On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen al Qaeda hijackers turned four passenger aircraft into instruments of mass murder. Two struck the World Trade Center. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. The attack was meant to be spectacular, unmistakable, and terrifying. Its authors wanted the world to see what they were capable of, and for one terrible morning, the world did.
A quarter of a century later, Western governments have invested fortunes in aviation security, intelligence sharing, and counterterrorism operations. They have become better at detecting suspicious travellers and interrupting plots. Yet a more awkward question remains unanswered: how does a free society defend its institutions against people who are perfectly prepared to exploit democratic freedoms while showing considerably less enthusiasm for extending those freedoms to others?
The bomber and the political organiser do not operate in the same way. One seeks an explosion. The other may seek influence over a school, a local association, a council, a place of worship, or a public debate. A bomb can devastate a street in seconds. The slow capture of civic space, when it occurs, can alter a community’s habits for a generation. The danger lies not in legitimate religious participation but in the deliberate use of civic institutions to promote coercion, sectarian control, and contempt for equal citizenship.
Call this, in the language of political polemic, the silent jihad. The expression is provocative and must be handled with precision. It is not a legal category, nor does it establish a common command structure behind Europe’s unrest or the electoral choices of American voters. It refers here to the ambitions of extremist Islamist currents that seek political and social dominance through ostensibly lawful means. Islam is a religion followed by vastly different communities. Islamism is a political project. Violent jihadism is a further and distinct threat. Conflating all three is intellectually lazy and strategically disastrous.
There is, however, nothing unreasonable about scrutinising organisations that demand public tolerance while preaching intolerance in private. Who finances them? What do their leaders teach about women, apostates, religious minorities, and dissenters? Do they accept the supremacy of civil law? Are they willing to defend for their opponents the rights they claim for themselves? These are questions for investigators, regulators, and journalists, not accusations to be scattered indiscriminately across an entire faith.
France has discovered how uncomfortable this scrutiny can become. A government-commissioned report made public in May 2025 examined the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism in the country, raising concerns about influence exercised through local organisations and social institutions. Its conclusions were contested, including by scholars and Muslim representatives who warned against exaggerated interpretations. The report itself was more qualified than some of the political rhetoric surrounding it. That qualification matters: the existence of a risk is not proof that every mosque, school, or charity is part of a conspiracy.
In May 2026, the French Senate adopted a bill intended to strengthen the state’s response to what French politicians call Islamist entryism. The measure was then sent to the National Assembly; a Senate vote alone did not make it law. The significance is political as well as legal. France is debating whether influence exerted quietly inside institutions can challenge republican principles long before a conventional security offence has taken place. It is a legitimate question, provided the answers remain anchored in evidence and constitutional safeguards.
The atmosphere on Europe’s streets makes that argument harder to dismiss. In Amsterdam in November 2024, violence surrounding a football match involving Maccabi Tel Aviv included threats and beatings targeting people who were Jewish or perceived to be Jewish. A Dutch official investigation later documented the attacks while also describing confrontations involving different groups. In Berlin in May 2025, a pro-Palestinian demonstration descended into clashes with police. These incidents have different causes and should not be thrown into one convenient ideological basket. Yet they show how swiftly public protest can be contaminated by intimidation and violence. No political cause, however fashionable, grants a licence to threaten civilians.
Nor has the familiar terrorist threat disappeared. Europol’s report released in July 2026 recorded 45 completed, failed, or foiled terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2025. Twenty-four were attributed to jihadist terrorism, including nine completed attacks. Jihadist violence caused five of the six terrorism deaths recorded that year. These figures do not prove a theory of clandestine political conquest. They do demolish the comforting idea that violent jihadism has somehow become yesterday’s problem.
Then there is New York, where history lends every argument an uncomfortable irony. The city whose skyline was torn apart on 11 September elected Zohran Mamdani mayor in November 2025. He took office in January 2026, becoming its first Muslim mayor. His religious identity is not evidence of extremism, still less of any connection to jihadist violence. A democracy must be able to elect a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Christian, or a nonbeliever without turning the result into a security accusation. To suggest otherwise would be to surrender the very democratic principle supposedly being defended.
Mamdani’s public positions are another matter. During the 2025 campaign, his initial reluctance to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” drew understandable alarm from many Jews who associate the phrase with suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. He subsequently said he would discourage its use. In September 2026, his administration unveiled a city strategy to combat antisemitism, allocating funds for the protection of religious institutions, hate crime prevention, and education. Some Jewish organisations welcomed significant elements of the plan; others criticised what they regarded as a failure to confront anti-Israel rhetoric. Both responses deserve to be reported. Public scrutiny must concern words, policies, and conduct, rather than ancestry or religion.
That is the test democratic leaders cannot evade. The mayor of New York has an obligation to safeguard Jewish residents who fear antisemitism, Muslim residents who fear anti-Muslim hatred, and every other New Yorker who expects the law to protect them. So does every European mayor confronted by radicalisation, communal intimidation, or political violence. Freedom of expression is not an excuse to ignore threats. Nor may the accusation of extremism become an excuse to silence lawful dissent.
India needs no lecture about what jihadist terrorism can do. In November 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen carried out coordinated attacks across Mumbai, killing 166 people. Hotels, a railway station, and the Chabad House were among the targets. Those killings were acts of terrorism, not episodes in a debate over theology. India also understands something that much of the Western argument obscures: a vast, religiously diverse democracy cannot fight a fanatical minority by placing an entire community under collective suspicion. That would reward the extremists by making them the architects of relations between fellow citizens.
For India, Europe, Israel, and the United States, the practical response begins with institutional seriousness. Foreign funding that buys political influence should be transparent. Threats and incitement should be prosecuted without regard to the identity of the offender. Schools must remain places of education rather than coercive ideological recruitment. Community organisations should be accountable for how public funds are spent. The same standards must apply to Islamist extremism, religious chauvinism of other kinds, racial supremacism, and any political movement that seeks to strip opponents of basic rights.
Above all, democracies should stop confusing indulgence with tolerance. Tolerance protects the right to believe, worship, argue, and disagree. Indulgence excuses the person who would deny those rights to others. The distinction is not a technicality for constitutional lawyers. It is the difference between a confident republic and a state so frightened of appearing intolerant that it cannot enforce its own laws.
No serious analysis should pretend that one secret organisation controls the protests of Europe, the elections of New York, and every religious institution between them. That is a conspiracy story, not intelligence. The more credible danger is less cinematic: opaque financing, selective enforcement, cowardly leadership, and the gradual normalisation of intimidation. Each concession can be explained away. Together, they alter what citizens are prepared to accept.
On 11 September 2001, terrorists needed hijacked aircraft to demonstrate their hatred of an open society. Today’s defenders of democracy need something less dramatic and considerably rarer: the courage to apply its principles without exception. Protect religious freedom. Expose political coercion. Punish violence. Demand accountability. And never allow the language of liberty to become a convenient disguise for the destruction of liberty.
The Twin Towers fell in hours. Democratic institutions can be weakened over years, quietly, politely, and sometimes with the enthusiastic assistance of their own custodians. The deepest irony is that a society so proud of handing out the keys may fail to notice when someone starts changing the locks.