertake a serious stocktaking not only of the threat posed by violent Islamism, but the wider threat ecosystem that has matured around it in the quarter century since 2001. The central reality is that Islam was never only a matter of terrorist cells and spectacular attacks. It has also been a civilizational project rooted in the memory of the caliphate. The ambition to reorder politics, society and law according to Islamic norms and the long term effort to build institutional footholds inside Western societies. As you know, I’ve been calling them fortresses. These segregated fortresses that they’re building and locating in strategic places. She said. I can speak to this ambition from my own personal experience and I’m going to pick it up from here. We’re going to take a break, but I want you to hear more of this. This is in the Tablet, which is a fantastic online magazine written by an. Hirsi Ali. I’ll be right back.
Segment 2
Let’s continue. This is really eye opening. You’ve always kind of knew it, right? What she’s saying is. This is Islam. Now there are others, Zuhdi Jasser and so forth, people who are really assimilated into America and who love this country and have actually fought for this country. But we’re talking about a significant percentage of the. Muslim population is her point. She said. I can speak to this ambition from my own personal experience, which in some ways parallels that of Mohamed Atta. When I was a Somali refugee teenager living in Nairobi, Kenya, at the age of 15 and 16, I became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Being a member of the movement is hardly like becoming a member of the YWCA or the Girl Scouts. You don’t pay a membership fee or wear uniform. Rather, you undergo a process of comprehensive self-transformation, which you are taught to discard the layered identities of family, clan, region and nationality in favor of a single universalizing identity as a Muslim believer, a member of the Ummah. Now look at this compared to Marxism. In which Marx also says to discard all the layers, the identities, the social acquaintances, everything else. As an eager young Proust lite, it was no longer enough for me to pray and fast at the appropriate times and identify myself as a Muslim the way that my father and mother had raised me. Our teachers were serious people, Africans who’d been trained abroad in Saudi Arabia and in Iran. They required us to read the Koran and the Hadith and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad and to analyze the texts in order to deepen our faith. Under the tutelage, Islam was transformed from a matter of customary practice to something deeply felt, which we could argue without fear and used as a weapon against unbelievers. And one of the main ways that we were taught to practice our faith was to clarify the relationship between ourselves as Muslims and non-Muslims, whom we defined as our enemies. And I want to continue. This was a short segment. I want to continue in a much longer segment. When we return, we’ll be right back. Up. I jumped the gun. We’ll be right back in. In a little while. But I want to continue this. So try and remember where we left off. I’ll be right back.
Segment 3
All right, let’s keep rolling. This is why I love talk radio. I love what I do here. 3 hours a day, five days a week. You can’t do this anywhere else. Anywhere else. Let’s continue with this piece from Tablet. It’s an online magazine. It’s fantastic. This is in Hirsi Ali. She says. Now, Kenya, at the time when she was talking about when she was a teenager, was a Christian country, and most of my classmates were Christians or animists. Some of them were my friends whom I walked home with after school, and she was Muslim at the time and shared food and confidences with as was normal among teenage girls, regardless of sectarian influences. When I protested to my teachers that I can’t see my friend as an enemy, I was told, No, you have the duty to convert her. And if she refuses to be converted, then she’s your enemy. Got that? And these newfound enemies. My classmates were only minor local enemies. My teachers also introduced me to the greater enemies of Islam, the Great Satan being the United States of America and the Satan being Israel, the Jewish state. A distinction was made between Israel as a state and Jews who embodied a type of metaphysical evil. The Jew was synonymous with the word Satan. He was behind all evils and had designated Islam and Muslims as his enemy and was hell bent on destroying us all in all of our prayers and in all of our. A doer is the supplication that God would destroy and eliminate the Jews. And this is what the Israelis have been trying to convey to us in this country. This is what they’ve been trying to convey to our State Department, to the White House, sometime about various administrations. They’ve been trying to explain, We can’t negotiate with this. We can’t leave them armed. And it’s not just the Palestinians, but the the the Muslim leadership in Turkey, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And they try to explain this to us over and over and over again. But we don’t have people who are skilled in this and knowledgeable in this. In the State Department, many bureaucrats who are dug in and believe in this sort of radical left sectarianism. And we have constant negotiations, right, with this ideology. And so of Netanyahu objects or something like that. He’s trounced on he’s trounced on by the podcasters, by various hosts, TV, radio, podcast, whatever they are. But he understands who this is that they’re dealing with. We do not. We refuse even conservatives, the Republicans act moronic. Fast forward, she