Twenty-three years today, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft and crashed them into the Pentagon, a field in rural Pennsylvania, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed.
Nearly a year ago, Hamas terrorists attacked the State of Israel. The 1,200 Israelis beheaded, burned, mutilated and raped were the proportional equivalent of 40,000 Americans. The United States retaliated with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries thousands of miles away—and Israel invaded the neighboring Gaza Strip.
The two events—9/11 and October 7—were similar in multiple ways. Like al-Qaeda, Hamas is a Sunni Jihadist organization that sanctifies mass violence to conquer the Middle East, and eventually the world, for radical Islam. Both are recognized as terrorist groups by the U.S. and most of the Western world. But there, tragically, the similarities end.
While America’s wars resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the United States was never once accused of committing genocide. Israel, which has reduced the civilian-to-combatant fatality ratio to a quarter of what it was in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been accused by its own American ally of indiscriminately bombing Gaza and killing “far too many Palestinians.” U.S. officials routinely cite Hamas’s casualty figures that make no distinction between civilians and terrorists. That would be similar to claiming that, on 9/11, 3,019 people died.
The United States never once considered negotiating with al-Qaeda but, on the contrary, hunted down and eventually killed its leader, Osama Bin Laden. By contrast, the U.S. has engaged in prolonged and detailed talks with Hamas, often treating it as a legitimate and honest negotiator.
Al-Qaeda, it must be said, took no American hostages, while Hamas dragged more than 250 Israelis into monstrous captivity. Yet, even if al-Qaeda had taken prisoners, the U.S. would most likely not have refrained from waging war or offered a long-term ceasefire in exchange for their release.
Michael OrenThese differences between 9/11 and October 7 would no doubt prevent many Americans from seeing the parallels between the two events. Eventually, though, they may. By not insisting, as they once did, that Hamas must be destroyed but rather demanding that war immediately end, American officials are unwittingly giving a victory to Jihadism. The result could be another, and possibly more catastrophic, 9/11.
- Michael Oren is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States