says to my life in the West, in Holland, where I enrolled in the University Leiden to study political science. On September 11, 2001, I was working for a think tank with Holland’s main center left party, the equivalent of the Democratic Party in the United States. The party leadership made up of people I admired was trying to make sense of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon through the categories that were familiar to them. I’ve talked about this repeatedly when it comes to Marxism, not Islam, because I’m learning from her and others. But in the case of Marxism, when you hear Bernie Sanders, they’re always defining whether we succeed or fail as a society, as a society, through the lens of Marxism. We don’t have government run universal health care. So we’re a failure. We don’t have absolute equality of income. So we’re a failure. And it’s that sort of thing that I’ve been trying to express and I’ve written about and try to explain. That were only a failure. To the extent the Marxists interpret who we are, what we do, what we accomplish through their ideology. And what she’s saying here is, well, the same applies to Islam. To Islam. The party leadership made up of people I admired. I’m just going back was trying to make sense of the attack on 911. The attack was a response to the injustice of U.S. policy in the Middle East more generally, or to the Israeli-Palestinian question in particular. Yes, the attack was brutal and inhumane, but at the same time, it was important to recognize the injustice of American foreign policy. She’s saying what she was told, which had impelled the terrorist’s actions. Meanwhile, it’s being reported that Mohamed Atta was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The other 911 terrorists were also members of the Muslim Brotherhood. We discovered in the form of a terrorist organization called al Qaeda. Again, I knew something about the Muslim Brotherhood. I also knew that the attacks had nothing to do, nothing with the explanations that these educated men and women look at as gospel. Having been steeped in the same doctrines that motivated the terrorists, I understood that what had just happened was civilizational, civilizational, a new chapter in a conflict that had been brewing for decades in which Muslims were the deliberate aggressors. Even more shockingly, I know that the Muslim Brotherhood believed that the West was weak. The West was weak and that we were strong. Osama bin Laden had launched his attack not out of desperation or weakness, but in the belief that he was an agent of history and that he would win. Now. I hope this. Sort of crystallizes for you what we’re hearing from these imams and these so-called scholars and professors and activists, where we’re hearing from CARE Students for Justice in Palestine, all these groups. This is their mentality. The West is weak. And this is why they use the word Islamophobia, because they know that will have an impact. It’ll resonate in the American media. It will resonate in both political parties. It will resonate as kryptonite. As kryptonite against us. All of this was clear to me from my own experience as a teenager, a believer in Africa. Yet for the people who were close to the levers of power, the ones I could reach, my account of who the attackers were and what the purpose was behind their raid clearly sounded like science fiction. There she is in Holland, trying to explain it to these think tank people. How could these cave dwellers imagine they were a superior civilizational force after all time and time again? I saw these same people and their equivalents throughout the West discard the plain explanation of who their enemies were and what they wanted in favor of the same condescending belief that all their foes wanted was more jobs, better economy, a taste of the luxuries of the West, plus a writing of historic wrongs to soothe the primitive sense of honor. Now, listen to me. This is exactly what the Marxists do. Listen to me. They’re not about more jobs or a better economy or the taste of luxuries or anything of the sort. They’re about power. The Marxist. The Islamists are about power. The book I wrote on power really hit this now on the head. It’s too many. Not enough people have read it, quite frankly. Honor killings. That type of thing doesn’t happen here and maybe used to happen here, but that was a long time ago. Then a series of honor killings would happen in Western European cities and be reported on in the press. And the politicians would always react with the same honest surprise here. It didn’t make sense. How could anyone know? The same was true of the grooming gangs in Britain and the systematic assaults by immigrant men against non-Muslim women, which were met at first with flat denial and then with the same unfeigned surprise. We didn’t know how could something so terrible have happened? They knew, but they didn’t know because knowing would explode their own sense of security and civilizational superiority, which grew more fragile by the year. It is exactly what’s going on in Britain, and now they’re serving the interests of the Islamists against the Jews in Israel. She says 25 years later, ignorance is no longer a tenable excuse. It even among those who acknowledge that violent Muslim extremists are not simply reacting to injuries inflicted by the West and that Muslims themselves were some of history’s greatest colonizers. A substantial blind spot remains. We in the West are so fixated on the military arm of Islamist movement that we often fail the attention to the methods of institutional capture and demographic transformation that are equally part of the Islamist strategy. And you can see this now in Judea and Samaria, wrongly called the West Bank. You can see this now. And our reaction to it. Even in our country, there’s basically UK is putting in this boycott and we say nothing. Nothing. This habit of denial is particularly acute among Americans of both the left and right who have convinced themselves that Muslim immigration and deliberate infiltration of institutions. Missions in order to spread their beliefs and normalize their practices, many of which seek to limit or destroy the freedoms on which Western societies are built, is strictly a European problem. If you listen to this program, you know that we’ve been attacking this, we’ve been trying to expose this, but trying to unravel it for all of you, for Mr. or Mrs. America, we do things differently behind this microphone. That’s why you’re here, I believe. Differently. Very differently. We dive deeply and we dig in. And we’ve talked about so much of this in different contexts and so forth. What’s happening in America, she writes, They tell me, is not dramatic enough to warrant any kind of serious change. Muslim communities have a constitutional right to grow and expand. If they win elections, they win elections. What I hear is the same inability that I heard in Europe 25 years ago to accept the magnitude of the threat posed by a hostile foe, and even to admit even to admit the reality of cultural differences. The reality is that we don’t have another 25 years to get this right. We don’t even have another ten years. The strategic environment confronting Western nations has changed dramatically. The West now confronts a broader hybrid battle space in which hostile states and movements rely less on classical warfare and more on cyber operations disinformation, migration pressure, institutional subversion and the exploitation of domestic polarization facilitated not only by tech platforms, but also by the rise of a secular leftist vanguard that is forging an alliance with politicized Muslim cadres that have learned to speak the common language of Third world sectarianism in order to mobilize migrant communities. Each side of the so-called Red Green Alliance that is now contesting elections not only in Europe but also in New York City and Michigan, no doubt believes that it is using the other in order to gain power. That’s important point, but only one half of that alliance is likely to win. And she means the Islamists. I personally would, as she says, I personally would bet on the side that an army of 1.6 billion believers, Muslims, that it can potentially mobilize, backed by the wealth of the world’s leading oil producers over the university, students from comfortable homes for whom politics means dorm room, banners of Karl Marx and Che Guevara. By the time they find out otherwise, it will probably be too late. It’s exactly what took place in Iran. Exactly. The question before us as a society is no longer simply whether American can defeat terrorist organizations. It’s whether the American Republic can still perceive an answer, an interconnected civilizational challenge in which Islamist ambition, hostile foreign powers, demographic strength, cultural capture and epistemic disorder. Reinforce one another. We need to see the Islamist threat in its full civilizational depth and then decide what we must be done to preserve the liberal constitutional order without allowing the freedoms we cherish and celebrate to become instruments of our undoing. 911 2026 must be understood as another fork in the road, a moment in the life of the American Republic as consequential as the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon 25 years before. The original lesson of 911 was not merely that America had enemies willing to kill civilians on a large scale. It was the Western elites following the end of the Cold War, had failed to take seriously the idea that the liberal order they knew could be seriously challenged. After all, the West had defeated the Soviet Empire, armed a massive nuclear arsenal that was armed with a massive nuclear arsenal and perhaps one third of the world’s landmass containing vast resources without firing a shot. Francis Fukuyama was essay on the end of the history. The end of history, now commonly derided, was in fact almost universally accepted as an account not only reality, but also the future. A mass embrace of communism after the Soviet collapse seemed as unlikely as the mass resurgence of Nazi ism that leftists liked to warned against at election time. The suggestion that religion might displace secular ideologies as a mass organizing principle, let alone become the basis on which states would organize themselves, seemed like an even more absurd reversion to phenomena that history had left behind, like blaming witches for crop failures or accusing Jews of drinking the blood of Gentile children. All right. We’re going to take a little break now, Mr. Producer. We’ll be right back.
Segment 4
It wasn’t that Western observers were deaf to logical, organizational and civilizational dimensions of the Islamist movements. What was lacking was the imagination required to believe that they might triumph. After all, Western liberalism, backed by the advent of ever more powerful digital technologies, had decisively won one contest after another. And today, ladies and gentlemen, we are losing. One community after another is being conquered. I use this language. People cringe. I don’t give a damn what they do. We are being conquered one community at a time. And I know this because that’s what the imams believe. That’s what Kerry believes. That’s what they all believe in, these Islamist organizations. We’ll be right back.
